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Adobe Flash CS5 Exports Animations To HTML5 Canvas
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe's Flash CS5 will seek to make the Flash runtime less relevant with support for exporting animations to HTML5 canvas. Seth Weintraub from 9to5mac writes, 'In a previous post, I'd wondered why Adobe didn't spend its time building HTML5 authoring tools rather than putting so much time/energy/money into its Flash -> iPhone Apps exporter tool for Flash CS5. As it turns out, Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools, as demonstrated in the video above.'"
What does this mean for Flashblock and Flash cookies?
Adobe has always been more about good editing tools, rather than runtime platforms. If everybody starts dropping flash support, why would they cling desperately to the flash plugin? Having their tools export to HTML5 is a smart move. Keeps them relevant, and they won't have to support their own runtime platform anymore. Instead, they'll have to compete, which is good news for everybody else.
Adobe was pro web standards until it bought Macromedia. It was the leading supporter of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for the first half of last decade, publishing and distributing an SVG plugin for Internet Explorer and supporting SVG in Illustrator and GoLive. Adobe lost its moral compass when it bought Macromedia, After failing to halt the popularity of web standards and standing at the edge of a precipice, Adobe is now seeking forgiveness from developers.
This is a serious question: Why does Apple appear to be OK with HTML5, but not with Flash? There are lots of posts claiming Apple is "afraid" of Flash, because the app store is their cash cow and Flash is a threat to that.
Now, I realize there is a lot more Flash content than HTML5 content, but isn't the basic principle the same? Couldn't I go make just about any game in HTML5 right now and have it work on the iPhone and iPad?
Is it because the source for any HTML5 game is viewable that Apple think "serious" game developers will avoid it?
Or another reason I'm missing?
In which case, you could take Steve Jobs' comments at face value, and it is just about the fact that Flash is crap, buggy, memory-hogging and inadequate to be run on a low-power, low-spec'd mobile device.
"If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
My bet would be, like most engineer posts I have seen, is flash sucks on the mac. It is apparently by far the most reported issue by the mac crash report, it is slow and very resource intensive so not likely to give a very good experience on the iphone. I don't have a link but that's what the engineers inside apple say. With the stamping out the flash compiler though perhaps it's grown to be something more ...
If I was witty I'd put something funny here but, as it stands, I am not and have just wasted seconds of your life
Dog slow? Obviously you haven't seen Google's Quake 2 port running in Canvas.
http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/
Admittedly this is far from Quake 2, but it's still an HTML5 game for the iPhone:
http://purplefloyd.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/html5-platform-game-for-iphone/
With proper optimization, don't you think most 2D games could run pretty well in HTML5?
You can already get Flash on your iPhone. Remote Desktop to any OS capable of running flash, and there you go. As long as you're within you're own personal network lag should be almost non-existent.
Heh. But it's not too far-fetched to think that Apple's infamous new rules for the iPhone have something to do with Adobe suddenly annoucing that they're working on Flash->HTML5 conversion. It looks like something good might come out of that decision after all.
Except of course it's been running on low-power, low-spec'd mobile devices in Japan since like 2003.
A large percentage of Japanese cell phones since around 2003 use flash for their UIs. This is great for the cell phone providers because they can contract out their UIs to graphic designers and UI/UX people can differentiate their UIs every 6 months.
I loved the selectable Flash based UIs on my both my 2003 and 2005 Japanese Casio phone
I would suspect that Apple considers HTML5 to be "better", regardless of what benchmarks say today; because they have the power to improve it, subject only to the limitations of their engineering resources and any fundamental defects in the spec(which, because the process is at least moderately open and consensus based, and one where Apple has a fair seat at the table, they have some hope of ironing out). Flash, by contrast, is however Adobe wants it to be.
Further, I suspect that Apple doesn't really need Flash-level performance out of HTML5. By virtue of their market share(and their customers' willingness to buy widgets), the "If you want performance, make an App and shut yer trap." argument has worked pretty well for them. I suspect that their intentions for HTML5 basically boil down to "Achieve broad enough adoption for video purposes that, for any random video website our customers go to, they'll get a lump of h.246 for our hardware decoder and a couple of vector widgets, rather than a 'you don't have flash, so sad' embed box." and "Achieve performance decent enough that, if web designers and their idiot customers simply have to have their fancy flash-based menu effects, they can implement them in HTML5 and not break the experience for iPod users."(and, presumably, in the not so distant future, Mac users).
Long term, there isn't any particular reason why HTML5, which offers vector objects and bitmap canvases with javascript control, should be markedly slower than Flash, which offers vector objects and bitmap canvases with Actionscript control. In the short term, I suspect that Apple just doesn't care all that much.