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.'"

Comments

Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Cyberax]

Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas except for animations approved personally by Steve Jobs.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Spacezilla]

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?

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[ukdmbfan]

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.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[auLucifer]

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 ...

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[FyRE666]

Actually that's mostly using WebGL. If it was rendered using an HTML5 canvas alone I'm guessing you'd see maybe 0.1fps on a fast machine.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Spacezilla]

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?

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 Canvas is only as slow as the JavaScript engine in the browser in question...

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[jo_ham]

It's not just "resource intensive", it's outrageously dog slow for seemingly no reason. It seems almost incredulous that it could be as bad as it is, but a simple H.264 stream inside a flash container (ie, no fancy extra stuff, just video in a box) is a painful hog in OS X. A 2Ghz Core 2 Duo should not be pushing 30% usage per core to play back 480i content.

Interactive flash content like games, or just heavy pages (like Blizzard's Diablo 3 site) do work, but they don't half push the CPU hard - considerably harder than the same site on the same machine booted into XP. (and we'll assume no H.264 hardware decoding on either platform - we're talking the animations and other stuff that flash does as well, it's not just video playback).

On2's flash player that was part of the program for testing your flash builds (it had a feature to create little ready made flash players from your movies) was better, and XBMC (running on top of OS X) is excellent at playing video streams that the browser plugin makes such a meal of.

It really is atrocious on OS X. (despite the considerable developer documentation about OS X's innards, although you will hear some people claiming it was somehow Apple "denying Adobe access" to the core of OS X to make flash better.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[abigsmurf]

I'm not sure HTML5 is much better. A lot of the (non video) demos I've tried use insane amounts of CPU. What's it going to be like when there's heavy HTML5 integrated into site functionality and banner ads?

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Shin-LaC]

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.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Vectormatic]

implementing != inventing

I don't know who actually invented it, but your logic isnt really flawless

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Tei]

It will take years to optimize HTML5 to something comparable to Flash. And maybe it will still be a bit slower than Flash. The point is not speed. The point is not scripting. Scripting is as bad if not worst, than a binary stream vectorial format. The points is a document model, that is easier to examine by bots and archivers, that can be modified by external tools, that can be linked, and all the good and cool features we have learn a Hyper Text have.

A binary stream of bits that render vectorial stuff is not fun, because you can't do much with these bits. A greasemonkey script is fun, google page rank search engine is fun.

Even if Flash is fast, a what price?, you have to support a separate things, with his own memory management and probably bugs. And is not that good either, Linux users have bad experience with Flash banners that take the 100% of the CPU.

Having everything following the document model (dom), any optimization made will touch all. Any optimization on the memory handling will affect all. Any safety mechanism. Updating the browser will update the rendering of such canvas thing, or svg thing.

I don't think Flash game dev's will move to HTML5 in 5 or 8 years. Flash will still be more interesting. But there will be a "leak" of the good features of Flash into the web, so the web will get whatever good we have learn from Flash. So Flash will not be required for some things. At a point, you will not *need* Flash. Needing Flash is *mucho* wrong, and we DO NOT WANT.

Some people will argue that "Flash-like" features in the web are bad news. These people are right. Animated banners in HTML5 are not better than in Flash. But with a better model, these will be more easy to control, limit, optimize.
And people want these Flash features. I serve no one to ignore that Flash add value to the web. We will steal (with HTML5 and SVG and Canvas) part of these value, to make the web AWESOME.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[PenguSven]

Yes, people are abusing Canvas just like they abuse Flash, but at least with Canvas, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc can DO something about the poor performance, rather than just listening to Adobe piss and moan and blame others, because Apple doesn't give a fucking browser plugin direct access to hardware.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[greggman]

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

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Verunks]

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.

I doubt that, the video is from october 2009

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[mgbastard]

It will take years to optimize HTML5 to something comparable to Flash.

Why? The Flash Player has over a decade of poor design decisions in SWF, bug-for-bug reproduction, etc, that it has to keep backward compatibility with. HTML5 canvas gets a nice fresh start having (hopefully) learned those lessons. IMHO, you'll see a lot of work with phenomenal improvements optimizing the runtimes, just like we saw with Javascript, in a quick surge. A lot of the same engineers who did did the magic on javascript are working on the HTML5 canvas implementations.

I don't think Flash game dev's will move to HTML5 in 5 or 8 years. Flash will still be more interesting.

I think that depends on whether Adobe makes the judgment call as to whether its more important to keep their Flash tools on top or not. If they conclude that the future is HTML5, they will bring their Flash/Flex/Air dev tools to be first class development environments for targeting HTML5 canvas; rather than being marginalized and losing their market share to a competitor in web animation authoring. Or perhaps they'll choose to compete on the platform itself, so they can own it. Time will tell.

Re:Next step: Apple bans HTML Canvas

[Jezza]

Apple don't create the implementation of Flash (and can't). So if Apple allow Flash onto the iPhone OS then they cannot influence the quality of that implementation over time. Apple created their own implementation of HTML5, and they can improve it and maintain it over time. Apple want to be able to maintain the user experience - not because they love their customers, but because they want to keep selling iPhone OS devices: they have to remain competitive over time. Essentially Apple are alone in this "longterm thinking" other manufactures leave the software to other players, given what's happened with other players in the market we can see that Apple's approach does have advantages.

Many people think Apple are primarily interested in "App" sales - Apple see this as a side issue, and actually the AppStore is seen primarily as adding value to the iPhone OS devices (or to put it another way, the AppStore helps sell iPhone OS devices, rather than the other way around). What Apple want is that anything created in HTML5 works well on the iPhone - so buyers see the iPhone as a good choice for consuming that content.

Why does Apple really hate Flash? Well if you look at the implementations of Flash on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows it is obvious that the Windows one gets far more love from Adobe than the other two - Apple hate that.

Great idea! And finally a webstandard from Adobe!

[thijsh]

... but I wanna bet Gordon will be pissed. ;-)

Flashblock and cookies

[Meneth]

What does this mean for Flashblock and Flash cookies?

Re:Flashblock and cookies

[dangitman]

What does this mean for Flashblock and Flash cookies?

What a strange question. It seems about as relevant as asking what this means for Flashdance.

Re:Flashblock and cookies

[A Friendly Troll]

Nothing. Flash will never be replaced, and by the time you start seeing Canvas ads, you'll have Canvasblock :)

Re:Flashblock and cookies

[TheRaven64]

The nice thing about Flash, from the perspective of someone who wants to turn it off, is that a Flash movie is self-contained. Each Flash thing in the UI is a separate blob of code. With canvas, this separation is not present. A browser can refuse to generate a drawing context from a canvas tag, but it can't isolate separate components of the page's script. JavaScript has a single global namespace and everything in a page is squished into this. You can't easily turn off JavaScript and canvas and then turn it back on selectively, just allowing the canvas tag that you want.

Smart move and good news

[mcvos]

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.

Re:Smart move and good news

[dangitman]

Adobe has always been more about good editing tools, rather than runtime platforms.

Yeah, maybe when Photoshop and Illustrator were their main products. Since then (and particularly since the acquisition of Macromedia) they have been all about "owning the platform" and trying to tie their products into the web. It's not just Flash, they took PDF from being a nice WYSYWIG print document format, and then started embedding all kinds of interactive bullshit into it. Or Adobe AIR.

Since around the turn of the Century, they stopped being about creative tools and started marketing to executives as being "business tools." The rapid decline of their applications was very evident, as they lost focus and tried to shoehorn their "platform" thinking into every product, even if it didn't really belong there.

Re:Smart move and good news

[jlebrech]

This was the logical step to go from the start.

Adobe has kept that quiet whilst pretending to be worried about flash going down the pan.

Flash is just an export file format, and they can now export to a slightly less bloated/featured format. this type of technology will cement Adobe more into the web development industry.

If Adobe are smart they will be the number 1 HTML5 authoring tools around.

Very impressive.

Re:Smart move and good news

[stimpleton]

"Adobe has always been more about good editing tools."

I really must disagree. While Macromedia made Dreamweaver, it has been under Adobe control for a while and very little has changed. My brief list of why Dreamweaver might be seriously hampered in the next evolution of web(HTML5):

- Data IDE to a database virtually unchanged since Dreamweaver 4.
- Broken layer support such as nested layers. Try positioning a layer mid vertical and horizontal and then try editing that in Dreamweaver.
- No virtualization for modern javascript techniques such as httpRequest, let alone HTML 5.
- GUI implementation of CSS is poor. Old Skool technique of writing the style sheet first is fastest.

In summary, Dreamweaver has not got these technologies right. I feel it is in real danger of dropping the ball. Adobe's attitude confuses me. But correct re Flash. It will be an IDE for HTML5 development or die. Within several years with a combo of increased processor specs and browser optimisations, the Canvas control will be the new VGA mode. With casual games being the biggest growth market, ignore this at your peril.

Re:Smart move and good news

[dangitman]

That seems true from observation of their actions, but I can't imagine the business case really lines up with it.

Nobody ever accused most executives that run big businesses today of being particularly competent at business. They mostly exist to enrich themselves by selling the company down the river for short-term gains.

From everything I can discern, Photoshop and Illustrator are still by far their cash cows.

I haven't seen any figures, but I wouldn't be so sure. Flash and Dreamweaver are very popular in web design and production. Anyway, nobody buys Illustrator or Photoshop as standalone products anymore, you buy the Creative Suite, and get the other stuff thrown in with it.

Their ownership of PDF helps them sell some PDF authoring tools, but it's not the revenue stream that Photoshop is.

Again, I'm not so sure about this. People may not buy Photoshop and Illustrator as standalone products, but businesses do buy Acrobat Pro as a standalone product in large quantities. Sure it costs less to buy, but it also costs less to develop, and when you buy Creative Suite it counts as an Acrobat Pro sale as well as a Photoshop sale.

I don't have any hard answers, but to me the weirdest thing is the change of culture. Having worked in design and photo editing, it used to be hell to try and get the boss to fork out for a copy of Photoshop. They would say "why can't we use something cheaper, like Corel, or [shudder] Microsoft Paint, or perhaps pirate it?" This was at a time when Photoshop had few serious competitors. Today, Photoshop has mounting competition, and the bosses have the opposite attitude - "If it's not Adobe, there must be something wrong with it. It can't be very good if it's that much cheaper." It's the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft" syndrome all over again. And just like that syndrome, it is highly entrenched. There are courses all over the world in web design that basically teach Flash and Dreamweaver as the holy grail, and teach people to do web mock-ups in Photoshop, and those courses will address issues like HTML5 when hell freezes over.

It's a bit sad, as someone who has used Adobe stuff from almost the beginning, to see that people now miss the point. Rather than seeing the potential of the tools, it's become entrenched rote-learning and slavishness to the product, rather than the vision.

Re:Smart move and good news

[gaspyy]

This was at a time when Photoshop had few serious competitors. Today, Photoshop has mounting competition

Name one.

There is no serious competition for Photoshop. I wish it were. Corel stopped innovating years ago. Gimp is still a toy for professional work and I really don't know any other professional program that can do what Photoshop can.

I'm saying this as a former Corel user. It wasn't easy for me to fork money for PS, but I had to because I realized that no other tool comes close. Sure, there's Fireworks (also by Adobe) and Corel Painter but they are specialized tools.

Re:Smart move and good news

[snsr]

it is laughable to think that html5 can compete with flash for casual games

Far from laughable - it's already happening: http://www.canvasdemos.com/type/games/

Re:Smart move and good news

[snsr]

In summary, Dreamweaver has not got these technologies right

Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG rendering engine is a joke, and it always has been. The app is a text editor with code highlighting, plain and simple.

Back to the Future

[wombatmobile]

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.

Re:Back to the Future

[virgilp]

Or another way to say it is:

"Adobe tried to compete with Macromedia by supporting web standards instead of Flash; after Macromedia kicked their ass due to the much faster development cycle (they were not constrained by any standards comitee), they learned the lesson, acquired Macromedia and did the development no their own".
Take a look at Apple... the only HTML5 standard they are supporting is the one already implemented in Webkit (coincidentally, it's their own platform). Sure, they've put up a "standards group" to make it seem like they care about others think, but the WHATWG standard is really "what Apple thinks best suits their interest".

I'm curious though how long it will take until browsers start becoming "CPU hogs", and "flash crashed my browser window" turns into "javascript/canvas/svg/whatever crashed my browser window" (or the full browser, depending on how good the browser implementation is.

(oh, btw, about multi-platform and "Mac users being second-hand citizens because Adobe is evil".... I hear that Safari implementation on Windows is pretty crappy compared to Mac. And how's Safari doing on Linux, does anybody care to tell me? :) )

Re:Back to the Future

[Simetrical]

Take a look at Apple... the only HTML5 standard they are supporting is the one already implemented in Webkit (coincidentally, it's their own platform). Sure, they've put up a "standards group" to make it seem like they care about others think, but the WHATWG standard is really "what Apple thinks best suits their interest".

Um, what? The WHATWG standard is written by Ian Hickson, who works for Google. There's theoretically a short list of members who can overrule him, but a) that includes people from Apple, Opera, Google, and Mozilla, as well as one freelancer; and b) it does nothing in practice, just lets Ian call the shots.

The spec also currently has a W3C version that mirrors the WHATWG version. Changes to the W3C version can be made by a procedure that ultimately boils down to approval by the three co-chairs, who are employed by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. The W3C itself, including the TAG headed by Tim Berners-Lee, also has a say in how the standard develops there. In principle, substantive differences could arise between the WHATWG and W3C versions, but so far Ian has implemented all the non-editorial approved change proposals in both specs (AFAIK).

I'm all for saying Apple is basically evil, but saying Apple controls HTML5 is ridiculous.

Very telling post

[Khyber]

"Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools"

Tells me they only had this as a backup plan for when shit hit the fan, which they never expected to have happen so soon.

Apple got Adobe with their pants down and now Adobe is scrambling.

Re:Very telling post

[Yvanhoe]

Well, I don't know if I agree with this analysis, all I want to say right now is : Thanks Adobe ! Welcome to the open web ! Finally ! Stop being an enemy and let's be friends ! Let's make the web fantastic again !

Re:Very telling post

[Anonymous Coward]

Please refresh my memory: when was it "fantastic" before?

Re:Very telling post

[Yvanhoe]

When every text content was crawlable and accessible via links.

When you didn't have to go through a slow (but shiny) flash animation to get twenty bytes of content. When the only annoyances were the animated gifs and the <blink> tag

Re:Very telling post

[thijsh]

I would like to sign your petition to make the web fantastic *again*... We all love animated GIFs with text and background with blindness inducing color scheme... Oh and lets not forget the mandatory Java applets with water ripple effects and ActiveX object just for some 3D little animation. The web really was fantastic then, websites even tasted better... kinda like strawberry and kittens. So please Adobe, sprinkle some of your corporate magic unicorn dust over the interwebs.

I can't read TFA!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Or rather, can't view TF video - FlashBlock prevented it.

Re:I can't read TFA!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.

Re:I can't read TFA!

[oji-sama]

I'm confident the advances in technology in the last 20 years means your CPU will be perfectly fine playing that video or running that badly written javascript.

You do not need 100% total control over your CPU, unless you have absolutely nothing else going on in your life.

I'm confident that advances in technology will mean that there will be something else clogging the CPU in 20 years.

Re:I can't read TFA!

[Simetrical]

Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.

Adobe doesn't care so much if they peg your CPU, because you're forced to use their product anyway. If an actual browser renders sites very slowly, on the other hand, people will leave it for a different browser. Performance is paramount to browser implementers.

Re:Patented by Apple

[TheRaven64]

Apple has licensed those patents for free to anyone implementing the canvas tag as defined in the HTML5 standard. Does the MPEG-LA want to do the same with H.264? If so, I'd love to see it become part of the spec.

Re:Patented by Apple

[JasterBobaMereel]

Apple disclosed the patents under the W3C's royalty-free patent licensing terms. This means means that Apple is required to provide royalty-free licensing for the patent whenever the Canvas element becomes part of a future W3C recommendation created by the HTML working group ....So Apple are not being "Evil" and so no double standards needed ....

Yay Microsoft

[theolein]

...... To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices. ......

You know, Microsoft used to make claims like that all the time during the anti-trust proceedings, that the trials were hurting their ability ot "innovate" and "improve" their products. Everyone used to deride Microsoft about their pathetic excuses. Now it's Apple doing the same thing.....