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Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"
teh31337one writes "Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple's position on Flash, going back to his company's long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. He concludes in saying that 'Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.'"
Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.
And for those who care about the original source, it's right here on Apple's website.
Both Engadget and CNET are too afraid of sending precious ad clickers away from their site to link to the original of course.
As someone who routinely writes in Java (or JVM-targeting languages) because it will run anywhere, it is hard to read Jobs' criticism that Adobe has been too slow with Flash support for OS X with a straight face.
Apple's track record with Java--from having 1.6 appear years late, to dropping 32 bit support, to insisting on packaging it themselves--seems to strongly indicate that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cross-platform compatibility.
Notice that Apple's only making a fuss now that Adobe is stepping up its support. That'll teach anyone to try to make their cross-platform tools work better with Apple's products, won't it!
...but back in the 80's they made it such a pain in the ass to deal with them and make programs for the mac...
Funny, unlike most people here, I was actually alive and developing software back in the 80s. The tools sure weren't as good and I would never want to go back. But the level of support and attention from Apple DTS back then was just phenomenal--I do miss dealing with the smaller Apple where a tiny company with a tiny product could deal directly with engineers and nearly always get next-day answers.
On the other hand, these days, there's far fewer questions that aren't answered by the documentation ;-)
So how come I can't run Firefox or seaMonkey on the iPhone?
"Last year, Mozilla claimed it was “too hard” to develop for the iPhone, claiming Apple placed too many restrictions on the user interface. Instead, Mozilla looks set to continue focusing its development effort on rival platforms."
From:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/357601/no-firefox-for-iphone-despite-opera-s-success
"The biggest one being that rather than being an icon on the "home" screen, you're a bookmark in the web browser. Users first have to open Safari, and then have to open your webapp, which is tedious and annoying."
Then what are these icons on my iPhone home screen that open bookmarks with just a touch?
You can make any website or URL a home screen icon by pressing the "+" button while viewing the page.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine
The small open source project is KHTML, a complete open-source HTML(4 at the time but I suppose it reached 5 now) rendering engine. Instead of improving it, they forked. Which is legal and ok, but not enough to recognize Apple as a standards creator on the Web.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Flash was unstable on Linux for years, but in the last two years the problem has apparently subsided. No more crashes in Firefox, not even in Konqueror. How is this possible?
Uh, because Linux is a different OS and has a separate code base?
I don't know why *you* can't run The Atomic Browser on your phone. But I can.. only cost me $0.99 too.. for both my iPhone and my iPad. It still needs lots of work but it offers tabbed browsing and in-page search which are two big missing features for me from Safari.
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/atomic-web-browser-fullscreen/id347929410
Don't be ridiculous. Apple is one of the participants in the H.264 patent pool, and the revenue they get from it isn't even a rounding error. H.264 licensing is extremely cheap, and you don't even pay per decoder before you're over 100K units. The H.264 consortium wants widespread adoption, and they've priced it accordingly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/
http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/
http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1
I don't think there is anything in Analytics that cannot be done in HTML 5.
Actually, that is the one thing you CAN'T do with BSD code. The attribution requirements are practically the only difference between BSD and public domain.
The SWF spec is about as open as the OfficeXML spec from Microsoft. Yeah, its there, but its not the "real" spec. The published one has lots of inconsistencies, and the official implementation from Adobe deviates from the spec quite a bit.
Likewise, what about the HW vs SW argument? It's easy for code developers, some of whom I'm guessing have invested a fair about of time and training in becoming adept at flash, to just wave their arms and say "battery life is somebody else's problem". Well, yes, the hardware manufacturer's, for one. Here is a hardware manufacturer's response. Etc.
Okay, let's talk about the HW vs SW argument. Adobe needed API support from Apple before they could add hardware video decoding to their Flash Player. This API was only added in OSX 10.6.3, and even then, won't even run on my Macbook Pro, because it's older than a year and a half old, and Apple is not (yet?) providing API support for older hardware. You can rest assured, that now that Apple has finally provided an API for developers to use, Adobe has jumped on it, but due to Apple's half-way job of it, much of Apple hardware is not supported.
Oh right, I forgot -- I'm supposed to believe Adobe has been the sole lazy company here. Adobe recognizes they have more resources available that they're not yet utilizing -- but these were only recently made available by Apple.
Somehow Steve forgot to mention this in his tirade, didn't he? Convenient.
SWF files can be generated from within several Adobe products: Flash, Flex Builder (an IDE), as well as through MXMLC, a command line application compiler which is part of the freely available Flex SDK. Other than Adobe products, SWFs can be built with open source Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler (MTASC), the open source Ming library, the free software suite SWFTools, the proprietary SWiSH Max2 and the web-based application BannerSnack. There are also various third party programs that can produce files in this format, such as Multimedia Fusion 2.
Adobe makes available a partial specification of SWF.[7] The document is claimed to be missing "huge amounts" of information needed to completely implement SWF, omitting specifications for RTMP and Sorenson Spark.[8] However, the RTMP specification[9] was released publicly in June 2009, and the Sorenson Spark codec is not Adobe's property. Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[10] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF
meep
I don't think you understand the difference between a BSD license and a GPL license. One of the main requirements of BSD is that the copyrights must be maintained. BSD imposes no limitation on modifications or publication of source code whereas GPL requires that all source code for modifications be published if the code is redistributed. So Apple did not have to release Darwin. Because CUPS was GPL, they have to release modifications, but Apple didn't have to purchase CUPS either. WebKit came from khtml which had a GPL license. Apple, under the obligation of the GPL, did release their modifications to the code; however they are not under obligation to release code that they wrote independent of khtml. From 1997 to 2005, Apple only released the GPL versioned parts of their WebKit, namely WebCore and JavaScriptCore. In 2005, Apple released all of WebKit, some under BSD, some under GPL.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
He's not blasting Adobe for being closed, he's blasting them for going around telling everyone how open they are when that's not true.
He fully admits that Apple has lots of proprietary stuff. In that same letter. Whatever merits that Flash might have that would warrant Apple supporting it on the iPhone, it being an open system is not one of them, and so Adobe should try to make more useful arguments.
Not that it'll matter to Jobs.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.