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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.
...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 ;-)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Get over it. Apple lavished praise on KHTML--by name--when Safari was released SEVEN years ago. They were explicit on why it was chosen over Gecko. One of those reason was it was SMALL at under 140,000 lines of code. "SMALL?" Sound familiar? It was a COMPLIMENT, not a dismissal of KHTML.
The Apple haters need to come down out of the bell tower. It's clear many on /. didn't even get to the second paragraph of what Steve had to say.
There's a marked difference between a web standard that anyone can implement, like HTML5, and Flash. Flash sucks on Mac OS X, Steve isn't shining anyone one. Flash routinely blows up its browsers and sucks CPU cycles like a starved vampire on Mac OS X. I've read it's not so great on Linux either. OK, given these FACTS, why do you want to perpetuate the 3rd party Flash when an comparable open standard is available? Want Flash on another OS? Gotta wait for Adobe and it might even suck.
I've noted most folks forget that Apple has been on both sides of things. They've lost control of the tool chain such as when Metroworks Codewarrior was the standard for Mac classic development. They've done "write once run elsewhere" as NeXT with OpenStep on Windows, on Solaris and the OPENSTEP/Mach OS. They've seen how Java evolved.