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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.
Of course you're going to get a bunch of corporate doublespeak out of Jobs, attempting to disguise base corporate greed under some sort of philosophical cover. But we all know that Flash apps would cut into Apple's bottom line, and it all comes down to that.
Steve doesn't like competition. Steve does like money. And Steve calls the shots.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The real reason?
It competes with iAd.
In fact any user can install standalone apps that does not come from the Mothership (a.k.a. App Store). iPhone OS supports localstorage and offline mode for HTML5/JS applications that can have their own space on the home screen and works without any browser.
When Flash is mentioned people (especially on here) first think of annoying advertisements, video, or games. These may be the most "in your face" implementations of Flash, but the fact of the matter is that Flash is used for MANY other purposes that people may not notice as much, which HTML5 simply cannot touch at all right now.
Nice *interactive* financial graphs on Google, Yahoo, etc, are extremely common, and while there are many HTML5 graphing examples out there, few are interactive at all, and even less are usefully interactive. (dragging to zoom, highlighting, drill-down, etc...)
Flash is also great for writing entire web-based business class applications in, just one example is Google's entire analytics site, it uses Flash extensively, so much so it doesn't work without it.
HTML5 and its related tools still have a *long* way to go to catch up... Flash will be with us for quite a while yet.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
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?
"...and I'll take that as tacitly agreeing that Steve is right on those issues."
Of course you would.
"Maybe you could just post an open thread each day in which people could gripe about the App store and its closed system, instead of allowing every thread about Apple to devolve into that."
Since for Apple it's all about control and ownership of a closed system, and since Apple would like to divert the argument in just the manner you are attempting to do, I'd say "allowing every thread about Apple to devolve" is appropriate. No reason to call it anything other than what it is.
"But when their current product is the single largest source of instability, why on earth would Jobs let a mobile version anywhere near his pet project?"
We only have Apple's word that that's the case, and it is a convenient argument to divert attention from Apple's clear goals. I personally don't believe that Flash is "the single largest source of instability" in OS X and I'm sure not going to take the word of professional liars that say it is so. Flash sucks and the world would be better off with alternatives, but omitting it causes Apple's customers to suffer and it's being done to benefit the company, not to provide the "best internet experience".
"That's why I knew with 99% certainty before the iPad was announced that there would be no Flash for it. To be blunt, it would have been irresponsible to let Flash near the iPad or iPhone until Adobe proves enough commitment and competence to get it working well on OS X, where it has access to vastly more resources in a far more forgiving environment."
You are demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of the issues, and since you seem to think that Apple's product is Safari I'd say your opinion doesn't count for much.
Lately it seems like the most trollish horseshit is posted by guys with really low UIDs. They are like dinosaurs who really just don't understand how the world works anymore, and are forced to resort to inappropriate and misdirected rants based on a mid-1990s level of understanding of digital media.
For starters, you surely must know that it is the publishers who encumber their product with DRM, not the seller. Apple is on the record as preferring to sell unencumbered media, and was the only player in online music powerful enough to actually make it happen. It was painfully slow to come about, sure, but considering the balls-out levels of fucktardery running the music labels, it was actually suprisingly quick.
You've also been around long enough to know that Apple has always made it trivial to strip DRM out of your music, right? And that they provided this feature to their customers in opposition to the wishes of the labels, right?
You must also remember that the original developer kit for the iPhone was based on open web standards, right? Oh, except that nobody liked that, so they added a proprietary devkit as well. But webkit still works, if you really hate the proprietary one.
You also surely must know that the developer toolchain for developing iPhone apps is based on the open source gcc (plus a proprietary API). Now, the gadget only runs signed apps, for reasons that are technically legitimate, and it costs you $99 for the ability to sign your own apps. You appear to be arguing that the device would be better if it ran unsigned apps, but you fail to explain how or for whom, so I'll fill it in for you: it would be better for 4-digit nerds like yourself who know how to install their own bootloaders and manually dig out rootkits, and it would be a rancid little piece of shit for everyone else, just like the other mobile devices out there. Guess what? There's an app for that: it's called jailbreaking. If you really cared, you would have done that by know, but you don't really care, do you? Trolling is more fun.
Compuserve GIF, anyone?
Most of the H.264 patent holders are hardware companies. Apple, Sony, JVC, and so on. What exactly do you think they have to gain from making their products more expensive to pay royalties into the patent pool?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Next thing you know your going to complain that your CD player can't play mp4 files. But you own the thing!!!1
The fee doesn't even apply before you hit 100K units, and then it's about twenty cents per decoder.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."