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A Peace Plan To End the Flash-On-iPhone Fight
GMGruman writes "As the pro- and anti-Flash camps have hardened their positions, the editors at InfoWorld have come up with a four-point peace plan that would allow Flash on the iPhone while addressing Apple's very real concerns over performance, stability, and security. Readers can vote and comment on the peace plan, which InfoWorld hopes will result in serious talks between Apple and Adobe."
You could outline that plan in the summary. How many people here will RTFA?
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Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's about Profit going down the drain if Flash apps make it to the iPhone!
I don't think anyone will be required to buy a pricy developers license - Apple doesn't require that for any of their development environments now, so I doubt they will require it in the future. So far, on OSX and iPhone/iPad, Apple have made their environments free to use and cheap to release for.
Ban both of them?
(Apple fans will mod me troll - but fortunately, there are no Flash fans!)
Here I was thinking they were talking about the lack of a camera flash on the iPhone... I guess Adobe Flash is important too. Whatever makes you happy!
Where's the option for "I support Apple not because I agree with their acceptance policies but because I honestly don't want Adobe's crapware anywhere near my phone!"
After all, unlike my desktop where I can easily -remove- Flash or block it with browser plugins, if Flash is on my phone then they better make sure I can remove it!
It's /anything/ on iPhone. Someday, there will be another widely used application that people want on an iPhone, that Apple won't approve. This won't be resolved until Apple pulls their collective heads out of their arses and gets rid of the insane requirement that they approve all applications on these platforms.
For me, this application would be Ogg Vorbis and Theora support, hence I won't be buying an iPhone or iPad any time soon.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
The Apple/Adobe fight is about money and control. Apple wants to wall people into their garden and Flash is an impedance to that. Apples banking on their customer loyalty (accept that owning an iPhone/iPad == no Flash) and that HTML5 will replace Flash for video.
If this was only about technological/security hurdles it'd be done and done already. Apple and Adobe have the resources to get this working in short order. The issue is money. No amount of standards and compatibility will get past that.
...or does InfoWorld now employ an entire department to astroturf here?
The decision is Apple's and Apple's alone. Apple has all the cards and has no need to cut any deals. InfoWorld's suggestions fail to take that into account.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There is no "flash lookalike", the only thing they have are javascript frameworks and we already knew about those.
It's $99 a year. Also you are required to buy Mac OSX which seriously brings up the price.
If I want to develop for Linux, I can write the full code in Windows and compile it too. If I want to develop for Windows, I can write the full code in Linux and compile it too. What about Mac OSX?
it's complete bollocks.
Steve HATES Adobe.
You're more likely to get Steve Jobs to prove at the next Apple Keynote that he really can shit rainbows. "One more thing....."
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
It's all about not allowing unapproved apps to play on the iProduct. Everything else is mostly an excuse to hide the blatant fact. If it was truly about stability and performance, then iTunes among others wouldn't suck so bad.
Apple wants total control over the tools used to create applications on their devices. They can't do that with Adobe Flash. Peace is not possible.
Having flash in the locked down iPhone/iPad environment would be akin to having a dynamic programming environment on the iPhone/iPad. It would open up so many vectors for screwing with the security on the devices. I imagine it would be a great vector for hacks as well, especially given how homogenous the iPhone/iPad environment is.
Why make them "at peace". This competition has been driving standards forward like nothing else has. The byproduct has been great for all, and I'm not interested in seeing this end.
1) Forget about it, it's their device and they'll do what they want with it, no matter if you like it or not.
2) Learn another language. WTH is wrong with developers these days? It's not that hard to learn another language! Makes me ponder if most the flash developers are actually programmers or just script kiddies.
3) Web authors: start using HTML5 video standards and quit the stupid flash video player already!!!
Finally: I actually hopes flash dies, I hate the tech on my browsers and hate feeling forced to install it on every computer I have. Flash should die and Adobe should turn all their Flash authoring tools into HTML5 authoring tools instead. Heck, that would get them into the iphone too!!!
Actually it's not a bad idea, but not as a "plug-in". The iPhone OS should simply load the .swf, analyze if it references an MPEG-4/H.264 file, and access that video file directly (i.e. replace the Flash video player with its built-in player on the fly).
Anyone know if it's easy to parse a Flash Video Player file to check for an external video file reference?
That way, they at least force people to switch to H.264/AAC if they haven't done so already.
Really.
If they want to control what users do in their walled garden, let them.
Flash sucks... hell acrobat reader sucks too.
I don't care for either Apple or Adobe personally.
But neither should control what I have on my phone.
This has to be more than just allowing flash movies to play. Adobe would have to allow people to write applications that supports all that is flash. This would clearly get rid of the major worry about Flash, that it is controlled by a single firm that could wipe our it's competitors simply by no longer supporting Flash on their products. Of couse, as Adobe is finding out, it works both ways. Apple is doing it's best to destroy Flash by not supporting it on the mobile products.
Why will Adobe not allow flash players? Well, because then we might get functionality that would be a detriment to major players like google. Users might have in browser control of browser cookies. Users might get the control the do with images, like automatically blocking any flash object below a certain size. Or, heaven forbid, user might get an off switch.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The author misses the real point here: vendor lock-in... Why would people even bother to buy an iPhone if any of the Google offerings allow them the same apps? If there's a really hot app that can only be had on the iPhone, then people will buy iPhones... Plain and simple.
A black hole is where God divided by 0
Why on earth would Microsoft care what hardware people are using to run their operating system on? It's not like they have their own competing hardware platform or something.
In fact, I think Microsoft like people running Windows on a Mac a lot. Better than people not running Windows at all.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
How do so many people seem to miss the rather glaring issue that Apple has no desire to be a slave to a third party development tool. They've stated as much and it is a very real and serious concern. They offer features to their customers but, if a third party provides developer tools (such as Adobe with Flash) and that third party decides to take their time offering support for those new features or to outright not offer it at all then those features do not make it to the customer. That is a serious concern. In an environment where manufacturers need to provide every advantage possible to stand out from the other offerings on the market, Apple would be hamstringing themselves if they allowed Adobe, rather than themselves, to dictate what features do and do not make it to their customers. Anyone who thinks, even for a second, that this is a trivial part of the equation is not thinking clearly about things.
I'm surprised that InfoWorld completely overlooked this very real and very significant concern. Ah, who'm I kidding?... I'm not surprised at all... sigh...
"performance, stability, and security" is a factor no matter what. You can't be against Flash for those reasons but be supportive of HTML5. HTML5 has the very same "performance, stability, and security" issues as flash. HTML5 can kill a battery, kill stability and is only as secure as the person who is using it. (IE, easily socially engineered to be stupid in most cases)
How about Apple just make their own implementation of flash? I mean flash is a public and published standard and anyone are allowed to create an implementation.
So if Apple don't like the current Adobe implementation(And I can understand that) they can just make their own.
Apple's new terms forbid applications written in any language that is not called C, C++ or Objective-C. For example, I work on the Free Pascal Compiler and added iPhone support a couple of years ago (it compiles straight to ARM assembler, no intermediate code or frameworks are involved). Most people that use it write their GUI in Objective-C and reuse Delphi or other existing Pascal code for their backend, just like other people would reuse C or C++ code.
But simply because FPC stands for Free Pascal Compiler rather than for Fast Progressive C, this way of working is no longer allowed. That just does not make any sense to me. Why on earth would the name of the programming language matter in any way? I could understand it if they would limit you to using their tool chain (although I'd still disagree with it), but limiting to a particular set of programming languages?
The fact that I can't even discuss this on the iPhone developer forums without first signing the new developer agreement (and thereby make it illegal for me to continue working on that project) only adds insult to the injury.
Donate free food here
Infoworld story doesn't load on my iPhone. Guess it's a flash site. Classic.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
The counterpart to Flash development in the iPhone world is AJAX and HTML5. That's free and you don't need to use the app store. It's called a Rich Internet Application (RIA) or a "web app". The so-called Flash replacement is a Javascript library that makes it easier to write web apps that look like native apps. That will actually help developers who don't want to pay fee or go through the app store. You pay $99 in order to develop native apps for the iPhone - that's different.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
It claims to support SWF1 and a lot of SWF2. Right now I believe we're on SWF9, so there's a long way to go, but it does show that the approach works.
1. Apple allows Flash on the iPhone / iPad, with one caveat - there's a huge fucking OFF switch in the settings. When this is turned off, no Flash code can execute.
2. If Adobe doesn't like that, too God damn bad. Get screwed with your pants on.
This way, the *user* gets to decide if Flash has all the problems that Apple claims it does, and if those problems aren't outweiged by the added functionality. If the problems are that bad, then very few people will use it, and Adobe looks like the goat for churning out terrible inefficient crapware.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Here's another idea:
1) some bunch of technically skilled people with a lot of spare time put together a proposal for a linux based tablet system
2) those people ask for funding (for example on http://www.kickstarter.com/
3) slashdot crowd starts donating money
4) people start developing the device
5) profit!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Feet crossed, head turned sideways, one hand on the hip and the other wrist bent?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For a number of reasons, I'm running Red Hat Enterprise 4 on my desktop. Yes, it's not Windows or Mac, so that makes me an outlier. On the other hand, Adobe advertises that Flash is available for "Linux". If I want Flash, I have to dump RHEL 4 and load RHEL 5. One of the reasons I use the Enterprise editions is to *not* have to update my primary system every six months or so -- indeed, I'm waiting for RHEL 6 before I go through the process.
And I do have a RHEL 5 system I use on occasion...and Flash will mysteriously die on that platform. The failure occurs most often when there are many Flash objects in a Web window. Everything just goes blank, and my CPU loading shoots to the moon. That includes ads.
RHEL 4? The lack of flash prevents all sorts of problems. Not to mention being free of obnoxious ads when browsing the World Wide Web.
Before InfoWorld's truce proposal can be seriously considered, I think Adobe has to clean house first. When Flash runs well where it says it runs, then they have a better position in the peace talks.
People really don't understand what this is about.
Sure the crashing is an issue and flash does suck and sure the gesture support thing is a bit of a problem.
But this isn't really about flash. Apple wants applications to be developed for the iPhone, not for the lowest common denominator. If flash (or any technology) is available on all phones then everyone and their brother will release apps using that technology and the phone becomes a commodity. New applications don't use the cool new hardware feature that Apple put in because flash doesn't support it yet (and may never or at least not until its on every phone). Suddenly there is no way to differentiate your product.
Sure, right now you can write an app for the iPhone and port it to Android but you end up with, optimally, 2 applications that are both optimized for their particular application. When you have something in the middle you don't get that. Java was like this for the longest time. Apps were optimized for windows and sucked on the Mac. Its possible to make a good java based UI app on more than one platform but its difficult and developers are lazy.
This is why apple doesn't want flash on the iPhone or even apps that are compiled from flash. The fact that Adobe is likely to make these things worse by not fully supporting the iPhone or by not keeping up with new features makes it worse.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
No it's not. I have the full X-Code package for developing on desktop OSX and iPhone, I downloaded it from the developer's area of Apple's website after registering for free. You only pay if you wish to release software via the App Store for the iPhone/iPad. $99 seems very reasonable to me as a fee for use of the libraries and access to the App store. Many development environments (e.g. Flash) require you to pay up-front whether you release or not.
Surprisingly, you are required to run OSX to run Apple's development environment, just like you are required to run Windows to run Microsoft's development environments. Code can be written for OSX using freely available tools and libraries on the OS of your choice, which will run from the command line or graphically via one of the cross-platform UI libraries. If you want to link against Apple's libraries you will need to use their OS, which I think is true of the Windows APIs too.
I've programmed in a lot of languages. I just learned Flash a few weeks ago because I needed to port an iPhone game to Flash. From a developer's perspective, programming in Flash is like programming with half a language that only has half a run-time library. That wouldn't be so bad if it was fun to program in like some of the more modern scripting languages, but it's not.
Regarding performance, I found that the only way to make Flash code perform well is to write spaghetti code. I had a collision detection routine running really slowly, and when I hacked together a profiler for it (which is not easy because the language has no high-precision timers), I discovered that the function call overhead in Flash is obscenely high. I had to get rid of all getter methods (i.e. make all my read-only member variables public), replace convenience functions like Math.abs() and Math.max() with if-then-else statements, and take my hit test function and copy+paste its contents everywhere I wanted to call it. (I didn't see any macro or inline features, and as much as I hate to copy+paste, the hit really was that bad.)
IMO, if Adobe can't fix the language, they should put a bullet in it. If they won't do either (and they've had years), then I have no problem with other companies attempting to put a bullet in it.
general-purpose computers like PCs, Macs and the iPad.
There's your problem. The iPad is not a general-purpose computer. It's an appliance.
Read carefully: the iPad/iPhone is NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER. Why is this so hard to grasp for the vocal minority of Apple-complainers on Slashdot?
Google and Mozilla have been working with Adobe on a new plugin API to put Flash in a sandbox. The plugin API also auto-updates to the latest version of Flash at all times, to make sure people aren't running around with old versions that have known exploits.
Apple's hardware is getting faster with newer iterations. Assuming Adobe was willing to meet in the middle and work on performance and stability, I don't think this is an overtly complex issue.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yeah but the poor performance and portability between browsers at the moment makes Flash look really, really good.
I'm looking forward to HTML5 but we're not there yet... and people are buying iPads and co right now, i.e. in the present.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I think I read somewhere about h.264 hardware decoder chips for mobile devices being readily available. I guess a flash video plug in wouldn't support those. So it'd kill batteries.
Actually, you pay $99 to release native apps for the iPhone. You can sign up and download the dev environment for free. It's not immediately obvious, but I have it sitting here in my downloads folder after a bit of circular link-following on Apple's site.
Why bother? 80% of flash is simply video, and the iPhone supports sites like YouTube already without supporting Flash. The 20% that's simple animation can be done just as easily in HTML5/CSS3.
I keep missing what great Flash applications people need ported to their iPhones.
What I don't get is why Microsoft doesn't disallow to run windows on a mac (inside vmware or otherwise natively). I mean, a big argument in favor of buying a mac is that it can always run windows anyway. That argument would then disappear. Less people would be inclined to buy apple, and as a nice side-benefit, Jobs would get to swallow some of his own tricks.
Not sure what this has to do with the iPhone and flash BUT: Windows does not make computers. They dont care where you run their OS as long as you do. Mac users buying Windows is just more money for them, nothing else, no loss.
That being told I have a mac, so do many friends. None of us would ever put windows on it. We have PCs for that, and Remote Desktop into them (I only sit on them to play the games that are not for mac.)
Steve is known to hold a grudge a really, really long time based on reports from those around him, and I think he has had Adobe in his sights for a while. Now that he finally has a weapon, the popularity of the iPhone OS, he is going to take every opportunity to wield it against Adobe.
It wasn't too long ago that Adobe used to love the Mac platform, they would release most of their tools on the mac either at the same time as the windows release or often before it. However, a couple of years back things started to change and the Mac platform was no longer Adobe's buddy. They released a 64 bit version of CS 4 for windows, but the mac version was 32 bit only(though largely thats because of a dick move on Apple's part, scrapping 64 bit Carbon GUIs right before Leopard was due to be released). After Apple released Aperture Adobe came out with Lightroom which only furthered Steve's ire.
Steve can come up with a billion supposedly technical reasons why they shouldn't use Flash on the iPhone, but it really all boils down to the fact that Steve hates Adobe and is trying to get back at them in any way he can.
Monstar L
Compatibility and open standards are not the real issue here; the real issue is who will own the lucrative ebook market.
There are two competing standards for eBooks -- one owned by Adobe and the other while not owned by Apple it is at least in a version that is the more fully developed. While Steve may not feel the need to own the eBook standard, he sure as hell doesn't want Adobe to own it, either. Flash is but collateral damage in this war. The next killer app - which Steve desperately needs to justify sales of iPads, which aren't burning the barn like the iPhone did - will be digitized books.
Answer: because those Mac users running Windows in a VM still have to buy a copy of Windows. Theoretically, anyway.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Since Microsoft and Apple each own a sizeable amount of each other's stocks, and since Microsoft is a software company who don't really give a fuck what hardware you're running their product on, I can't see the benefit to this. Nay, the best outcome for Microsoft is everyone buying a Mac and installing Windows on it: that way their Apple shares value, AND people are still buying their product directly.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
In one thread, I have this going on:
while (Flash.Sucks)
{
Developer.Bitch();
Developer.Moan();
Developer.Complain();
}
While in another thread, I have:
while (Apple.IsBastards)
{
Developer.Bitch();
Developer.Moan();
Developer.Complain();
}
These threads are deadlocked in a race condition, and meanwhile, most Users have absolutely no idea what's going on. Surprisingly few of them even seem to care.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Flash is a god-awful piece of software, but the issue for many people is that it's the cheapest option to do cross-platform, dynamic applications. While the iPhone is a nice piece of kit, it doesn't have the levels of market penetration that makes it worthwhile developing your application twice, so developers are left with the choice to either drop iPhone OS support (which they'd rather not do because it's a nice marketing coup at the moment) or spending an extra amount developing an iPhone specific version of your app which probably won't give you the same ROI (of course, the other option is to use something like HTML5, but then you're screwed if you want to also offer your app on older desktop browsers which tend to have a much higher market penetration). Now, having said that, I too hope Flash dies sooner rather than later - but experience tells me this is unlikely to happen (since I'm stuck supporting IE6 on 50% of my projects, I don't see HTML5 saving the day in the near future).
4) Salesmen: really stop selling flash. Be a sport, and sell something more modern.
Flash is usually there because of the salesmen, not because of the web authors.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
3) Web authors: start using HTML5 video standards and quit the stupid flash video player already!!!
You need to pay more attention, there is not standard video codec for the tags. As far as AJAX + SVG thats doable.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I'm an Arch Linux user, and besides high CPU usage, I don't have any real problems with Flash. No browser crashing, stability problems, etc. On the other hand, I would still prefer to use HTML5 for streaming video, for ideological and other reasons (multiple videos open, or running CPU-intensive applications as well as Flash video tend to really bog things down.)
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
You've kind of answered your own question, though. The reason they might want Flash is that it's already used in so many places that if you have a definite requirement for it, and you want to be able to meet that requirement from your phone, you're not going to be buying an iPhone. Of course, at the moment that consideration doesn't outweigh the positives to Apple in not having Flash on their device, but if enough people complained or even started buying alternative devices, I'm sure they wouldn't be beyond rethinking their approach, lousy as Flash is.
2)
First, Flash is not just "another language". It's a completely different platform, with different concepts and APIs.
Second, it's not about being "difficult" to learn it. It's about being able to develop a single cross-platform application. By taking care of the device-specific quirks and APIs, Flash provides developers a common ground.
The alternative is doing a Objective-C port for the iPhone/iPad and a Java port for Android.
Dilbert RSS feed
The article above says you can vote. I can't find the voting link anywhere in the article.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
To clarify, you pay the $99 to deploy and release. Without a provisioned device, you can't deploy to it.
...somebody get Mitchell over here. He can shuttle back and forth between the two camps if he's not too busy
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Quite cromulent paraphrasing you've performed there.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Because it is the geek version of an 'inconvenient truth". Folks on here love to bash the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, comparing it's 'closed' system to a general PC, which is wide open. The argument makes no sense when it is taken for what it is: An appliance.
Apple and Flash Haters in general have very real arguments against the use of flash (for the record, as to performance, if Flash improved in that arena, I wouldn't see an issue from that side of the argument. I could simply make the choice to use or not to use). It is proprietary, it encompasses an framework within itself, and it is out of Apple's control. If Apple were to allow Flash 'apps' on the iPhone, and Flash introduced a security vulnerability across such a large scope of applications (and you know there would eventually be thousands of such apps), Apple would be totally at the mercy of Adobe, who has a terrible track record when it comes to security. In such an instance, it would be Apple who suffered the scorn, not Adobe. Why would any sane person want to put themselves into that situation, when they obviously do not need to? The lack of Flash has arguably not hurt iPhone sales in any significant way.
I also found this statement from TFA a bit ridiculous: "At InfoWorld.com, we believe such lockouts of technology, however well rationalized, could eventually lead to an Internet future of multiple, incompatible platforms that demand multiple proprietary technologies."
The simple fact is, that if a technology is good, and absolutely needed, it will be placed where demanded, or the vendor refusing to will simply shrivel and die. The market ultimately makes this decision for a vendor. Standards group typically end up incorporating technologies when evolving needs require them, although they may take their time, they do eventually get there. These standards don't happen in a vacuum. Prior to HTML5 and no viable alternative to PROPRIETARY Flash, there simply wasn't much of a choice. The market demanded the features that Flash delivered. Even though it is a proprietary technology (like the one the above quote is slamming), it became hugely popular. This in itself I believe was it's biggest downfall. It had no competition within the market, and Adobe became lax with it. They had the 90+ percentile numbers of multitudes of Windows users who were lapping it with nary a choice to the contrary. 64 bit OS's have been around for years, yet we are only now seeing betas of a 64 bit plugin? Smart phones have been around for years, yet we still have no production version of the client. The geek herds should be all up in arms that Flash is so 'last century', yet they are clamoring to get it installed (well at least some are) onto their Droid's, only to complain that it crashes, kills battery life, and generally sucks. Why so surprised?
I'm actually rather shocked that Flash's downfall is so tantalizing close considering it was an almost impossible 'ball' to fumble given the unbelievable good fortune Adobe has had and squandered.
The InfoWorld article misses the point. It is for me the consumer to decide, and I believe the Apple crowd has overwhelmingly already done so, and new the new directions like HTML5's capabilities are a reflection of that (note I'm not saying Apple is responsible for HTML5 or anything of the sort, but their refusal to 'sign on' to Flash due to it's very obvious shortcomings are being answered by new standards to address those concerns).
Nice article.
A waste of time, ones, and zeros.
Neither Adobe nor Apple have any reason to compromise unless and until the Feds get involved and force the issue in which case the solution will be worse than the disease.
Let them both eat cake.
(Disclaimer: I love the closed environment of the iPhone and iPad. It keeps some of the junk out of my way.)
This week's memo at Apple has it as follows....
It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,
Let's do the Time Warp again!
THAT is apple's stance.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Take Evernote. I use it on both Android (Moto Droid) and my iPod Touch. Because there's less buttons and the native autocorrect of the iPod, I find it easier to use on that, but the Droid app has more features and control (allow network access) that "fits" that platform better.
I'm sorry, developers *can* make apps that take advantage of each platform they're on, they just choose not to for expediency. Flash is a lowest common denominator - and it's a bad one at that.
There is nothing that makes any flash look really, really good...
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
You might want to actually read past the title of things you are linking to. This supposed replacement for Flash Apple is developing is based off of HTML and javascript, therefore making your 2nd paragraph utter nonsense.
Flash provides developers a common ground.
Yup. Abysmal performance and instability on every platform. It's uniform across the board.
It get's worse with every release as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can?
Maybe sort of but if you are going to develop for Windows you will have Windows and for Linux for Linux?
But can you develop for the XBox 360 on Linux? Mac? Solaris?
What about WindowsMobile and CE? "Wine doesn't count".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The faulty assumption such a "peace plan" is that the "technical reasons" Apple states are the real reasons. The real reason Apple doesn't want Flash is because there are tons of excellent cross-platform games written in Flash that would kill both their lock-in and their cottage industry of iPhone games, many of which are just imitations of games already available in Flash.
Apple feels strong right now, and they want to leverage that strength as much as they can to kill competition and tie developers to their idiosyncratic platform.
'Every six months'? RHEL 5 is three years old. It (and it's derivatives like CetOS 5) has reached the point where we can't even compile our latest code on it without replacing every library we use on the system. And you're running the version before that. Are you really surprised that Adobe isn't supporting your platform?
Meanwhile the x86_64 Flash plugin for Mozilla works pretty good on my (old) Fedora Core 10 workstation. I think Linux is the only platform you can even get a native 64bit binary of Flash for. So yeah, I think Adobe's Flash support on Linux isn't half bad.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
If there were Flash on Android systems, there'd be a lot more free games and the Android phones would be MUCH more popular. Adobe should have committed substantial resources to facilitating Flash on Android systems.
Maybe there's still time . . .. We'll see if functional Flash shows up in June.
You snooze, you lose.
Web content > proprietary non-Apple software component > Apple device
Apple does not want to let a single third party control Apple's ability to access web content, and thus perhaps dictate terms for access to that content. To access Flash content currently requires a proprietary software component from Adobe, giving Adobe substantial power to dictate terms for accessing this content. Even if Flash were made an open standard, it would require substantial resources and time for Apple to create its own Flash renderer. Why not simply put that effort into HTML5 rendering and authoring tools? Apple is gambling that the iphone and ipad currently give it the leverage to move the web ecosystem away from proprietary Flash and towards HTML5, a standard over which it and other parties have some control.
Adobe could produce a fantastically efficient, bug-free Flash plugin that exposed all the nifty features of the latest iphone OS and Apple still wouldn't want to use it.
Take a look at many of the iPhone/iPad and Android apps. Do you notice something? Take a look at Hopstop, Facebook, Twitter, FlightAware, Weather Channel. Now, do you see something?
A good percentage of the iPhone/Android apps are customized interfaces for webapps. That's right. Instead of downloading and installing these apps, the user could simply go to the webpage and do the same thing.
Even more strange is that many of these apps are paid apps. That is, the user is buying an app when they could do the same thing for free by merely visiting the webpage? Why are users doing that?
We could snarkily claim that these users are stupid (They're not using Linux after all!) Or, we could say that maybe there is something about native apps that users prefer and are even willing to pay a few dollars for in order to enjoy the privilege of using a natively written app.
That is why Flash is dead. Adobe is trying to push the AIR platform as a write once/execute anywhere platform. Adobe wants to push Flash as a "Universal" web platform for creating rich webapps. But, the users aren't going to buy that. It's not an HTML5 vs Flash debate because users don't want to use HTML5 either. They want the apps they download to work as effortlessly as the mobile device they're using.
If you're a Flash developer, it's about time to learn to program in the native apps found on these various platforms. Heck, learn them all! I believe that Android is Java based (I haven't programmed on it yet) and the iPhone uses Objective C which is not too difficult a language to pick up. Plus, both platforms have extensive SDK that help with things like GUI, buttons, scrolling, etc.
Because the truth is that no one wants to use a Flash app on any platform.
Thanks for clarifying. I was mistakenly thinking it was a general purpose computer because of the availability of 200,000 general purpose applications for it. After reading your post I realized that it's just a phone, nothing else, nothing more. It's just like my old Panasonic cordless phone on my desk. My bad.
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/may/08/android-flash-demo-flashcamp-seattle/
Did you even do any research about the rumored alternative to Flash that Apple is supposedly building... if the rumors are to be believed, it already exists, and it turns out pure HTML5, CSS and JavaScript... all open technologies
I don't know a lot about flash, so here's my question:
If flash is proprietary, then how can someone easily write a program that reads and plays it (other than Adobe)?
That's pretty much in line with Gate's old quote "If they're going to be pirating, I'd prefer it to be our stuff." (not a direct quote since I can't be arsed to look it up)
I wonder what would happen if someone managed to get a wholesale/retailers discount on Apple computers, and then started selling them with Windows pre-loaded, either as the solo OS or dual booting.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
It's an Internet Appliance. Remember about 10 years ago, they were going to be all the rage? Well it's finally happened. It's a closed environment, designed for a specific set of tasks, and designed to be easily used. The 'limitations' perceived by geeks are deliberate, and seen as an advantage by most non-geeks. Think about the original XBox - fairly generic PC hardware in a custom case, totally limited in what you can do with it but excellent for playing games when connected up to your TV. The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
Actually, you don't. You can compile Apple's toolchain on any other platform you want. Their fork of GCC is open source (GPL), clang / LLVM is open source (BSDL), and even their linker is open source (APSL). There isn't much in the iPhone part of Apple's open source site, but the toolchain is. If you want to compile it for some other platform and use it for cross development, you can. They don't ship Linux binaries, but then Microsoft doesn't ship a Linux cross-compiler either, and you need to either use WINE to run theirs or use a third-party one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Um, there's a lot of video sites beyond youtube that are mostly flash-contained videos. In fact, the streaming sites like Ustream, that seem right up the mobile market's alley, are flash. And it's not "the iPhone supports youtube," it's "Youtube supports the iphone." You've got it backwards.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I can freely develop applications for my Android phones. As for the gaming consoles you mentioned (last I checked the iPad isn't one), those devices are sold at a loss with the assumption you will buy games from publishers who pay large fees to the manufacturer. You also can't produce free games for the devices, whereas Apple expects people to pay them for the development license even if the application will be free on App store. Not only does Android not charge for the SDK, they don't even do anything about competing app markets and they don't require apps to come from a market at all.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
*Grrr*- look, there's thousands of games available for the Xbox, does that make it a general-purpose computer too? Since the rise of the home microcomputer, geeks have been used to installing whatever applications they wanted and hacking the system in any way they wanted. The iPhone/iPad have changed that, and follow a games-console paradigm - you can have anything you want as long as Apple approves of it - which as you say still leads to a huge amount of choice, just not the sort of freedom most geeks expect from a desktop PC. It's not general-purpose in the sense that it can't easily be applied to whatever purpose you want: it really has three purposes: make and receive phone calls, access the web, install and run Apple-approved apps.
"Get ready for Apple fanbois coming in and commenting on this on why it's "innovative" and why suddenly "Apple shouldn't support HTML5"."
Here's a Apple created, MIT licensed, web app framework written in Javascript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SproutCore .
This is already in use by Apple's MobileME and this tech is already usable on any javascript supporting browser. Calm down a bit...
Here be signatures
Ustream supports the iPhone.
http://www.ustream.tv/mobile
This isn't true on OS X where a Core 2 Duo @ 3Ghz isn't fast enough to watch a flash video without stuttering.
People keep saying this, but I was able to watch it on a 2.5 GHz machine on full screen with no issues. So I don't know what the fuck YOU people are doing, but you're obviously damn well doing it WRONG.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I don't see why you couldn't develop an application using the XNA Framework under Mono. You can even test it on your Linux machine with Mono XNA
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Within a year 90%+ of online videos will have a HTML5 alternative.
Bullshit. Maybe 90% of YOUTUBE videos will have an HTML5 equivalent, but I doubt you're going to see any mass conversions by sites like blip.tv, and more and more people are moving away from YouTube due to their insane overreactions on any random DMCA claim, and other issues, not to mention the blackbox-style account suspensions and deletions.
Saying "Flash will be dead in a year" is like saying "This is the year of the Linux Desktop." Yeah, we'd like to believe it, it'd even be nice if it was true! But in your heart of hearts, you know it sure as heck ain't happening.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
1) Except if they are found to be violating antitrust laws.
2)A lot of people that develop flash "apps" are not programmers.
3)What HTML5 video standards? Which ones do all the major browsers support?
I don't disagree that flash CAN be an annoyance (it can also be a convenience), but what Apple is doing is ridiculous. I can understand them blocking the flash player itself from their devices. But blocking any applications developed in flash and compiled to run natively in their OS? That's just off the charts of ridiculousness.
Apple has every right to guard their monopoly, as does Adobe. I just hope that Adobe announces very soon that they're going to stop developing Creative Suite for Macs, and watch the Windows-only CS6 force Mac users into buying PCs. Then Apple will either have to develop their own version of CS, or go to Microsoft to buy their creative apps. That will indeed signal the end times.
- Jack
There are already Macs sold with Windows pre-installed with Boot Camp. Neither Apple nor Microsoft has a problem with this. Apple is happy as long as it's selling Macs and Microsoft is happy as long as people are using Windows.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
If you don't like it -- don't like the pricing, don't like the machines, don't like the color of the cases then fine, don't use it. This system doesn't allow just anybody to do just anything, which conflicts with some people's sensitivities. Personally I just want something that works reliably, and if the system is a little harder for devs to navigate then so be it.
Look at it this way -- maybe a system is $1500 for you to be able to develop, and another $99 per year. Ultimately a lot of people have made serious amounts of money through these little apps... not just one or two people either, but mobs of them. You have a chance to reach a HUGE segment quickly, without servers on your end or high bandwidth connections, or renting a colo etc. It's a little bit of money upfront to get started, so what? I can't create a product and market it using Google for such a low price, or send flyers, or any other method. Put it on the App Store and people may find it. Maybe get a review. But jeez, it's such a low cost that if I had the time to play with it I probably would. Such an opportunity!
It's an Internet Appliance
That's like saying my fridge is a cooling appliance. Except it can't cool any dairy products. And it can only cool one thing at a time. And it can only be serviced by the company that made it. And it costs more than generic, all-purpose cooling appliances. And there's a subscription on top of a higher initial price tag fee if I want to use it with the more ubiquitous 110 V line instead of the scarce 220 V lines. Etc.
I thought Apple's stance was the Northern Chinese Shaolin Angry Tiger stance?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
There is some middle ground there, however, which would be rather useful for such a device. Some conceivable uses that lie somewhere between "dicking around on the web" and "desktop app suites and kernel hacking". I am interested in such uses, which is why I'm not interested in an iPad. (And, honestly, why should installing Open Office be outside the scope of this machine's functions? The machine is good enough to run "iWork Pages"...)
Oh, and going back to that whole "dicking around on the web" thing, I like playing flash games on the web sometimes. :)
To approach this from the other side - I'm a long time PalmOS fan, so I can appreciate a system that does things a little differently in order to serve its role better... So I can also appreciate some of what Apple's doing here. One of their contentions about Flash is that it's made for a mouse, not a touchscreen, and so allowing Flash would enable a whole lot of ill-fitted shovelware and they want to avoid that. But I don't believe for a minute that that's why they don't allow Flash. Store apps still go through an approval process, right? So if something were developed using Flash and installed to the iPad as an application, it could be rejected if it didn't work nicely with the touchscreen. This is about power... Diminishing Adobe's power and leveraging Apple's power.
Bow-ties are cool.
Huh. I thought Apple would have taken issue with them being retailed as such. Really, I'd just extrapolated from the reaction to Mac Clones. Probably not the best comparison, in retrospect.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Read carefully: the iPad/iPhone is NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER.
By definition only. Their GP computerness is their only real selling point. Technically, they are indeed general purpose computers.
However, even granting that it's not, my response is... so what? Calling them "appliances" doesn't make developing for Apple's device any more palatable.
It's a bit of a nonissue for me, really. Apple's platform is not attractive to develop for, so once I finish a project I've already committed to, I won't do it anymore.
The thing that makes it emotional for me is that these devices could have been truly great. They come so close, it hurts. I mourn for the lost opportunity.
But, but, what if I don't know how to code? Why do I have to pay for someone else to design and program an app for me to sell?
I drank what? -- Socrates
"NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER"
Whooooooo I don't know where to begin, as this is wrong on so many levels.
E-mail? Check.
Games? Check.
Chat? Check.
Presentations? Check.
Sync with other devices? Check.
You can even use the iPad for some minor music stuff!
It's even got a webcam.
Smells like a general-purpose computer to me. Works like a general-purpose computer.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You're preaching to the convert, I rarely use Flash at all. Just saying it's not simply for lazyness over learning a new language, it's to make cross-platform apps.
In Windows/Linux/MacOSX there are plenty of alternatives for producing cross-platform stuff. It's not true for iPhone/Android.
Dilbert RSS feed
In regards to #3. HTML5 does not specify a video standard: http://www.zdnet.com/news/html-5-drops-open-source-video-codec/318208
If you are truly into open source you want to use Theora, but support there is not full, so maybe you have to work with h.264, which has a myriad of licensing issues, I fail to see how this is truly superior to the issues faced with Flash currently. It to me feels like an "out of the pot and into the fire" scenario. Both have their pitfalls and neither are clearly better solutions until we get the HTML5 issue more clearly resolved.
"*Grrr*- look, there's thousands of games available for the Xbox, does that make it a general-purpose computer too?"
Are we talking about the original XBox? FUCK YES IT'S A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER, given it had a goddamned x86 core and ran a modified version of Windows, or even Linux if you felt like doing some hacking. Shit you modify the firmware and you could use the original XBox for TONs of applications.
The new 360? Not so much. The PS3? Most certainly (if it's the old fat version.)
Go do some actual programming for the devices before you run off at the mouth about something that is painfully obvious you know nothing about.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I really don't understand why people want to settle things between Adobe and Apple. Honestly, I'm loving it.
The more Steve Jobs complains about Flash, the more focused in building a decent runtime for Flash Adobe will be (current Flash on Linux is a resource hog and OS X is not that far away either); The more Jobs says H264 is for "open web", the more people will scream about it being a patent encumbered protocol.
Hi, learn what the fuck a CPU is before saying it's not a computer. Does it compute? Then it is a computer.
Goddamn the fools are out in force today. In the Apple vs PC crowd, looks like I'm the only one with a brain to simply look at the silicon configuration and capability and go "Yep, that's a computer."
Fuck all you ignorant tools. Can the thing give you 1+1=2? Then it's a goddamned computer no matter how else you look at it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No wonder Android phones have been beating iPhone sales all year.
That's funny cause iPhone had about 8.7 million units sold in the first quarter of this year while all android phones combined haven't topped 6 million for the quarter.
Keyword for xbox: games. Not random apps to do just about anything you want it to do. Games. Yes, there are a couple of non-game applications, like Netflix. But 99.9% of what runs on xbox is games and media. Not so for the iphone and ipad. They have general purpose apps to do just about anything you want them to, so yes, they are general purpose computers.
Smells like a general-purpose computer to me. Works like a general-purpose computer.
And marketed as an internet appliance with a walled garden of functionality.
(And, honestly, why should installing Open Office be outside the scope of this machine's functions? The machine is good enough to run "iWork Pages"...)
It's not "outside its scope", it would just require a group of dedicated people willing to put the effort into porting Open Office to the iPad, while taking into account the device's relatively low processing power. The iPad versions of the iWork apps had to be scaled back quite a bit to work on an iPad.
I'm a long time PalmOS fan, so I can appreciate a system that does things a little differently in order to serve its role better
Same here. I like my iPhone but there were a lot of things that my old Palm IV did better. Unfortunately, making phone calls was not one of them.
This is about power... Diminishing Adobe's power and leveraging Apple's power.
I agree with you about Apple using its market power to diminish Flash's domination of Web video but I think that, rather than Apple wanting more power at Adobe's expense, it's more a matter of turnabout being fair play. When Apple was at its low ebb during the late Nineties, Adobe changed its development emphasis from Mac to Windows and urged its Mac-using customers to switch platforms. Now that Apple is once again strong, they're giving Adobe a bit of payback. Steve Jobs has a very long memory when it comes to things like that; after all, in his opinion at least, there might not even be an Adobe today if Apple hadn't been the first company to license PostScript for its LaserWriters.
Of course, it doesn't help that Flash for Mac really sucks, and has for years now.
This ain't rocket surgery.
When will people realize that this isn't a war on Adobe, but on one particular technology that Adobe offers (Flash)? As a web developer and an iPhone developer who happily uses OS X, I find Adobe's products are regularly used parts of my daily workflow. I keep XCode up to date and I also pay licenses to keep CS up to date. Flash is not a requirement for a web site, but it can be a wonderful tool for fulfilling some client requirements and making a site look great. It is important to be able to degrade to a suitable alternative when a user doesn't have flash installed or enabled and such practices will leave a site looking great whether viewed on an iDevice or a desktop machine. Proper degradation should even be in place if you're doing DHTML. Aside from Flash, Adobe has many great products that are not threatened by Apple's position on Flash, among them Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. Additionally, Bridge is a useful way to keep track of media assets if you care to use it. I think Adobe will do just fine whether or not the Flash Player is universally available.
Um, $99 for the iPhone Dev Kit is hardly all that pricey. And you can download and use it for free. That's the exact opposite of pricey.
Which codec should we use for HTML5 video? The one that doesn't work in Opera/Firefox or the one that doesn't work in Safari/(future)IE9?
I'm not in charge of standards, there is a group doing it though. Whatever ends up being used the most will be adopted by the others. It's the way it's always been.
Also, give me Farmville, badgersbadgersbadgers and Chatroulette in HTML and I'll buy what you say. But since you can't, I feel compelled to say you are wrong.
Will Quake 2 running in HTML5 do?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/google-html5-quake/
However it's the "Hipster Douchebag" that influences something like 30% of those 97% because those 30% ask the 3% for advice on all things tech. So it's a leading edge bit. Yes, current market share is around 3% for iPhones, but what will that be in the next five years? Let the wave catch up to the leading edge, and you might be surprised.
However, since you're trolling, I'm going to stop feeding the troll ... now.
If people are ignoring 97% of the computing world to listen to the advice of the 3% "hipster douchebags," then they're stupid enough to deserve all of the scorn and contempt the rest of us pour on them and more. Apple's i* crap isn't "leading edge" in any technological way. It's the bleeding edge of Marketing and convincing customers that eating shit for the sake of Apple's profits makes them "cool", but the tech is generally over-priced, underpowered, underperforming, and under-featured.
But a machine doesn't need to be locked down seven ways to Sunday in order to use it for casual browsing, playing a bit of music etc.
The appletards seem to think openness and usability are mutually exclusive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's only one real way to get Flash on the iPhone. Put Flash on other platforms such as Android. Make it good enough that it becomes a selling point for those platforms. When Apple's sales start hurting because of it's lack of Flash on the iPhone, the iPhone will get Flash.
But then, why all the crying for Flash and none for Java? Flash is just one thing that is hit by a larger policy. Even the new license hit several companies that were making developer tools specifically for the iPhone while iPhone compatability is all just a minor subsection of Flash. (Although it could have made it big because then people like me who have just Flash knowledge could then make apps for the iPhone.) There's much more being affected here than just Flash, but Flash gets all the headline titles. Java seems more important. Most of the enterprise web apps I'm familiar with are in Java and if it ran on the iPhone or iPad, that would open up many opportunities in enterprise as people could include those in their off site workflows for business. Still, I guess videos and games trumps enterprise apps for most people.
The ability to program for something does not a general purpose computer make. I can write programs for DSP chips, but they're definitely not going to be used for general purpose computing.
A far better solution is to not treat the end users or developers like children and allow the platform to develop and grow organically.
Let the end users decide if Flash is going to be on the phone, or anything else for that matter.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Flash is a god-awful piece of software, but the issue for many people is that it's the cheapest option to do cross-platform, dynamic applications. While the iPhone is a nice piece of kit, it doesn't have the levels of market penetration that makes it worthwhile developing your application twice, so developers are left with the choice to either drop iPhone OS support (which they'd rather not do because it's a nice marketing coup at the moment) or spending an extra amount developing an iPhone specific version of your app which probably won't give you the same ROI (of course, the other option is to use something like HTML5, but then you're screwed if you want to also offer your app on older desktop browsers which tend to have a much higher market penetration). Now, having said that, I too hope Flash dies sooner rather than later - but experience tells me this is unlikely to happen (since I'm stuck supporting IE6 on 50% of my projects, I don't see HTML5 saving the day in the near future).
Your application can be developed 100% in C++ for the iPhone. You only need Objective C if you going to be using the interface (ie: games don't need it) and then you can still just do the hooks in Objective C and the rest in C++
OpenGL also is available in most platforms. Heck, make a game with OpenGL and C++ at it's core, and you will be able to take it quickly to MacOS, Windows, Linux and potentially even the Nintendo Wii (if they had something like Apple's open policy that many say is closed.) Can't talk for the Android, last time I gazed at it it said you needed to program in Java with their SDK, there may be other options though.
Flash video will not be the primary means of video distribution in a year's time. It will be a means, and it'll probably be available for quite a few years, but the browsers bring it in, and websites will inevitably provide a HTML5 alternative for compatible browsers.
Do you think that these other sites will chose to deliberately not use Flash for video distribution? Maybe Adobe will sell them on DRM.
YouTube already has a native app on the iPhone, so is already irrelevant. Maybe blip.tv will have a native app within a year. Not that I've ever heard of it.
>> general-purpose computers like PCs, Macs and the iPad.
>
> There's your problem. The iPad is not a general-purpose computer. It's an appliance.
Not really. It's less of an appliance than a Tivo.
jedi@nomad:~$ ssh root@192.168.1.110
root@192.168.1.110's password:
jedis-iPhone:~ root# ls
Library/ Media/
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Flash provides developers a common ground.
Yup. Abysmal performance and instability on every platform. It's uniform across the board.
It get's worse with every release as well.
True that! Plus, games and anything you would likely use flash for can be developed in OpenGl + C++, other than a bit of testing for platform quirks, thats rather cross platform AND ends up being faster than a 1 legged turtle!
Starring Steve Jobs as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a Transplanted Transcoder from Transylvaniaaaaaa.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
1) Except if they are found to be violating antitrust laws.
For Apple to be found violating antitrust laws, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all would have to get probed for doing worse in their video game consoles.
I'll happily accept the annoyance and pain that will be perpetual Flash dependency if the government forces console makers to open up their machines too, though.
> *Grrr*- look, there's thousands of games available for the Xbox, does that make it a general-purpose computer too?
You are under this deluded impression that we think the proprietary nonsense that occurs on game consoles is any better.
This idea that Microsoft can be a platform tyrant is just as bogus on the Xbox.
We expect Gates to be a jerk. Jobs is supposed to be the anti-Gates.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...plus they only came to think this after the iPad was announced.
Before the new messiah, the old one was perfectly serviceable. Now that they have the second coming, they have to denounce the first.
Once you jailbreak an iDevice, it looks very much like a Mac.
You can ssh into it. You can SCP into it. You can install 3rd party non-blessed software.
It will even play non-blessed video formats. Although the hardware might not be up to it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can you run OS X in VMware Fusion ON A MAC? At the time I was involved in the beta version the answer was no, and I lost some of the point of the exercise if it was just about running non-Mac software; virtualizing OS X on OS X seems entirely useful.
Stop sugar-coating it. It's a toy.
A toy that lets you read the paper, play games, and listen to music/watch movies.
Real computers have keyboards, or better keyboard layouts than the ipad/iphone.
It has an onscreen keyboard, support for blu-tooth keyboards and wired USB keyboards (through USB adapter) and an optional dock with an integrated keyboard. You can create presentations, work on spreadsheets and write documents with the iWork apps or connect to a PC or mac and work remotely on those machines.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
What the console makers do is different from what Apple is doing: AFAIK none of the console makers mandate what language you have to write your apps with. Whether it's worse or not depends on perspective.
flash on linux is still a beacon of stability compared to how IE-specific websites render in firefox or reversed
People, what a bunch of bastards
But a machine doesn't need to be locked down seven ways to Sunday in order to use it for casual browsing, playing a bit of music etc.
The appletards seem to think openness and usability are mutually exclusive.
They are not mutually exclusive for people who are willing to learn and are interested having a computer. Apple offers the mac line that purpose where you not only have an easy to use GUI but you can open up a shell and have at it or install the developer tools and start coding.
There are people who are not interested in having a computer or simply have no interest in having to deal with the complexities of having a full fledged computer with them on the road when all they want is to access their music, movies, the web and access their email. The iPad can do all of that, and run games written for the iPad extremely well.
Tablets that came out previously were heavy and had to be maintained just like any other windows machine with OS updates and virus definition files.
By the way, anyone who uses the word "appletard" deserves to be modded as a troll or flamebait. I'm a mac user at home but I'm a software developer for the windows platform with over decade of work experience. I can hack a geektool desktop and write shell scripts with the best of them but I like having an OS with a GUI that does not require me to put on a sys admin hat when I get home.
I plan on getting an iPad when I'm down in Vegas and selling my MBP since I only use my iMac when I'm at home and I have stopped talking my MBP with me on trips. I've been using my iPhone 3GS instead but I'd like to have something with a larger screen but still more portability than my laptop. I think the iPad fits that bill.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Read carefully: the iPad/iPhone is NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER.
The only reason why it isn't is because it's artificially restricted from running arbitrary code installable by its user. So using that as a supporting argument for the restriction introduces a circular dependency.
Because it is the geek version of an 'inconvenient truth". Folks on here love to bash the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, comparing it's 'closed' system to a general PC, which is wide open. The argument makes no sense when it is taken for what it is: An appliance.
Android > iPhone. iPhone is closed garbage, Android is open and free. I would have to pay money to write apps for my own device if I was using an iPhone. How ridiculous is that?
Fuck Jobs and his closed platform bullshit.
I agree. I don't actually think that Adobe needs any cooperation from Apple; all they need to do is clean up their own house.
Step 1. Produce a Flash plug in for Macs (and Windows) that doesn't crash or allow excessive usage of memory or CPU cycles.
Step 2. Produce a Flash plug in or Flash-enabled browser for Android that does not run down the battery excessively or demand excessive system resources. Develop a set of standards for Flash apps that are both mouse and touch compatible. Provide user interface options, accessible from any Flash app, to block intrusive Flash applications (e.g. anything that runs or animates automatically without some sort of authorization from the user).
If they can do this promptly, they may rescue Flash, and Apple will eventually fall into line due to user demand and competition from Android. But the window is rapidly closing. I expect that Adobe has maybe 3 months before the window for saving Flash closes forever.
Learn another language. WTH is wrong with developers these days? It's not that hard to learn another language! Makes me ponder if most the flash developers are actually programmers or just script kiddies.
It's not hard to learn another language, but there are plenty out there that are much, much better than the horrendous hybrid of extremely low-level and extremely high-level that is Objective-C. Regardless of Flash, I'd much prefer, say, OCaml to that abomination - but that's blocked by the license, too.
As for the gaming consoles you mentioned (last I checked the iPad isn't one), those devices are sold at a loss with the assumption you will buy games from publishers who pay large fees to the manufacturer.
Just because they have the same development model does not mean that they are required to have the same business model. Apple has a different business model from that used by game consoles, one where they make their money off of the HW and the SW is primarily used to sell the HW. It's essentially the same business model they've been using for the Mac all along, only the development model has changed.
It's just like how Apple had the same development model as Wintel machines but had a different business model from either Microsoft or the Wintel hardware manufacturers. They haven't exactly cornered the PC market, but they have made money hand over fist over the last 8-10 years so it works for them. Not every competitor in a given market has to have the exact same business strategy. If they did, then only the large would survive as the economies of scale would allow them to undercut the competition on price (essentially the price war between manufacturers of windows machines). If you don't like the business/development model for a device then don't develop for it. Just don't bitch that you want a profitable company to change their development model to suit you.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I should have known better than to come in here. Flamewar from hell. Whatever.
Personally, I don't give a small rat's ass if any Apple product ever supports Adobe Flash. Linux can stop supporting Adobe Flash as well. Then, Adobe could stay right where it belongs - on Microsoft computers. I mean, we HAVE alternative to Adobe on Linux. And, it really shouldn't be hard to port any of them to Mac - it's a Unix-like, after all. Let Adobe chase after the Microsoft market, and create security holes in Windows, where they belong.
Yes, I'll load an occasional site that relies on Adobe, and the content won't run. No big deal. I'll miss that content, and the site will miss my repeat visits. Fair trade.
The Linux world is growing. Yeah, there's a long way to go to say that Linux even competes with Microsoft for market share - but so what? The Linux world is still growing, and people will complain the site developers that they can't see the content. Eventually, developers will develop with the alternatives to Adobe in mind.
The world is a beautiful place when you don't rely on proprietary shit.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
We don't fail to understand that. We just think it sucks. Maybe it's hard for you to imagine that someone thinks the iWhatever sucks without there being any misunderstanding, but there you have it.
Of course it is ultimately about profits as far as Apple is concerned. Apple is, after all, a business, with primary responsibility to its shareholders.
But what is it that makes this a profitable move for Apple? If there were really a strong public demand for Flash on portable devices, Apple would be busy trying to help Adobe put Flash on Apple products, also in the interests of Profit.
The reason that Apple can get away with it is that large numbers of users are themselves pretty fed up with Flash--it crashes or hangs up their browsers, and it is responsible for irritating ads that animate without being asked to, or worse, "escape" from their sidebars to get in the way of content. For every user who loves Flash games, there are several more who find a Flashless web to be a pretty nice place.
This is the problem that Adobe needs to solve if they want Flash to survive.
I doubt it does much good. Apple has taken it stance, and they have a very clear reason to do so: Apple is building a replacement for Flash [theregister.co.uk].
Of course, the Register based that article on a single tweet by one person who claims to have seen this replacement. Hack journalism at its finest, and business as usual for the Register, which is a very good reason not to pay any attention to what they write. Unless, of course, you're using it to support your agenda and don't really care about, you know, the actual truth or anything.
This ain't rocket surgery.
The war is over.
It's Apple's box.
Steve has decided.
Now the only "fight" is whether or not whiny app makers and web designers want to shut themselves out of what is likely to be a very large part of their market.
That is all.
People keep saying this, but I was able to watch it on a 2.5 GHz machine on full screen with no issues. So I don't know what the fuck YOU people are doing, but you're obviously damn well doing it WRONG.
Yeah, but was that 2.5 GHz machine a Mac running OS X? The point being, while Flash may run okay on Windows, it's a dog on a Mac.
This ain't rocket surgery.
The InfoWorld article misses the point. It is for me the consumer to decide, and I believe the Apple crowd has overwhelmingly already done so, and new the new directions like HTML5's capabilities are a reflection of that (note I'm not saying Apple is responsible for HTML5 or anything of the sort, but their refusal to 'sign on' to Flash due to it's very obvious shortcomings are being answered by new standards to address those concerns).
You're right. I'm on my second iPhone, and I don't want Flash. I like my phone the way it is; and I only "miss" Flash when I stumble across poorly designed Flash sites that I'd just close on a desktop computer. That being said, I don't play a lot of Flash games like other people do. I do think TFA really misses the point that the iPhone is popular because, in my (consumer) viewpoint, it just works. If developers have to rewrite their applications and go through a tyrannical approval process, so be it; because the market is saturated with apps that work well.
But the performance problem is legit. My biggest gripe with Flash is that every so often a web page's ad starts gobbling up a core. Prior to Chrome isolating Flash in a helper process, my only recourse was to figure out which tab was gobbling my CPU and close it. I even had problems with ads on Slashdot gobbling my CPU. What's worse are ads that start playing annoying sounds, but I rarely visit sites that use these ads, and complain loudly when other sites do.
The point I can agree with is that Adobe needs to submit Flash as an open standard. The runtimes need improvements, like the ability to mute loud ads, or throttle back resource-hungry ads. These improvements can't all come from Adobe.
I'm actually rather shocked that Flash's downfall is so tantalizing close considering it was an almost impossible 'ball' to fumble given the unbelievable good fortune Adobe has had and squandered.
I disagree. Prior to trying to push Flex as a proprietary alternative to HTML + Javascript; Adobe was focused on publishing tools. Flash originally was a multimedia publishing tool for the web. Adobe recently announced HTML 5 tools. Adapting their Flash tools to HTML 5, as opposed to trying to push Flex, is a great way for them to hedge their bets and stay relevant with publishers who built careers around good ol' Flash. Besides, HTML 5 is much more difficult then the point & click Flash tools.
No, I will not work for your startup
I have a late 2008 aluminum MacBook, 2Ghz w/ 4GB of RAM. Flash runs and I've never had it stutter. What it does do though is make the processor extremely hot. Even the new beta, which can use the GPU instead of the main CPU, still runs quite warm. The fact it takes up so much processor time and energy is the main reason I dislike it.
--- b2b.mallaidh.org | www.mallaidh.org | www.kidsalive.org/article/kahlil-pfaff/
Pop quiz, hotshot.
Do you have to buy a Microsoft Developer licnese to wirte code for Windows Machines?
Nope
You pay for the license to use their tools.
DO you have to pay Microsoft to release software for Windows?
Nope
Do you have to submit your program for approval before you can sell your program?
Nope.
No, it's not. Really. Are you being disingenuous or do you actually not get it? It's like being a geek who usually carries a Swiss Army Knife, going into a shop and buying a really nice bush knife, then complaining that it doesn't have a cork screw. The iPhone/iPad are a minimal OS with a web browser that also support limited, locked-down and fairly small applications, and the iPhone also does voice calls.
Ya gotta love the summarizers that - believing we are unable to either read or think for ourselves - attempt to simplify the problem for us dullards:
"It's all about money..."
"It's all about control..."
"It's all about Apple being vindictive..."
"It's all about Adobe wanting to sell Flash..."
Actually, it's all about a bunch of slashdotters wasting time arguing about stuff they have absolutely no control over.
Me? I'm laughing my ass off. Apple has been the marginal market has-been for years, getting bashed for being overpriced with a has-been OS. The MS and Linux fan-boys that wrote Apple off the business marketplace are *shocked* and *appalled* by Apple's success in the consumer arena, dismayed that their favorite player is unable to keep up. Now that Apple is starting to squeeze a few nads, everyone and his brother is up in arms about it being somehow unfair. Apple has always been about a quality user experience and now that this - combined with great design - appears to be an enormous draw to the average consumer, the MS and Linux folks are dumbfounded! Why can't buyers see the advantage in open source? Why won't they select my virus-magnet OS of choice? Please can we go back to 1999? Waaaaaaa!
Welcome to the reality distortion field.
No, it's not a general-purpose computer. You're making the engineering/geek mistake of confusing the underlying raw specs of a device with its actual designed/marketed/sold-for purpose. My refrigerator contains an air compressor, but I don't moan that it doesn't have a socket for me to connect up my inflatable boat to pump it up (yes I know it pumps freon not air, it's an illustration).
The fact that you can use an Xbox or iPhone or PS3 for general-purpose computing doesn't change the fact that that's not what it's designed for. If you want to buy something and hack it, that's fine, but don't complain the the iPhone doesn't let you do this that or the other just because the underlying hardware could support that.
Many, many devices on the market from cars to central heating systems have an x86 based computer inside them, or some other relatively mainstream Arm or PowerPC, but everyone 'gets' that the limitations are designed-in. For some reason, because the iPhone has a screen and a web browser, everyone seems to be upset that Apple doesn't support it like a general-purpose OS.
I'm glad my iPhone has a locked-down App store, I had a Palm TX before that and suffered crashes from badly programmed apps all the time. Number of crashes in 18 months of iPhone usage? 0.
And it sucks on Windows too, just not as much. When that same machine using a real video player can decode the video just fine when it's captured and extracted from the flash container. Flash video sucks hard on Linux as well, so it's not just OSX users that get screwed by Adobe. Flash blows, and it can't get replaced fast enough for my taste. Adobe has proven that they are unable or unwilling to hire programmers that can code their way out of a wet paper bag.
And the same goes for the computer sitting in the dashboard of my car. It's got a fairly high-res touch screen and a DVD-ROM drive. But I don't see posts all over Ford websites complaining that you can't install Flash. In 2-3 years this will be a non-issue, the geeks will have finally caught up with the rest of the world in recognising a different class of computing appliance.
If everybody needed only appliances, who could become a developer? Even Jobs had to have a hacker on his hands to succeed. Now he tries to keep them as far as possible. Passion and marketing can do only so much... What we are witnessing now is an inflation of trademark.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
What the console makers do is different from what Apple is doing: AFAIK none of the console makers mandate what language you have to write your apps with. Whether it's worse or not depends on perspective.
They do, and you must use their SDK and nothing else. The iPhone is not too different from consoles, it just does not require you to be a large corporation to be able to publish software for them. You still have to be a registered apple developer just as you have to be a registered Nintendo/Sony/MS developer to develop to those systems and as I just noted, to use their SDK and your software to be reviewed and approved for publishing.
"No, it's not a general-purpose computer. You're making the engineering/geek mistake of confusing the underlying raw specs of a device with its actual designed/marketed/sold-for purpose"
You're making the mistake of confusing marketing for fact. Fact: iPad has an ARM processor. Fact: despite what MARKETING says, it's a general-purpose computer in the fact it's made for a variety of everyday tasks. Period. MARKETING'S PURPOSE IS TO SELL YOU A LIE.
Looks like you bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
People question Apple's motives and point out that the Adobe/Apple scrap is all about money and control. Of course it is, but why should we care? Apple may have the wrong reasons for supporting HTML5 but isn't it more important that they are doing the right thing (supporting an open standard) even if it is for the wrong reasons? Moreover, why should we want a peace agreement that will 'save' flash? If flash is not saved, that would leave an opening for open standards to fill the gap that would quickly be filled. Adobe would survive and prosper without flash as the are a very large company with a lot of other businesses. They would likely become one of the biggest supporters of technologies using open standards that would replace flash functionality. So, really, why do we want to save flash?
Interesting. I thought you could use other tools to write games for consoles. I swear I've at least heard of "middleware" tools for consoles.
Damn, you're right, I'm off to hack the general-purpose computer in the centre console of my car so that it can run Flash.
What? You can't watch YouTube on your iPhone? We're not unreasonable. Here's the video version
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, it's not. Really. Are you being disingenuous or do you actually not get it? It's like being a geek who usually carries a Swiss Army Knife, going into a shop and buying a really nice bush knife, then complaining that it doesn't have a cork screw. The iPhone/iPad are a minimal OS with a web browser that also support limited, locked-down and fairly small applications, and the iPhone also does voice calls.
So in your analogy a PC is a swiss army knife and an iPad is a really nice bush knife?
EL OH EL man.
A PC would be a workshop full of tools, and the iPad would be a dinky little Swiss Army knife.
Okay, thanks for the info. I use my XP machine exclusively for controlling my amateur radio station and my Linux box is a dedicated file server so the only real benchmark I have for Flash is how it works on my general-purpose computer, a 2 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro, and that is "not very well." As soon as a Flash video loads, the fans start spooling up to the point that the thing begins to sound like an old DC-8 preparing for take-off.
I'm with you when it comes to wishing Flash an early demise. I don't know what kind of resources Adobe has on the project now but at one time, it was a grand total of four programmers, none of which were Mac specialists.
This ain't rocket surgery.
It's not a new kind of "appliance", though. Tablets have been around for almost 10 years now, and for all of them being able to install software was the norm rather than exception - and iPad challenges that norm.
Also, an "appliance" is something designed specifically for a given narrow task. For example, the GPS in my car (which, so far as I know, runs WinCE) is an appliance for navigation - it is not extensible except for the ability to load new maps on it.
But iPad? Don't tell me that it's "an appliance for surfing the Net", because that's a definition so broad that it's pointless to call such a device an appliance. Not to mention that a true appliance does not have third-party app extensibility at all; while iPad (and iPhone, BTW) does, just with some arbitrary restrictions from Apple which mostly serve to improve their bottom line.
Frankly, I think that if iPod and iPad were completely disallowing third-party applications, it would have been less of an issue than it is now. Then your "appliance" argument would have merit. Right now, it does not make sense at all.
Apart from the XBOX360, all platforms you mentioned allow users to run executable code. Whether or not you can use the full suite of SDKs or libraries doesn't matter.
With iDevices, every piece of software, no matter how small and trivial, has to approved and published by Apple.
I think a better story here would be in two parts: the first about how it is that the editors of InfoWorld have inserted themselves into a situation that they don't have any part in. Did Apple or Adobe (or both) ask them to mediate? No. It's just a me-too technology rag trying to create a story that they can fit between the advertisements. The second part: Who thought this was news for nerds / stuff that matters?
Not so. In fact, yours is the circular dependency. Because technically, any 'computing device' including a calculator, a radio or anything else that utilized some form of a RISC or CISC processor, could -technically- be considered and used as a general purpose computing. Do I want my calculator to be a full powered computer? No! Because I want my calculator to do the one thing it does well- Calculate!
The iPad is not marketed, nor intended, as a general purpose computing device. I don't know why that's so hard to understand for geeks.
Use what works.
Many people are afraid of options. Not just as a figure of speech, but if you put them in front of three exclusive options they'll start to panic.
And they want to force you to believe you have their limitations.
Perhaps the relentless ads from Apple proclaiming that there's an "app" for every possible circumstance. Hmm, what kind of device would that be?
> Fact: despite what MARKETING says, it's a general-purpose computer
Actually, Apple's entire marketing campaign is very focussed on it being a very general purpose device. How else can we interpret the obsession with the tag line, "There's an app for that"?
Stop making apps for Apple. How many apple machine will get dumped if you can only get illustrator/photoshop/creative suite for Windows.
Lets See how quickly apple will give in...
I can connect a real keyboard to an XBOX, PS3 or Wii...
Remember Netscape vs IE. Many of Microsofts fans said the same thing, this competition will help the web.
Nearly 15 years and we still haven't undone the damage that little "advancement" cost us. We've barely been able to contain it (Damn it IE 6, why wont you die). Apple is trying to do the same thing, take control of the HTML5 standard so Apple can decide what is and isn't permitted and push proprietary codecs. At least all MS wanted was money, not my obedience.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You mean like gnash? Clearly it's not quite as simple as that, because gnash's primary function appears to be to crash, taking the browser with it...
-- Andrew
When I read the title, I thought this would be about keeping the camera flash on the iPhone! That would have been more interesting...
You might want to read a news item on this popular website which mentions android phones beating iPhone sales for the quarter. Careful though, sometimes the people who post comments on that site are uninformed jackasses apt to pull unfounded claims out of their ass.
So make open office work on the iPad. It must be possible to do without a big pile of Java suck.
I think the discussion on this is missing an important point.
The iPhone is after all just a phone. Flash or not it won't make a lot of difference.
The iPad is an internet viewer, that's its main task. This is where the lack of Flash support is going to sux and sux hard. An internet viewer without Flash support is worthless. Only an Apple junky would buy such a device. Why would anyone in their right mind want an internet device that didn't fully support the technologies of the internet? It dooms the device to the left field of uselessness.
It appears someone (GP) did not RTFAITOS which clearly mentioned in the US and even indicated it was based in saturation of the only US carrier with the iPhone.
One other item to note, people actual pay for their iPhones. Much of the Android "sales" were giveaways by carriers who could not sell them and wanted to create some buzz.
Do you have to do those things for Windows Mobile: Yes.
Do you have to do them for OSX: No.
Do you compare Apples to Oranges a lot: Yes.
Because Adobe would sue them for violating their TOS because surely someone at Apple has purchased any CS product.
Take a look at the Gnash FAQ if you do not understand the legal dance they are performing. It would certainly not work for Apple.
Of course most of youtube is already on HTML5 and blip.tv already supports the iPhone/Pad.
By your own argument - would you characterize Flash as "open"? AFAIK the Flash compiler + the FLEX SDK is open-source.
Flash is always the thing that kills my browser for no other reason then a crappy flash banner. - Flash can just go and die for all I care.
How can people have a crusade for a technology that is so damn young. What did you do before flash, was your life empty and unfullfilled?
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
the real problem here is that steve jobs & apple co want to a) control the app market for their devices which earns them a lot of revenue b) force developers to write applications that are more challenging to port to other platforms so this peace plan doesn't really address the key issues. if iPhone is so 'sandboxed' and 'secure' Flash security running in a sandbox shouldn't be a major concern. As for performance - only one app is running at time, so should be able to figure out how to manage the performance for that. the argument about being a proprietry web technology is a bit of a laugh, that's what apple iPhone applications are. the key difference for apple is most flash apps/games are free (apple does not get revenue) apple apps money goes to apple.
Why? RealMedia^WQuickTime^WFlash is obsoleted by new technology. In this specific interation, it's QuickTime^WFlash^WHTML 5.
"The security, stability, resource, and UI issues Jobs cites in his opposition to Flash simply don't exist for Flash video."
I don't know about security, but the stability and resource issues simply do exist for flash video. UI is arguable (i.e. not-identical)
Like anyone can even know that
Mostly. The flash spec is open, it's free for download and anyone can implement it. You can create a new flash player or creator without having to pay any royalties to Adobe, and you can use their implementation without many restrictions (i.e. no restrictions on the kind of thing you can create with their tools or how you can distribute them).
My problem with Flash is that there is only one complete implementation of the player, and it's is pretty horrible. Actually, Tamarin, the ActionScript VM, is pretty nice, but a lot of the other code is terrible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Get ready for Apple fanbois coming in and commenting on this on why it's "innovative" and why suddenly "Apple shouldn't support HTML5".
But be assured that the Apple Hatebois will have made the first post, taking some innuendo from a second hand-report of two tweets made a year ago, adding their own prejudices on Apple to the mix and creating a stirring "proof" that Apple is evil.
So far all we know is that Apple probably wrote a tool that allows people to make web apps in a way similar to making OS X apps. And that it is supposedly used internally at Apple to make web apps on the Apple site - that are nothing but HTML(5) and JavaScript. Oooh, evil.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
No they would not. They have changed their TOS to allow 3 party player implementations.
The debate is pointless, in that Flash itself is dead, and HTML5 (and the upcoming HTML6) are where the industry is already going.
Wasting precious time debating it, or having a peace plan, is like France building a Maginot Line.
It won't work, and Flash will be crushed as the industry continues to move forward to an HTML5 future.
At best, it will only give lazy programmers a false sense of hope, as their industry, like Betamax or Palm or any of the other fallen-by-the-wayside prior technologies, dies off.
Embrace the future. Surrender now, Dorothy!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yeah but the poor performance and portability between browsers at the moment makes Flash look really, really good.
On Windows. Because Flash has some performance and portability issues on anything but Windows, too. Which everyone here on Slashdot would have told you until the first rumors came up that the iPhone wouldn't have Flash.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It should be quite easy to fart rainbows if the positions of the light source, observer and Steve's sphincter are in proper alignment. Have a bag of burritos handy in case there is a need for re-takes. This could be modeled with any reasonable ray-tracing program or the like. I want to see the first free iDevice app with this graphic. To be fair, an Adobe representative should be present to indicate the relative position of the observer. YouTube will gladly convert the display format to Flash for the X.264 impaired.
Umm, microcontroller != CPU.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Which codec should we use for HTML5 video? The one that doesn't work in Opera/Firefox or the one that doesn't work in Safari/(future)IE9?
Which one would be the one that doesn't work in Safari? Cause Theora works on my Safari.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
FTA:
But the Sorenson Spark codec is equivalent to the requirements for the H.264 codec used in HTML5 and on the iPhone, so it should be allowed.
No, no it's not. H.264 is hardware accelerated on the iPhone.