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Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
An anonymous reader points out an 18-month-old interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock, and highlights three interesting quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming that seem very timely now. "'It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid. ... With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics. ... You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."
I'm not against flash, but i would like to be able to opt it out without losing any feature of the website i'm browsing. As i don't need/like flash based games and bloated intros, at the moment i got it installed just to watch embedded videos. One feature to go.
slashwhat?
We'd like you to buy into OUR implementation. That cloud ought to be accessible to anyone's computer - as long as they're running Flash.
Adobe wants a monopoly on content, and wants the OS to be commoditized. I want the whole platform to be commoditized - and that's why I support truly open standards.
If they really want to boost Flash adoption, they should make it open-source!! Or at the very least make cheap authoring tools that everyone can use. Flash isn't really all that multiplatform, b/c the authoring tools exist only for Windows and Mac ... where are the versions for Linux, BSD, Solaris?
399 more times.Then do a funny little dance and keel over to fail your astronavigation exam.
"It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox"
You mean, like these pages that say "To watch that, you need Flash 10"?, I have found loot of these. Your propietary extension is not better than some people doing a XUL remote webapp. (full disclosure: I have released a few xul apps, look for Tei in sf)
-Woof woof woof!
With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics.
*sigh* another company claiming that what they're doing is "platform independent" because they've created versions for a few platforms. Just like Microsoft with their Silverlight technology, Flash isn't platform independent at all. Sure Adobe has created Flash for a few different platforms, just like MS has created a Mac-version of Silverlight, but at the end of the day, Flash only works on the platforms Adobe have decided to create a binary for.
What platform independence is all about, is that the platform is completely irrelevant. You know, like the web is supposed to be. Javascript doesn't care if it's running on an Intel chip or an ARM chip, it doesn't care if you're running it in Windows or Linux, it doesn't care which browser you are using. THAT is platform independence. Loading the approriate binary for your platform is not, especially if you can't create these binaries yourself in the case Adobe doesn't support your platform.
This is why Flash is terrible for the web. When websites rely heavily on Flash, it basically turns the web into an Adobe-only platform. That's terrible for everyone, no matter how Adobe is trying to sell it to you.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I'd rather be forced to use Firefox to view certain content, than Flash. At least Firefox is Open Source and WORKS FINE on all platforms it runs, and follow standards very closely without misinterpreting them. Neither can be said for Flash. Moreover, if it works with Firefox, it will work on pretty much all browsers that respect standards, unless you use XUL to develop the application, but then you're pretty much conscious you're doing a Gecko app, and not a standard web app.
Flash sucks, let it die, spit on it's tomb, for it's the biggest oppressor of the open web.
So i "need Firefox for this to work" and that's worse than needing Flash? Well, Firefox works on more platforms than Flash. Problem solved, not by Adobe tho.
Very eloquently put. Wish I had some mod points left.
"I'm sorry, if you really want to read this post you have to use Flash."
Adobe wants web content to just run anywhere? When the plugin they sell doesn't run everywhere and in places it does run, it often runs poorly?
Where is Flash for BSD? For AMD64? Oh, wait, when Adobe speaks about the net, they mean IE.
Adobe, the reason Apple hates your guts is because you never ever supported their OS properly until you absolutely had to.
Oh and I hate your guts too, just a little bit more then Steve Jobs in fact, so I hope he rapes your stinking rotting corpse and eats your babies. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is worth cheering on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Correct. If Adobe had open sourced Flash right from the beginning and provided a free dev environment it may have been ubiquitous by now instead of being a glorified video codec. But the other reason Flash applications haven't taken off is simple - nobody whose opinion matters wants them to!
Microsoft is terrified by anything that would let it's locked-in customer base easily migrate to another desktop OS. Apple doesn't care so much, but would much prefer applications be developed specifically for MacOSX (and guards the iPhone like Fort Knox). The linux desktop people are busy with other stuff and distrust Adobe. The application developers would maybe like to use Flash (or maybe not) but are hindered by insane licensing fees. The only people (apart from Adobe) who really want Flash are Google, who stand to make more money if applications are pushed out onto the web. Google are the only ones who push out Flash with their browser, and include good Flash support in their mobile OS.
Adobe really tried to get people to develop whole applications in Flash, but I could never see a compelling reason to do this. HTML works well enough for most things (even more with HTML5), anything more demanding is maybe not a good candidate for implementing as a web-based application. Where is the Flash facebook or imdb? They don't exist because they wouldn't provide anything more than what we already have. Where is the cross-platform Flash email client? Nobody cares.
I don't mean to dump on Flash too much - it serves its purpose. Even with HTML5, Flash will still be used for games, advertising, and maybe video for years to come. But it will never be the all-encompassing platform that Adobe wants it to be.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
This leads us to the root problem: Why is there no Flash binary for some relevant platforms (not talking about iP(hone|od|ad))? Flash is supposed to be a publicly available specification, isn't it? Well, it may be, but there is patented stuff in there and the spec is entirely under Adobe's control. Others have no say in it. Sun opened Java (after a long time of handling it much like Adobe still handles Flash), but Sun is no more, which might be a bit of a disincentive for Adobe following Sun's lead.
That said, even as an open platform, Flash would still suck. Flash "documents" or "apps" are binary blobs. That's not how I want my web to be. The granularity of a Flash applet is much too coarse.
Who donate their time for no other reason than that they wan to enrich everyone.
And over there are Abode, who bill their time for no other reason than that they want to enrich themselves.
How dare they compare themselves with FOSS developers? How dare they?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In the Wikipedia article on Pot calling the kettle black there's this alternative interpretation: "the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pots own sooty reflection that it sees"
This is how I see Adobe's accusation against Firefox. I have yet to see *one* single site that requires Firefox, I have lost count of the sites that require Flash.
His reasons are fine, but they've been "trying" for too long they need more doing!
If he's serious about content being accessible on any platform then they need to start treating all platforms equally and with decent performance too.
it's ridiculous that a stupid flash game takes as much resources as a full on game. using the same technology for advert banners is insane
Apple prohibits any kind of code interpreter, not just Adobe's.
Dilbert RSS feed
read the title of the story as: "Adobe Flounders On Flash and Internet Standards"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player. Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9.
Yeah, I've seen more IE than Firefox too. But that's irrelevant to this particular straw-man.
They are basically washing over the fact that they are causing the same issue, except they are adding an additional layer that it can occur on. Although, in this case competition is limited.
Still, a decently written page with a cross-browser javascript library and/or plain HTML will work on more platforms than Flash.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
What was it again?
Oh right
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"The Following Plug-In has crashed: Shockwave Flash"
However when you take Apple out of the picture (despite this being filed under Apple for some reason) no-one can think of a kind word for the Adobe wonder child. Oh how flash isn't open, only works on Adobe approved systems, Firefox runs on more systems etc etc....you can't have it both ways people.
I'm no fanboy but at least I'm not a hypocrite...Flash sucks, always has, always will....regardless of who choses to support it and who doesn't. FFS people, one would think you'd be happy that a company (in this case Apple) is trying to champion an open standard (HTML5) to free you from the shackles of requiring a compiled binary made especially for your system.
If it comes down to Adobe Flash or HTML V5 H.264 I'll take Flash any day and twice on Sundays! At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros. And SD Flash plays beautifully on this 1.8Ghz Sempron I use for a low power netbox, and with the latest Flash I can add a $50 AGP card and go full HD. From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.
And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA, who unlike Adobe really REALLY likes to sue...a lot. Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check. MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.
So everyone can go "poo poo Adobe, poo poo" and I'll be the first to say their past versions of flash left a lot to be desired. But at least it seems they are trying, and aren't going around trying to lock up the web with an AV paywall like MPEG-LA. Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash is frankly beyond me. And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard" because it doesn't matter if it is all locked down behind a paywall of patents. I mean, do you REALLY want to help lock web video into a legal minefield that benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Whether you like Flash or not, the fact remains that for a long time it was the only way to do all sorts of things that are only just becoming viable with other methods, as so was the de-facto standard.
Things like Joe Cartoon, RatherGood.com and Fly Guy would never have existed without Flash, and there is all sorts of information stored in SWF files going back to the 90s. You may argue that this information is now in the wrong format, but there's lots of things that will never be updated to HTML5 or JavaScript equivalents.
I can understand a lot of the complaints about Flash, but if goes, we lose a large chunk of internet history with it. The battles between Adobe and Apple is all about their own self interest, but may result in people losing lots information for idealogical reasons (as has already happened to iPad and iPhone users).
This seems a little bit too much like book burning to me.
One more time: Apple has a single patent in the h.264 pool. Microsoft has something like sixty, and they still pay the MPEG-LA twice what they receive in royalties. And Apple gets pocket change for their patent. Neither have an economic interest in promoting h.264, beyond sunk costs.
I'm honestly not sure, at this point, if they are just self-serving whiners or if they have been wrapped up in adobe so long that they've acquired a capacity for sincere delusion on par with the guy outside 7-11 who rants about the Second Coming...
"Gosh, it sure is terrible that some sites only work properly in Firefox. And other demand IE. There are even a few that only work in Safari. Wouldn't it be better if every site just required Adobe Flash 10? Things would be so simple!"
lol, I'd glady shell out a few bucks for a picture perfect Flash player on Linux!!
Perhaps you [we] could donate to Gnash ? You know, they might get there someday.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Just a quick natter: JavaScript doesn't "just work" 100%.
ECMAScript is the name of the standard; Netscape (and later Mozilla) were entitled to use the Java trademark to call it JavaScript; Microsoft instead call it JScript. JScript somewhat resembles JavaScript, which is an implementation of ECMAScript; however, it is not much more compatible than anything else in the IE core.
Speaking of Java; it's funny, but as far as web-apps go, only a few years ago I'd have said that Java was officially dead and that Flash had gone and eaten its lunch. But now, it looks that, for web-apps, Flash is living on borrowed time and Java is on the brink of rebirth. Maybe once the non-IE browsers can finally, collectively dethrone IE and banish it to the far corners of the web, Java can finally do what neither Flash nor even itself managed to do: a true run-anywhere engine for compiled code inside every user agent.
The headline has a nice double-meaning. It could be read as an interview with the founders of Adobe on Flash and Internet standards, or that Adobe is foundering on Flash and Internet standards. The latter is what I first read it as.
Personally, as a development platform, with Android 2.2 around the corner, and Adobe releasing the iPhone packager for other mobile OS, I'm willing to give them breathing space to get on with what they are trying to achieve.
The problem I find with /. is so many people seem to be doing the "well v6 was crap, v10.1 must be awful" routine. It's tedious. Please go and read this http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/05/engineering_flash_player.html .
Currently there is no other company out there trying to deliver such a comprehensive write once, run anywhere solution. If they pull this off, my life as a developer becomes a lot simpler.
Noted. :)
You go ahead declaring whomever you want enemies.
Personally I feel the internet has to be based around free non-patent encumbered standards. Yes it's currently a lofty goal and we can't do it overnight (we should never have let it get this far, but people like shiny toys, don't they.)
This does means that Flash and the MPEG-LA just smell wrong. I couldn't care less about demonising them - the techs wrong, plain and simple.
You presented a false choice - I choose neither.
Founders... oh wait... it's a noun!
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
You mean besides the fact that they can't be sued for patent infringement by other members of MPEG-LA?
yeah.. thats not worth anything.
Apple has exactly 1 patent in MPEG-LA? That means they need MPEG-LA more than any other member.
"His name was James Damore."
These guys just don't understand Apple's business goals. Apple long ago realized that they can't compete as "just another computer company". The paper-thin margins of the PC business preclude that. So to that end, Apple's goal is to reinvent why people want to buy its products. Sure there were tons of MP3 players out there when the iPod came out but iTunes changed the way you get your music. Then the iPhone threw out the gimped phone device business model crammed down our throats by the phone companies. Apple wants to do the same thing with the iPad but with a broader goal. Embracing Flash is counter to that because then the consumer has less motivation to buy an Apple product. At its core, this is about business, not about technological ideology.
At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros.
Most nvidia cards come with a hardware H.264 decoder, which the Linux drivers support, so that's one way of getting it free. I bought a Dell with Linux preloaded, and it had the Fluendo codecs preloaded, so that's another way. Oh, and you could always just ignore software patents, or use a format other than H.264.
From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.
From what I've seen, it still beats Flash in that regard. Of course, none of that is required by the spec -- see, unlike Flash, if you have a problem with HTML5's performance, you can actually fix it!
And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA... Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check.
Well, let's see: First, you can't actually run it anywhere, including iStuff, and of course Linux distributions on odd architectures.
Second, H.264 is included and widely used in Flash, so I don't see why you're assuming you'll never have to write a check. That's entirely at the whim of Adobe.
MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.
So apparently, you will. Thanks for explaining why Flash solves nothing.
Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash...
How would that work, again, given that Flash includes H.264?
And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard"...
No, but HTML5 is.
benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?
Yes, Flash does. Their Linux player has always sucked, even more than their Mac player, which has always sucked. It's one of a very small number of pieces of proprietary software which are essentially required -- software patents aside, I can build a fully-functional HTML5 player with H.264 support using entirely free software, and I can even avoid the legal minefield by simply avoiding countries where software patents are respected.
I honestly can't see why you're wanting to trade an open, transparent standard which you may have to pay for (but probably not -- every major OS either bundles the codecs or offers them for an under-$100 fee), for a closed, proprietary standard you also may have to pay for.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Even if they do eventually catch up to the Adobe player, they still have the exact same issue as HTML5 currently does: H.264 and other proprietary codecs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't know why but for some strange reason every time someone talks about Flash the Queen Song Flash jumps into my head.
Flash - ah - saviour of the universe Flash - ah - it'll save ev'ry one of us Flash - ah - it's a miracle Flash - ah - king of the impossible It's for ev'ry one of us Stands for ev'ry one of us It'll save with a mighty hand Ev'ry man ev'ry woman ev'ry child With a mighty flash Flash - ah Flash - ah - it'll save ev'ry one of usMy ism, it's full of beliefs.
Adobe stands to loose the only tube-based revenue stream they have, and it's a big one. They are on the verge of becoming irrelevant via html5. I'm glad. They've had so many security holes over the past few years I hated installing Flash or Reader on anything. There were times it took Adobe months to release critical security fixes and the only reason they didn't do it sooner was because they were too fat and lazy. Everything Adobe is doing now is just a result of slowly running out of oxygen.
The only thing that can save Adobe now, and their grip on the browser/video/porn market, is to Open Source their product. The same way M$ killed Netscape; give it away, or get 0wned.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Use firefox and use the flashblock addon.
Has he forgotten about SVG ? Adobe still distributes a viewer for SVG, and there's native support in Firefox.
I think they're basically saying "We don't want open standards - we want only our standard".
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
The video codec in most Flash-encoded videos is h.264. All the new <video> standardization does is ensure your browser plays the video without a plugin. So I'm not sure why you see a difference. It could be that the flash video is encoded at a lower bitrate than any "plain" h.264 videos you are trying to view.
The one advantage that Flash has is that Adobe pays the licensing fee for its users - just as Apple does for Safari, Microsoft for IE, etc. Firefox is the one browser without a major corporate sponsor to pony up the licensing fee.
Any video codec will be covered by a gazillion patents. Theora isn't patent unencumbered, it's just patent unenforced, and in that way it's a bigger legal minefield than h.264. It's highly likely that if it gains traction, it will be sued out of existence. I think the WebM codec is the only chance of a non-MPEG-LA codec surviving - not because it won't be infringing on any patents, but because Google actually has teeth to defend it.
There's enough open for you to write flash authoring tools, but not enough to write an actual client. In particular, last I checked, the "open" parts forbid you from writing a client.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Last I checked, it could only be used for authoring tools, not for writing an actual client/plugin.
it can still deliver applications or 3D gaming experiences or whatever
Only very recently did it get actual hardware-accelerated 3D. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't, but JavaScript is getting 3D support soon (they're in the nightlies of the major open source browsers).
the 30 year old Pacman clone on Google's homepage stutters like a bitch.
Didn't stutter for me. What crappy browser are you running?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Have you taken a look recently at what is going over the wire when you play a "flash" video?
.swf object, providing the controls, followed by a .flv or .mp4 video(with the latter becoming more common as time goes on), more often over http, sometimes over rtmp.
.swf stuff, there is no such thing as "flash video", just video codecs that Flash Player has decode support for. Pretty much all of which are proprietary, patent-encumbered, or both.
In the substantial majority of cases, it'll be a tiny little
Depending on the exact whim of the publisher, "flash video" is almost always a proprietary variant of h.263, VP6, or h.264.
With the exception of the old-style vector-animated
If flash was open source, a published standard and available for every single OS and platform then yes, they could claim it was fully cross platform.
The version of Flash lagged way behind on Linux for years.
Standards implementations are slowly converging over time and the focus now is on proper application development which flash has just never done a very good job of proving itself in. The needs of Adobe's customers changed, and their product just didn't change fast enough to keep up.
I'm assuming you will be screaming for an addon that disables all canvas elements on the page, y'know to kill all those adverts....
There are performance demo's around demonstrating Flash 10.1 vs HTML5 canvas implementations with Flash around 30fps and canvas around 6fps (SVG around 2fps).
HTML5 has got a lot of work to make it a viable alternative, but I suppose they actually need to finish defining what HTML5 actually is first.
Well, it's not run anywhere. FreeBSD/amd64 here, without a native flash plugin, and no Adobe support in sight. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other platforms that too are not supported, and never will. (Sorry mods, I know it's redundant, but the point has to be driven home to Flash devs).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Another reason Apple is so dead-set against using Adobe Flash on their iPhone/iPads is because they would lose their exclusive development platform of XCode on their custom Mac hardware. And if Apple is anything, they are a hardware company.
Basically what they are saying (after they changed their licensing agreement for iPhone/iPad developers) is that if you want to write software for us you will type in code in XCode and compile it using that compiler and submit it to us for approval.
If they allowed native compiled code from other software developers, then anybody with Adobe's latest CS5 Flash (even on Windows!) could create native iPhone binaries using the well-known Flash dev environment. And porting Flash games over would take work, but not nearly as much as buying a Mac and re-writing everything in Objective-C.
And all those annoying Flash banner ads! I'm glad they're gone... I mean being replaced by Apple iAd so they can control the entire advertising "experience" for your online devices. iAds is coming soon to iPhone OS 4.
Adobe can make all the excuses for flash they want, but it still sucks hind tit for all the reasons people have complained about before. However, I do think they have a valid point regarding their thoughts about "internet standards" and how it was supposed to be versus how it is now a days. It was not intended there be patent encumbered which defeats the whole purpose and idea behind the ubiquity of accessing data. Yet there are companies with the sole intent of making everyone pay a toll or beholding to them. That in my view is wrong and is no better than the wall AOL tried to erect around the Internet.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Do you realise that Flash != codec? Do you realise that any video in a Flash applet very likely will be encoded in H.263+, H.264 or VP6? Are you aware that at least two of these require MPEG-LA royalties to decode? Do you realise that Flash does not support Theora? Hence, despite your deep dislike of MPEG-LA, if you're advocating Flash then you are more or less or promoting MPEG-LA royalty bearing technology. The only modern web-video technology which does not require MPEG-LA royalties is HTML5 video with Theora (potentially Googles' VP8 might be added to this list in future).
With all due respect, you appear to have a less than solid grasp of the facts of the matter, which renders your conclusions quite suspect.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
So when your boss comes and asks you to create a website featuring videos, what do you tell him? At some point you have to choose, and choosing Theora isn't really an option, since it won't play on most browsers.
The only way to ensure cross-platform capabilities is open standards (unencumbered by patents). If we have learned anything from the age of the Internet, it's that building on an open standard, even if inferior in many ways, allows for an amazing array of applications that could never be imagined. Anyone can impliment a HTML browser for any piece of hardware (to a point). Flash's cross-platform capabilities are entirely dependent on one company. One public company who at anytime could choose to not port their "Internet viewer" to your platform (or just drag the chain, or do a poor job). Who in their right mind would want to be beholden to that? Adobe holds the Internet to ransom! Yes we need flash like capabilites, but we need them an an open format that anyone can impliment. I am not beholden to firefox, if I wanted to get off my arse, I could contribute to add whatever feature I so desired. If I had enough capital I could make a browser from scratch. No, flash is the antithesis of the open web, it must die, and the only way achieve this is to replace it with an open standard that can do as much (or close).
I really love going to a site and being told my software is out of date, but please click on this link (as Administrator of course) and install new software that we promise is just the new version of Adobe flash. Sure. I trust you.
You should read the Gnash FAQ and you will understand their shaky legal ground. Once they "get there" Adobe will just sue the crap out of them. Unless of course Adobe keeps their "Open Source Project" promise before then. But in that promise they said they would drop the devices royalty for flash player on mobiles and for people making their own flash players. Somehow in 2 years that magical day has not yet come.
the Web designers are told to design to make IE work first, Safari on iPhone second, Firefox or Safari third, and worry about the rest of the pack when time permits.
If the web designers are smart they will make it work first on Safari, or Firefox, or Chrome, or whatever they believe to be most compliant. Then that arduous process of getting it to work with IE will be easier. You have to start with a level or a plumbline when building a house and that is how you should start when building a web application. IE can be coaxed into working correctly but trying to do it the other way will only cause major problems.
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
And there are many things Adobe does in fact make people write that check for. It is Amazing how many think anyone can create a flash player and not pay Adobe any money. Those folks might try reading Adobe's license agreement.
I'd choose a new job .-)
I gave up building web front ends about five years ago - I didn't want to move over to the newer techs like flash and ajax as I found them clunky and messy solutions.
The romance went out of the "web" for me at that point and it became just another ad platform.
I do purely the back end tier now and let someone else make the front end choices (sometimes JSP/Servlets, has been XML/RPC to .Net apps too).
I recently left a Bank who were transitioning their WCMS and client facing interface onto FLEX. Its a disaster waiting to happen frankly and I said so (gently mind, I've got a heart).
To answer your question - at a push, I'd advise someone to put their videos up on youtube and link / use that. Bandwidth can be easily scaled and when this current video mess is sorted out, youtube will have resolved it for me :-)
Another reason Apple is so dead-set against using Adobe Flash on their iPhone/iPads is because they would lose their exclusive development platform of XCode on their custom Mac hardware. And if Apple is anything, they are a hardware company.
I'm trying hard to understand what you're trying to say here. Apple makes piles of money selling iPhones. They make next to nothing selling Macs to iPhone developers. There simply aren't very many app developers compared to iPhone users. You'd have to be dim to make architectural decisions about the iPhone with that tiny amount of profit as a motivator instead of iPhone profit. I agree Apple wants to control the dev tools, but I think that's because they want to be able to sell more iPhones. They sell more iPhones by making the iPhone platform better for end users and part of that is adding new features other phones don't have and getting developers to use them. Third party dev tools are a tollbooth run by another company in this process.
Basically what they are saying (after they changed their licensing agreement for iPhone/iPad developers) is that if you want to write software for us you will type in code in XCode and compile it using that compiler and submit it to us for approval.
Yeah, pretty much... unless you want to write HTML5 apps, of course.
If they allowed native compiled code from other software developers, then anybody with Adobe's latest CS5 Flash (even on Windows!) could create native iPhone binaries using the well-known Flash dev environment.
Yup, that was Adobe's plan. Apple doesn't want that to happen. Think of it from Apple's perspective. You dump a few million into doing something cool for the iPhone, say just in time compiler improvements and a battery saving architecture. Suddenly apps use 20% less battery and the iPhone effectively has a 20% longer battery life than competitors with the same hardware. Score! But wait, while this is built into the iPhone and Apple's developer tools, requiring just a recompile for app developers to make it happen for their app, what about third party tools? Suddenly you've got thousands of apps made with Adobe's tools and those don't get the improvements until Adobe gets around to implementing them in their Flash suite, if they ever do. Apple already has this problem on OS X, with many major cross platform apps completely failing to support the cool features offered by the OS. So now, despite spending millions on R&D to differentiate their platform from other phones and make something better, Apple is waiting on Adobe to get around to doing work before their investment pays off. And meanwhile other companies are copying Apple's improvements. Will Adobe even get around to implementing it until it is on pretty much every platform and is no longer a differentiator to drive sales? Will they ever get around to it? They sure don't have a great track record so far, with Flash apps performing abysmally on OS X and Linux. So what is Apple to do? Clearly, they ban third party dev tools that can be blockers.
And porting Flash games over would take work, but not nearly as much as buying a Mac and re-writing everything in Objective-C.
This is true and is a detriment to Apple and their platform, but they seem to think it is worth it to deal with the problem above. The market will decide in a few years if they were right.
And all those annoying Flash banner ads! I'm glad they're gone... I mean being replaced by Apple iAd so they can control the entire advertising "experience" for your online devices.
Umm, I don't think Flash ads and Apple's iAd program are really comparable. It's more like an adwords competitor aimed at the mobile market.
In defense of Microsoft (wow) at least Silverlight works well on something other than Windows. Adobe can not say the same thing.
He said that in the next sentence :)
Adobes license agreement requires fees for distributing a flash player on devices or to install a flash player without an unmodified Adobe installer. They promised to drop the fees in 2008 but have not found the time to modify the license agreement. They are too busy making statements about how great they art...
You're leaving out one important (to me) detail about that setup. SD fullscreen flash runs like CRAP on my lowpower dual core AMD HTPC under Linux. Boxee is totally hamstrung by this, but MythTV can decode full HD on the fly in the gpu, h.264. Flash is completely hamstringing my setup from doing what I would like it to for No Good Reason. I have a hardware h.264 decoder in my gpu. I can use it to playback local file beautifully and no, the "latest flash" doesn't play them back using my hardware and the OS that does what I want with the rest of the hardware.
My Babylon
It's definitely true that a single company controlling a complex API / standard should always be able to provide a more consistent implementation than a dozen companies trying to implement a complex API / standard independently. The question is whether we want any single company effectively in control of the Web; I think the answer's obvious.
And if your answer is that Adobe should open-source Flash so that Apple, Microsoft, et al can create their own implementations -- and by necessity, their own non-standard optimizations and improvements -- we'll be right back where we are now, with a lot of small inconsistencies that prevent content from playing correctly on all platforms
Before Adobe bought Macromedia and decided to turn Flash into a video-streaming plugin, it actually did serve as a good solution to the balkanization of nonstandard HTML/javascript/CSS implementations for developers who wanted or needed a consistent user interface across platforms. Granted, it required that the user install the Flash plugin, but once they did, you could be reasonably certain that all of your buttons were placed, looked, and functioned correctly, that all of your UI feedback animations played correctly, that the correct fonts were displayed and scaled correctly, etc. Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm sorry, were you under the impression that PHBs actually care about that sorta thing? Or more importantly, that boffins could second guess them?
You are in IT, you do what management tells you.
Uh. I'll agree with you when my 64-bit flash client comes out for ubuntu. My recently updated 10.04 system no longer has support.
Better yet, how about some ARM processor support.
Get over it, h.264 works in Linux and it's working a lot easier than flash does. If you're already willing to accept flash, you're already throwing out the proprietary vs. open source argument.
In the meantime, Adobe would like to charge everyone to develop on their platform. They're content to making it so all web graphic design courses are centered around their tools and they're content to only support a small segment of the market despite trying to make these stupid claims of "uniform code for all platform" BS.
This isn't an Apple issue. This is an Adobe is evil issue. I could care less about what Apple thinks, it's just fortunate they agree the web shouldn't be tied to a content creation baron like Adobe.
Also, the h.264 and flash issue are TWO SEPARATE ISSUES. h.264 is a codec for video support, flash pushes their own craptacular codec through their flash video players, if they wanted they could write the players to support h.264 as well. Flash is a web technology that requires a plugin to decode various interactive multimedia content (not necessarily video). You may want to re-research your issues with h.264 and redirect them toward the evil MPEG-LA.
This is not because HTML is not a standard i'ts that some browser makers don't care to support it because (their marketing prople think) they can get more economical benefit from nor doing it, just like this guys pontificate about the stuff they create as being the most wonderfulest when it's so blatantly obvious they're primarily motivated by the profitability not the quality or the accessibility, for them standards are good as long as they're the ones ho make it. They could as well be working at apple and give the exact same answers, just replace one trademark for another.
Well, you might call FLV a "proprietary variant" of h.263 and VP6, I guess, but h.264 in Flash does not use FLV, it uses plain old .mp4.
In retrospect, my comma use there was a touch ambiguous. My understanding is that Adobe's implementation of h.263 in ".flv" is a bit weird and proprietary(though fully understood at this point). Their applications of VP6 and h.264 are orthodox, to the best of my knowledge.
The scope of "proprietary variant" was supposed to extend only to the first comma, not to the entire list.
All right, that makes sense.
They can't be sued because they are paying their license fees, just like everyone else using h.264. That has nothing to do with being a member.
For the love of God, why do people insist on build entire websites in Flash? Sure, it's pretty and shiny, but it also breaks navigation, as anybody who's ever made the mistake of hitting the back button from 4 levels deep into a Flash-only site knows all too well. And good luck bookmarking an internal page for future reference, or God forbid, trying to explain to somebody else how to get to said internal page, especially if the idiot designer decided to make his links shaped like bunnies and rainbows because standard buttons with text labels are just too utilitarian.
This is why people learned to hate Flash-heavy sites. Flash is fine if used appropriately, but site navigation belongs in standard HTML that provides a predictable user experience.
You are in IT, you do what management tells you.
You miss the point. The shortest route to a cross browser solution is the way I propose.
If you are saying that management dictates an IE ONLY solution then I will have to ask for a citation as that does not seem plausible to me.
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I'm not saying proprietary is a better way to go but current standards don't cut it. Design by committee doesn't work.
Isn't that kind of like saying bars not owned by the mob suck because they always have shattered windows, light on fire regularly, and the bartenders all have broken fingers? Design by committee can work well, unless all progress is halted for a decade by a single monopolist who illegally leverages their position to prevent cross-platform Web apps from being viable. Web standards and progress stalled because MS outright refused to implement any of them in IE and IE has an artificially inflated market share from being bundled with a desktop OS that has monopoly influence on the market. Several different Web standards were put forward and a reference implementation created over the years but they all died because developers couldn't use them because 60%+ of users were on IE and MS refused to play ball.
You can deep-bookmark flash pages no problem. Just because people misuse it doesn't mean it in itself is bad. Pressing backspace, too, can be perfectly fine in a flash-based website, as Flash will capture that itself, and not the browser window (just as you can press backspace when typing a comment on Slashdot without going back in your history).
What Adobe are basically saying, is that a single proprietary monoculture (flash) is better than multiple slightly incompatible implementations (browsers)...
I have lots of devices here which can access HTML, but considerably less which support flash... There are open source implementations of HTML but pretty much only one closed source implementation of flash, so i can use html on niche systems like haiku, netbsd, amigaos etc while i can't use flash because adobe doesn't bother to support such niche platforms. A few years ago i used an sgi and an alphastation as my primary workstations, neither of which had flash support.
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The video tag doesn't care about the codec - just putting an h.264 video in a video tag doesn't magically mean it will play. However, if you have a mildly-recent flash plugin, it will play. Also, the Flash player does a lot more cool stuff than simply pseudo-streaming a video across HTTP - it supports RTMP, allowing for things like dynamic stream switching, instant seeking, and so on.
Hopefully Google will clear up the clusterfuck of a mess that the VP8 spec was in after it left On2 - On2 are terrible developers.
So you're one of those fuckers that makes IE only apps... You're not a programmer, you're not a web designer. Just go do something else with your life as you're a failure at doing web.
I bow to your orating skills, sir. Sometimes it is far more valuable to be able to express ones opinions in a clear manner, than actually being right about everything. And I don't mean that you are wrong, but posts like this one make Slashdot a good place to be.
iPhone and all android phones for a start...
Binary vs plain-text has nothing to do with this. What is important is that there is a plain-text program (i.e. source code) that can make sense of the "binary".
If we would follow your model, we would also need ten times storage space for everything. That is not always feasable. Computers think in binary, no need to force them to read human text because you do. If you disagree, read the first paragraph again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)
If it comes down to Adobe Flash or HTML V5 H.264 I'll take Flash any day and twice on Sundays! At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros. And SD Flash plays beautifully on this 1.8Ghz Sempron I use for a low power netbox, and with the latest Flash I can add a $50 AGP card and go full HD. From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.
People have VERY short memories. When I read TFA about how Adobe's sob story is that they offer a cross platform standard language that works in all browsers, I laughed so hard I cried.
Adobe took their SWEET time porting Flash to Linux. Getting it to work in different browsers was nearly impossible and the 64-bit version was a day later and a dollar short. The GNU alternative to Flash sucked, resulting in the same issue (things work on some browsers, but not others). Just a few short years ago, I hated Adobe with a passion for their piss poor Linux support.
I did not forget. I hope they die a slow death as more and more companies move toward a real standard (HTML5). In the end, I'll be there to dance on their grave.
The point is that since the ECMA specification is open and standardized, the work of producing interpreter code is very straightforward and in fact already available in a relatively-platform-independent programming language - C - as f.e. SpiderMonkey project by Mozilla. This all as opposed to having to wade through vague SWF "specification" by Adobe AND to account for the quirks of the Flash Player (which is the de-facto SWF player) while doing that.
Shorter put, as evidence and observation would have it, making GNASH has proven to be far more difficult than making Spidermonkey. That alone says it all, pretty much.
Every unmodified Adobe installer that I have used has essentially been invisible to the user. So where's the beef?
Except I think the site is near death.
Just because a series has gone on hiatus or even reached its finale doesn't mean that the format in which the series is encoded (SWF vector animation) is no longer useful. People new to the series can watch the complete series, and people can watch other series that use the same format.
6 months paternity leave is excessive.
How long does a TV show take between one season and the next? How long did Doctor Who go on hiatus?
In this context, I don't think "Backspace" == "Back Button". I'm pretty sure the latter he's referring to is the one that most people actually use in the upper part of the browser.
I know I try to disable Backspace->Back whenever I can. Nothing like instinctively hitting the "Tab" button to start a new paragraph and leaving the text box, and then mashing backspace. Poof. Browsed back and whatever in the box is probably gone.
When flash can trap the browsers' back/next buttons, then what you say applies. That would also be a good day to let everyone that you do free tech support know that they need to uninstall flash FOREVER since there's no way that won't be abused.
Where is Flash for BSD? For AMD64?
Just about everything in Flash except for the legacy H.263 video codec is documented, and Adobe dropped the restriction against writing your own SWF player two years ago as part of the Open Screen Project. Have you donated to the Gnash project yet?
In particular, last I checked, the "open" parts forbid you from writing a client.
You last checked more than two years ago. Please see a press release in which Adobe drops the restriction on players.
Anything which runs too slow on a computer this year will be butter by next year.
Do you sincerely believe that Crysis will run well on mobile phones or pocket-size Internet tablets (e.g. Archos) next year?
If Flash and Java ran in the browser on an iPhone, then you could actually develop high-powered webapps, and run a web-based app store.
What does JavaScript lack compared to Flash's ActionScript in this respect?
I won't get along with flash until it stops making my CPU and Graphics card double in temperature. I've been using the HTML5 beta of since shortly after it launched and without flash, my computer doesn't get nearly as hot...
This isn't about money: it's about controlling the future of the web. Both Apple and Microsoft see Adobe's Flash and Air as a problem in that it breaks vendor lock in on their platforms. In Adobe's case it creates a new vendor dependency, but one that is very economical compared to maintaining separate code bases for Mac, Windows and Linux. Apple and MS would rather you commit.
-- $G
You realise that actionscript in flash is ECMAscript right?
Just recently, my mom got a virus from Firefox. I thought, "That's odd, Firefox is pretty good about that". It turns out she was using Firefox 2.0. I was about to tell her to download the latest Firefox, but then I realized... a year from now, it's not going to get updated AGAIN. So... I told her to download Chrome.
I think the problem with the advancement of standards isn't how long it takes to develop standards, or developers adopting standards. The problem is that 30% of the users are using a browser that wont update it's self, and if it isn't for some sort of intervention, they wont. Ever. Thankfully, thanks to OS upgrades, people buying new computers, and tech savvy relatives around the world, a new generation of browser finally becomes the new standard after 5 years. This is a ridiculous amount of time to wait before you can even start suggesting to your clients to use new technology. How does all this waiting to use new technology put any pressure on the standardization process to add new features?
The first thing that I think should be standard in all browsers... is background updating forever. Even after a whole new browser version is released. If your afraid to scare away users then keep the interface the same, but update those damn javascript and rendering engines. If the user really wants a "new" experience, they'll download the "new" browser with the new interface. There are too many advantages to background updating browsers to pass it up.
With technology as cool as HTML5 coming out, it is a shame to hear around my office, "Eh, HTML5... we MIGHT see it used in 5 years". Non-updated browsers hurts the internet industry. And it shouldn't take the next "big thing" on the internet to start pushing forward a few new technologies. In a world where all browsers update in the background, everyone should be working hard to update their site just to remain competitive. Because in 2 weeks after the release of the new standard, 80% of the internet will using it.
Adobe says about Apple and Microsoft that, "...they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."
The problem with Adobe here is that they're invading the standardized Web and calling themselves the "Web". Basically, technology lag caused by slow adoption rates of standards is causing the "plugin" market to grow too large, and Flash is a result of that. The idea to counteract this is to develop a standards based ecosystem that fills the market demand for new technologies, so that the market doesn't depend on plug-ins for growth. The only way I see for us to decrease the technology lag is to increase adoption rates of standards, and apply pressure to the standardization process to explore new technologies. I think background updates would be one good way to get things moving in this direction.
I can already have HTML5 video support in linux distros, for free, without having to wait for adobe thanks to ogg theora and webm...
I can even have this support in linux/arm, 64bit windows, linux/mips, netbsd, freebsd, amigaos, solaris, irix, beos or a new platform of my own creation should i need to... With flash i am forced to use the very limited set of platforms which adobe supports.
Incidentally, HTML5 video is new which is why you have a poor experience with it, nothing has really been optimized yet... I doubt it will be long before it outperforms flash, it already does on OSX with safari by quite a considerable margin.
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This is interesting:
bjacques's blog at gnashdev.org I don't know if you can explicitly forfeit a right by accepting a private agreement (the EULA) and then claim that it was never valid. AFAIK, most rights can be waived. Any European lawyers in the house?
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
What about suing them for patents not covered by MPEG-LA ? Don't google own a number of video encoding related patents having acquired On2? There may well be other patents out there too...
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No tech has complete coverage and is unlikely to any time soon, you would be forced to support multiple options in any case. I would probably host the videos on youtube and link to them - let youtube work out what codecs to use etc.
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They may be self-serving but they have a point.
They have standards that work across diverse platforms. The companies that own the
underlying platforms HATE this. They the underlying platform owners want you to be
locked into their particular flavor of vendorlock rather than being able to freely
move from platform to platform.
Adobe may suck but they don't keep me trapped on Windows.
Apple's whining in this regard are equally self serving. HTML5 is a distraction. It
isn't ready yet. This is rather convenient since it gives Apple the appearance of the
high ground when all they are really doing is driving people to their equivalent of
Windows Desktop apps.
It would be nice if Flash were more like XBMC or VLC or Firefox. However,
Adobe's stuff is still an improvement over how things would be if Apple or
Microsoft had their way.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Free means 0$/mo, and that's most probably not what you are paying.
On AT&T, I pay $60/mo if I bring my own smartphone. I also pay $60/mo if I get the subsidized smartphone. The difference between the two is $0/mo unless I switch to T-Mobile once my contract is up.
is moving the dependency to something you can control.
Who do you think you are kidding?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web, as long as it has an Adobe logo on it."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So you're one of those fuckers that makes IE only apps... You're not a programmer, you're not a web designer. Just go do something else with your life as you're a failure at doing web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight#Operating_systems_and_web_browsers
Anyone with a Mac knows that Flash on the Mac has always, and seemingly will always, suck balls. Currently it works a lot better on my Mac mini then it did on my pre-intel systems, but it's relative. On my MacBook it sends the fans wild, and on that Mac mini the arrow keys don't work in many Flash-based games. For example my kids can't play many of the mini-games on Club Penguin because the damn arrow keys don't work. Update after update doesn't fix this. I actually now have them run Firefox in Windows in VMWare Fusion, where the arrow keys work, but that's just ridiculous. Given all that, why are people surprised that Apple is hesitant to even allow Flash on the iPhone? Adobe doesn't care, and putting trust in them has not worked out even remotely in the past for Apple.
--- What?
but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check.
h.264 is out then. Is DivX patented? If so, then what's left? Uncompressed RGB? Even that would probably play in less devices than divx...
Standards are (or should be) created by a consortium... The last time I checked W3C there wasn't much mention of the Flash standard... Though far from a standard yet, it appears that both W3C and WHATWG are indicating that VP8 / WebM have some potential to become part of the HTML5 standard (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20005466-264.html).
There's about a half dozen internally used applications where I work that were designed for IE and ONLY work in IE. IE Tab has saved me so much.
A lot of businesses are like that.
"That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web." Interesting that they would mention Flash's Achilles heel in that its history has been littered with weak or broken accessibility. On the Mac platform, which includes a full screen reader and keyboard navigation system built into the OS, Flash is entirely inaccessible. On Windows, if you embed flash so that it works with DHTML layers (set wmode) it also becomes inaccessible. Even if it is embedded in a page running on a Windows browser, most developers don't know about or discover how to set up attributes to, say, label a button or control as to what it does. Those options are buried in the IDE UI and turned off by default (or at least they used to be). Even if a developer cares, at some point that custom slider constructed from boxes with mouse tracking and such needs semantic markup to identify what it is - the ActionScript equivalent of the w3c's ARIA. Adobe says they are working on it but when? Sure HTML5/CSS3 is pretty green, but there are real implementations out there now in mainstream browsers. By the time Flash catches up, will it matter?
The navigation problem can also bite you on AJAX-heavy websites. And in both cases, there are ways to work around it, it just requires a little bit of effort by the developer.
Yes, and Microsoft LOST a case of infringement from a patent outside of MPEG-LA's H.264 pool. The pool provides NO protection from patents outside of it.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Flash videos today are just wrappers for H.264 video. Adobe is paying the license fee and distributing the player for free.
So the question is not Flash _or_ H.264, but whether you want Flash _and_ H.264.
If you think that Flash benefits Linux, you're fooling yourself. Do you remember when there was no Adobe Flash plugin for Linux at all? There still isn't one for FreeBSD. Flash violates the very spirit of Linux - requiring a closed source implementation of an effectively closed standard (the crappy released "standard" for Flash that is insufficient to build a real implementation doesn't count). H.264 has open implementations of an open (but patent encumbered) standard. And it's still used in Flash videos.
Wish I could tell these 2 what I think of their company's purchase of Omniture (2o7.net) but I want to keep it office safe.
Any external projects like that, because I was assuming external public facing projects when I wrote what I did.
Internal projects are much more controlled environments than the wild wild web.
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Why does steve go around promoting like it will replace flash then? He clearly has a vested interest in seeing it as a web standard.
If flash had open sourced flash from the beginning, it would likely have been integrated into webkit/mozilla at least by now, and might even form part of html5.
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Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations
Bingo. Right now, there are some things that can only be done in Flash, and many others that Flash just does better. And I don't see this changing in the near future. Which is a shame - I wish there was a free and open alternative to Flash.
MobileSafari (iPhone)
Mobile Chrome (Android)
The Nokia Maemo browser
Windows Mobile IE
Opera Mobile
Any open source javascript interpreter when compiled for an ARM processor
And a lot more...
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I guess it was the same person who modded you as a Troll. :/
:)
But fear not, my Karma is too high.
P.S: Fuck you Adobe!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Nothing is stopping you from porting an existing javascript engine to a new device, or writing one from scratch for that device..
Adobe's licensing of the flash spec prohibits doing this..
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It seems to me that there are at least 3 competing standards for web video (ogg/h264 and now webm/on2), and currently all the browsers support at least one, some two but none (as far as I know) all three. That's the biggest hindrance to html-5 video support over flash - flash in fact works on every browser on Mac/Windows just fine and its performance is getting better thanks to better support for hardware assisted playback.
It was real disappointing that the first html-5 video demo I saw on an iPad didn't even work - because it only supports h.264.
In a way I think that is what chuck/john are talking about.
So to enforce lock-in, Apple and Microsoft are promoting... the same format, which is easily licensable by anyone with even a little bit of money, and which is also used by Flash, their supposed enemy.
That makes perfect sense.
Steve is not "going around promoting" anything "like it will replace Flash". He is using the best available video format on his platforms. Just like Flash is. Apple, Adobe and Microsoft are all using h.264, you know?
Before you get on that train, take a look at web technologies. They are a black art filled with platform inconsistency and trick after trick to get things working. It's ridiculous. The only good thing about them is that they are generally open and that's about it. I'd take a controlled (not necessarily closed), consistent, and free platform any day over something like HTML/CSS.
I love his ridiculous idea of "cross-platform". So, let's see: It runs on old 32-bit Windows browsers, Intel and PowerPC Macs and 32-bit Linux. And there's a pre-release for 64-bit Linux, and maybe an Android version coming. That's it. Whooptdee doo. How far we have sunk when "cross-platform" means "works on more than one platform"!
Whilst it's primarily aimed at producing application-style code it's more than capable of graphical/game content too, you just need to bring the graphics in from another application.
Say I wanted to make something like Homestar Runner or Badger Badger Badger. In which application should I make the animated vector graphics before bringing them into Flex SDK?
But, HTML 4 + javascript (with a good library) is functional across even more platforms.
I can use it on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, MacOSX, and even BeOS without difficulty. I suspect I could add Amiga variants to this as well.
I can't say that about flash.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
jQuery, YUI, etc.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
What can only be done in flash?
I agree there are things that can be done easier/better in flash, but I'm not sure about the 'only' thing.
Well, I saw a flashed based web game that could save/load files to your hard drive (opened a save/load dialog). That kindof scared the shit out of me, but aside from that, I'm not sure what can be done in flash but not javascript.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I have yet to see *one* single site that requires Firefox
HTML5 elements such as <video> and <canvas> do not work in Internet Explorer. They work in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, or the Google Chrome Frame plug-in for IE. Among these, Firefox has the most users. Look at how many of these demos of HTML5 elements and APIs don't work in IE 8.
I sure do!
And when I do, all I need to do is this:
$(".things_i_want_to_round").corners("5px");
And it works. In IE 6+, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc.
Oh, and it also works on the iPhone and iPad too...
The real litigious bastards...
Oh, and you could always just ignore software patents
That would require moving myself and all my users out of USA, Germany, and South Korea. Is your country ready to take in potentially millions of refugees from information processing patent regimes?
or use a format other than H.264.
Which format? MPEG-LA claims that WebM infringes.
Chrome seems to support all 3...
Theora is likely to die out now that webm is replacing it, leaving only 2 competitors... One free, and one patent encumbered...
Flash doesn't work in any 64bit windows browsers, you have to run a 32bit browser to get flash on windows..
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And where do you work?
So true. The problem is that the "Hyper_TEXT_ MARKUP Language" was designed for linked documents, word-style, and has been shoe-horned into something it was not designed for. Any HTML-site, nomatter how pretty CSS can make it look, still has an underlying model of a text-document, and is working hard at things like word-wrapping and layout-calculations, which is completely against what many web-designers ask for. (Personally I think many designers ask for the wrong things anyways, but that's a different topic.)
Flash is more comparable to SVG than HTML, unfortunately SVG is a quite bad solution to a problem that should have been solved years ago. (Seriously XML container for vector-graphics, where texture-embedding is essential, and vertex-lists can grow huge?)
Flash still sucks from a usability, performance and openness/freedom standpoint though.
It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox.
Wait what? Forced to use Firefox? uhhhhh ... right
With the exception of the old-style vector-animated .swf stuff
And it is this "old-style vector-animated .swf stuff" that will keep Flash Player installed on people's PCs. Ever heard of All Your Base, or Hatt-baby, or Hyakugojyuuichi, or Badgers, or Weebl and Bob, or Homestar Runner? All vector-animated. Newgrounds? Entirely vector-animated until Numa Numa Dance proved the concept of FLV, and the vast majority is still vector-animated thanks to YouTube siphoning off the authors who would have used H.26x or VPx. For example, Hatt-baby is 1 MB, and it'd probably be ten times bigger if rendered and encoded in H.264.
Throw in the opportunity to throw a monkey-wrench into practically all open-source competitor's machinery, and I'm pretty sure both Apple and Microsoft will bite. (Damn Mozilla stealing IE-shares, forcing active development again and other such costly crap.)
iShiver
Accessing the camera or mic (for chat applications). Video filters. Audio filters. Rotation of elements.
The game that you mentioned was probably using Flash shared objects - it works on the same principle as browser cookies (access is strictly limited by originating site), but it's a lot more versatile (you can pass it any type of object, and it automatically gets serialized). So I guess this one counts as "easier/better".
Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
While it may not have been intentional, this is a great title. True for all common definitions of "founder":
Yeah, ultimately "Flash video" means H264 being played in a media player that happens to be written using Flash. So instead of using Quicktime or Windows Media Player or VLC, your using a player that was written in a variant of Javascript using Adobe Flash as the development kit.
The big downside is that, the way Flash media players work, you're *forced* to use a particular player. Imagine you went to a website that included a normal MPEG file, but it was set up so it could not be played in any player other that Windows Media Player. That'd be pretty stupid.
What platform independence is all about, is that the platform is completely irrelevant. You know, like the web is supposed to be. Javascript doesn't care if it's running on an Intel chip or an ARM chip, it doesn't care if you're running it in Windows or Linux, it doesn't care which browser you are using. THAT is platform independence. Loading the approriate binary for your platform is not, especially if you can't create these binaries yourself in the case Adobe doesn't support your platform.
No language/dev tool is inherently platform independent. Though some are more widely available than others, every single one requires that a vendor (company or developer or other) must decide to provide it on a given platform. Every VM and interpreted system needs to have someone write that VM/interpreter for a platform.
Platform independence isn't about the number of supported platforms - it's about the experience of use across platforms that *are* supported. If a flash game or video runs identically on Mac, Linux, and Windows -- it's still platform independent. Even if it doesn't run on AIX and my Blackberry.
Of course, I otherwise agree - Flash is terrible for the web. Or at least my eyes. And "platform independence" is obviously not synonymous with "open standard".
Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
Note that the different syntax is actually the same syntax with a different vendor-specific prefix. This is how it's supposed to be as the border-radius attribute hasn't yet been finalized and it's not guaranteed that the syntax won't change in the final version. IE8... Well, it's Internet Explorer.
Yes, Flash offers more features than HTML + JavaScript but even with draft versions of HTML5 and CSS3 we can replicate the important parts on most browsers. Yes, we can't do everything Flash does but we can do what most people need. Once finalized, HTML5 and CSS3 will be good enough and Flash will be marginalized. That's actually good as Adobe isn't very good at supporting many platforms. I mean, Flash/OS X is still incapable of playing back any video at any resolution without occasional hanging frames and the only ARM implementation of Flash I know of is specifically for Nokia devices.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In any? Here's one:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html
So we have one browser that supports all html-5 video formats, and one plugin that works on x64 browsers - we can go to town.
I see no mention of "player" which suggests I'm allowed to write a third-party player. The specs have been available for at least that long...
All it mentions is "removing restrictions", which is pretty vague.
From Open Screen Project FAQ > "What motivated Adobe to remove the licensing restrictions from the specifications?": "Until now, the specification had a license agreement associated with it, which said that developers could write software to output SWF but could not make software that would "play" SWF files. [...] Adobe is removing this restriction from the SWF specification [...] This will permit the development of applications that play SWF files."
This is rich.. "The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them."... What do you think they teach people in B-school? To make your products indistinguishable from those your competition? what a joke. Truly a capitalist geek whine-fest. The history of software is littered with ego-tripping coders who cry, "if everybody would just use MY standard, we'd all have a simpler more beautiful technology". It's why the web is a tower of babel of so-called "standards".
So, this guy in one paragraph basically said "we think the web should be standard, and integrated into browsers" and "flash should be used for the web". He basically just argued against flash while trying to support it. Amazing. But then again, these are the same people that created Postscript, and charged an arm and a leg for it... so standards are great, as long as they get royalties, yes?
Hopefully the Nero Lawsuit against MPEG-LA will either invalidate a bunch of patents or break up the patent pool enough to allow Theora and WebM to survive. Though, I wouldn't count either out until MPEG-LA actually states what patents they are infringing on. Until they actually state which Patents are being infringed this is still in FUD territory.
Sorry, Java and Javascript have exactly the same issue. They need the "appropriate binary" between the platform and the independent part. Just like BASIC in the 1960s, or any other 3GL (FORTRAN, Cobol, etc.).
Even the abstract web can't be independent. If your platform has a browser that works just fine, and people start using new features like style sheets and your browser doesn't handle it, then "the web" isn't platform-independent any more. The browser itself has replaced the BASIC interpreter as a translation layer, even before it loads the Java interpreter.
The abstract ideal needs real implementation to work in the real world.
No, they don't want the iPhone turning into this vast wasteland of crap turned out by graphic designers instead of programmers which is what was starting to happen to the web with regard to flash. And Flash IS CRAP, it's a resource hog that doesn't extend what you can already do if you bothered to use more efficient native calls.
BTW, Apple does not control how Apple iAds are displayed, it's just a framework to help new developers inject Ads to fund their work and in the same vein allows Apple to capitalize on in-app advertising, they just happened to demonstrate how Apples iAd framework will provide a much more interactive experience using an actual web standard (HTML5). You will not see an iAd unless the developer puts ads into their app.
"founders - collapses: breaks down, literally or metaphorically"
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
Once finalized, HTML5 and CSS3 will be good enough and Flash will have had another 10 years to add even more features.
FTFY
It's the sad truth that HTML will never keep up with other technologies such as Flash / Silverlight, because they take the committee approach to defining requirements (where the committee members can number into the 10,000s), and have to bend to a number of big players who all want to leverage their ideas at the expense of the others. The end result is a mish-mash of ill-defined half-finished ideas that are always 5 to 10 years BEHIND what proprietary players like Adobe can produce.
It's called progress, hell new ideas and technologies come along every 6 months nowadays, and we're expected to wait years to get the "equivalent" or "good enough" for the sake of openness, when you know damn well the DOM / Javascript models for HTML5 will be just as fucked up as all the previous versions have been.
Why do designers feel that their page has to look the same in all browsers? For example, why do I need rounded corners in all browsers? I tend to use the fallback approach. I design for modern browsers that follow standards (chrome, firefox, etc), then I fallback to things that look passable on IE6. So maybe I don't have rounded corners in IE, why is this such a big deal? A website is to convey information it is not a painters canvas. Hell the user could substitute their own css and hose my layout if they want to. This is why I design my sites to work fine without css, then I add css to make it look better.
No, they are suggesting a patent encumbered format that lock free (as in GPL and price) software out of the game in finality. Adobe has indicated they are more than happy to implement an open replacement for H.264 in Flash.
-- $G
Look Ma, 0.2 FPS !
Not sure what that is supposed to prove, it's a set of DIVs with PNG images that get switched in and out at specific intervals. Not a canvas tag to be found.
Ohhh look, there's an audio + source tag at the bottom ... so much better than that clunky old object + source tag we had to use in the old specs.
Show me, say, a rendition of Farmville in HTML5 that plays at the same speed as the original. That will prove that HTML5 is a worthy successor to Flash.
Now I will wait patiently for the first response of "only idiots play Facebook games", as I formulate my response "those 21 million daily idiots ARE your userbase, they ARE the internet".
So in other words "Pay your $599 license fee, you cock smoking tea baggers!"? Hmmm...now where have I heard that one before?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Linux is so marginal that it almost doesn't count, like it or not. I rather don't blame them for saying they are cross-platform, etc., especially given that most that would hear that sort of thing will think "Windows and Mac", not "Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, Minix, . . ."; Linux has been worth supporting only when some other MAJOR player begins to leverage it: Google, for instance (whicrh didn't exactly beg Adobe for anything, but said "we'll pay for you to play: we want to build it into our Chrome browser".
Besides that, you can't qualify "HTML5" with "real standard" yet: it's not yet, if it ever will be: those codifying it (you know, the companies, rather than the standards body) are going about talking about how it probably won't be ready for "ten or fifteen years": what a friggin' joke.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
p.s., before I get flamed by the zealots, I'm typing this from within Firefox on XFCE atop of Ubuntu, am considering Debian, but am intrigued by the speed and rolling-updates of Arch, and like Linux and things OSS and FOSS very much. I'm just being realistic about things here.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
If the BSDs have a linux-compatibility layer, why aren't they utilizing it? If it doesn't quite work with Flash, why aren't they improving it? And what do you mean "Spirit of Linux"? Linux is the bane of the spirit of the FSF, Linus being pragmatic, after all, the head of the Linux KERNEL project, turning-down Stallman's bid to have him assign the FSF his linux-kernel copyrights, and being one of the many to point-out that AS WRITTEN, the GPL (v. 2) doesn't disallow dynamic linking (it's one of those things which lawyers joke "definitely wasn't written by a lawyer"), such that he even has a modifying header-license text for certain parts of said kernel. The FSF is the puritanical group (and you know, I just want to point-out that despite the bad associations, being "puritanical" isn't always bad, which is just another way of saying "purist"), whereas Linus is not interested in that sort of thing: he's perfectly fine with letting propriety run, or if a company doesn't want to do that work, not run, atop the kernel. If you want the "spirit of the [FSF]", use GNUHerd...oh wait.
Taking cues from his pragmatic orientation or many comments to that effect, I bet Linus is quite happy that Adobe ported at all, which might be taken as a testament to having obtained some measure of success (or that the Linux using community is just so annoyingly whiny that Adobe finally got tired of the spam). Like it or not, many standards are closed, most effective and functional and widely-implemented standards are closed; most highly successful standards are closed; and this is likely to continue into the future in many arenas, if not (let's hope) online, where the virtual "reality" of things makes contrary circumstances potentially feasible. Just because something is closed, doesn't mean its crappy: and just because many users have done crappy implementations, doesn't make the tool crappy: it has its uses. GTK/+, of itself, compared to alternative sets of tools, really is crap: yet it's currently used very effectively for functional and worthwhile programming and programs. Flash of itself, has quite a lot of merit, and when used intelligently those things are leveraged, but no matter what you do, the majority out there isn't always going to be that considerate or intelligent, if at all, and usually the only solution to this is to make the tools almost impossible to use effectively if they aren't mastered (and then even the masters of a discipline just simply refuse to use them: look at the programming environments for Sony's PS3 for a good case study on this: you have to be expert and deft to program well for that thing, but "it's too hard" say so many, even great gaming companies, and so not many games were readily available for it, and studios in general just weren't that interested; Sony actually made statements to the effect that they wanted it to be a hard set of tools in order that quality would be better, which I admire, but instead people just avoided the platform).
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Ok, I only read a few of the hundreds of comments, but there is one good reason why I personally dislike Flash, (outside of it's proprietary nature) - and that is the Adobe memory management. Adobe are terrible with memory management. All of the software leaks like a sieve. No wonder they find it so hard to port.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Yes, this is why they provide free h.264 playing facilities in their OSes, which can be used by free software without paying anyone.
That makes perfect sense.
Yes, I am sure Linux's huge market share on the desktop is keeping them up at night.
If it comes down to Adobe Flash or HTML V5 H.264 I'll take Flash any day and twice on Sundays!
So instead of HTML5 and H.264 you'd rather take Flash and H.264 (which is what more and more "Flash videos" are). Gee, is there a reason for this, apart from H.264 being teh 3v1l?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Unless its ours..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Another reason Apple is so dead-set against using Adobe Flash on their iPhone/iPads is because they would lose their exclusive development platform of XCode on their custom Mac hardware. And if Apple is anything, they are a hardware company.
I'm trying hard to understand what you're trying to say here. Apple makes piles of money selling iPhones. They make next to nothing selling Macs to iPhone developers.
Apple wants to control the development platform because it locks developers into supporting only Apple's end user hardware, namely, the iPhone. Apple's tools do not effectively support cross platform development, so anyone who wants to make an app that runs on more than just the iPhone has to write substantial amounts of additional code to support the non-Apple devices. The result is many developers opting not to target devices other than the iPhone at all, which is good for Apple because users are now pressured to buy their hardware for the exclusive applications.
If Apple allows Adobe's development tools to be used, the distinction between Apple and non-Apple hardware is abstracted away, and there is no longer any reason for developers not to make their applications available on as many devices as possible. This invites competition that Apple naturally does not want.
Javascript doesn't care if it's running on an Intel chip or an ARM chip, it doesn't care if you're running it in Windows or Linux, it doesn't care which browser you are using.
It doesn't care if javascript has been ported to your browser..
While i agree in principle with what you are saying and things should be pushed down the stack as far as possible, everything relies on something being ported to something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apple wants to control the development platform because it locks developers into supporting only Apple's end user hardware...
That's just your speculation and not supported by the facts. Why are they dumping so much money into free HTML5 dev tools and support for HTML5 apps in Webkit if their goal is to prevent cross platform apps? Also, why would taking steps that make cross platform development in and of itself help Apple instead of hurt them. Generally, breaking interoperability only helps when you have dominant market share, otherwise it hurts the bottom line. So basically, your hypothesis has no support.
Nice list there. It's good to see that everything not supported such as chrome, opera and friends are listed as N/A on non windows platforms.
Better to pretend they don't exist then actually have support for them...
(IANAL)
The Flash Player EULA used to include a clause that attempted to prevent users of the software from also developing a competing product. That particular clause was excised from the EULA several versions ago.
Here's the most relevant part of the EULA for 10.1 and what it says on the subject (you'll have to jump down to the English section starting on page 66):
4.5 No Modification or Reverse Engineering. You shall not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative
works based upon the Software. You shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise
attempt to discover the source code of the Software. If you are located in the European Union, please
refer to the additional terms at the end of this agreement under the header “European Union
Provisions,” in Section 16.
So you can't directly adapt or create a derivative work of the player, but as long as you write your own thing, you should be fine.
coding is life
they are making flash for non-x86 due out first on android devices this year.
They've had it on PPC for awhile (but OS X only), and I wouldn't be surprised to see other builds on ARM. The point is that it's not something I can install on any old Linux distro -- in this case, maybe I can install it on a custom Android setup, maybe not, but Android doesn't run X, IIRC.
Of course, were it open source, it'd be ported to everyone and their dog's favorite platform ages ago. That's the point here.
they also desperately wanted to get it on the iphone
And if so, it'd be like the PPC version -- iPhone OS only. Certainly wouldn't imply that any old Linux user would be able to download an ARM version of Flash the way I can download an x86 version.
they also have power-pc flash been around for a good wile but they have abandon it due to the death of power-pc.
Erm, why do they have to abandon it? And what's this "death"? Sure, Apple isn't using PPC anymore, but it's still in all modern game consoles, for instance. So we again have no Linux player on any of these devices.
and arm being widly used is a recent thing
The Linux kernel was ported to over a dozen architectures, last I checked. Why does a platform have to be "widely used" for you to compile for it? And why does Flash have to be proprietary, so we can't do this ourselves?
As "recently" as five years ago, I was running Linux on an old-at-the-time handheld PC with an ARM processor. Couldn't run Flash on that, either.
before how many people relly had a arm based pc it wasn't very many.
Tons, actually, they just weren't PCs.
I'm also not sure what any of this has to do with anything I said.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web.
As long as the server has the right crossdomain.xml file...
Flash only works where Adobe choose to compile it.
And Gnash only works where you choose to compile it. Or were you referring to Flash IDE rather than Flash Player?
The reason you cant understand this is because you dont account for the fact that Apple wants to lock users and developers into their prductlines wholely and solely. If you want to develop for the Iphone, you have to use a Imac, end of story and they will be checking. If you want to use the internet on your Iphone you have to use Safari and it's implementation of web standards/frameworks, end of story and they will be checking.
More important then selling Iphones is making sure existing customers cant leave, making sure that developers cant leave or make cross platform applications deminishing the unique appeal of the Apple product line.
Many fanboys have pointed out that Apple cant compete with other vendors, so they need to lock in their entire supply chain and userbase.
There, fixed that for you. Such a glaring omission.
HTML5 is not yet a standard and Apple is tying to take control of it and force all users on all platforms into Apple's implementation of a standard. That means using Apple's chosen codec and how Apple chooses to interpret tags such as video and canvas.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Oh, that would be you then.
Personally I were thinking more about Mozilla and the open source phenomenon in general.
Ironic then that my main motivation for continuing to use Firefox is that it has Flashblock.
That's funny, I went to YouTube a few weeks ago and it told me my browser was out of date and would have to be updated. I don't really see the difference.
But, HTML 4 + javascript (with a good library) is functional across even more platforms.
HTML 4 + javascript is a broken mess -- without a DHTML framework to abstract things, you can't even write a site that works across multiple versions of the same browser, let alone multiple browsers and multiple OSes. And to avoid breaking, those frameworks basically need to be updated any time a major new browser version ships.
Those DHTML frameworks are awfully complicated to write, test, and maintain. I can attest to that, having been the architect of one myself. So for all practical purposes, to do anything useful with HTML+JS, you're wholly dependent on an abstraction layer that is maintained by some third party group. And that doesn't really sound much different from building on Flash.
I sure do!
And when I do, all I need to do is this:
$(".things_i_want_to_round").corners("5px");
And it works. In IE 6+, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc.
That's great! So you wrote that cross-browser abstraction layer yourself, right? Hmm, ok, but it's already out there. So when IE9 ships and it's not compatible, you'll just jump in and submit a quick patch, right? Hmm, turns out the code is a little complicated. Ok, no sweat, just wait till those guys who maintain it release an update, right?
For all intents and purposes, this situation is the same as using Flash. You can't code to the browser "bare metal" because it is insanely fragmented and buggy. You have no choice but to use an abstraction layer that someone else wrote -- be it JQuery or Flash.
Now make your CS-software cross-platform, that would probably help a bit in that regard.
Uhh... the CS software has been cross-platform (Mac and Windows) for 15 years (e.g. Photoshop 2.5).
The license agreement has made it very clear, for at least two years now, that anyone is free to create an alternative player.
This summarizes it: "There are no restrictions on the development of SWF authoring tools, and anyone can build their own SWF or FLV/F4V player."
Both Microsoft and Apple offer h.264 playing, for free, that Mozilla can use without any legal problems.
It is Mozilla's own choice to not take advantage of that offer, and to throw a monkey-wrench into their own machinery.
In the meantime, Adobe would like to charge everyone to develop on their platform. They're content to making it so all web graphic design courses are centered around their tools and they're content to only support a small segment of the market despite trying to make these stupid claims of "uniform code for all platform" BS.
There are actually numerous free and/or non-Adobe tools for producing Flash (SWF) content: Flex, FDT, IntelliJ, haXe, SWiSH, various "slideshow makers," etc.
I'm not sure I understand "only support a small segment of the market." If your complaint is about Linux support, I feel your pain, but I'm sorry to say your argument is completely bass-ackwards -- Linux is the "small segment" while the vast majority of the market is Windows and Mac boxes. And Flash is installed on 99% of them.
h.264 is a codec for video support, flash pushes their own craptacular codec through their flash video players, if they wanted they could write the players to support h.264 as well.
Flash does support H.264 -- since 2007, in fact.
That's just your speculation and not supported by the facts. Why are they dumping so much money into free HTML5 dev tools and support for HTML5 apps in Webkit if their goal is to prevent cross platform apps?
Apple's move to support HTML5 is commendable, but don't doubt for an instant that they also have an interest in breaking the back of Flash. Adobe has been less than stellar in supporting the Mac lately and Apple wants to be sure they aren't beholden to them in the future.
Also, why would taking steps that make cross platform development in and of itself help Apple instead of hurt them. Generally, breaking interoperability only helps when you have dominant market share, otherwise it hurts the bottom line. So basically, your hypothesis has no support.
Apple's mindshare with casual users is tremendous. The big fight right now is not among Apple, Android, RIM, Nokia et al, but rather between Apple and Android. The latter two have traditionally targeted the business and prosumer markets and have mature offerings there. Android and the iPhone OS are both new, emerging platforms targeting home users, and in that market Apple's position is enviable. They may recently have slipped behind Android on total sales, but they still have the next gen iPhone coming down the pipe and all reports indicate that it will close the hardware gap that emerged with the release of the Nexus One.
Your argument that Apple's exclusion of Flash is based exclusively on concern about application quality is a little naive, I think. If applications developed with Adobe's tools are lower in quality than the native offerings, consumers will recognize that and opt not to use them. Saying that they will instead turn around and blame Apple for their shortcomings is a little twisted. Additional choices are a win for consumers here, the only one who stands to lose is Apple. Denying that their actions here are not motivated at least in part by unadulterated self-interest is disingenuous.
The reason you cant understand this is because you dont account for the fact that Apple wants to lock users and developers into their prductlines[sic] wholely and solely.
You're right, I don't "account for that" or rather I don't just blindly accept it as true without any evidence. But then, you haven't presented any evidence as yet.
If you want to develop for the Iphone, you have to use a Imac, end of story and they will be checking.
Citation? I have a friend who develops on a MacBook (a Mac, not an iMac) and I know another guy who uses a Hackintosh. How are they checking and do you have any support for this assertion?
If you want to use the internet on your Iphone you have to use Safari and it's implementation of web standards/frameworks, end of story and they will be checking.
You know that the internet and the Web are different things, right? As for accessing the Web you can use the built in Webkit with any browser that wants to use it or you can use browsers like the one offered by Opera that perform server side rendering. Or you can jailbreak your device and use whatever you want. But I fail to see how this locks developers into developing only for iPhones. The Webkit engine is open source and in use by lots of major browsers including Chrome and being used to render all applications on WebOS. It is a very cross platform layer.
More important then selling Iphones is making sure existing customers cant leave...
So Apple doesn't want to make money? Selling iPhones gets Apple cash. What does locking in users get them? Small amounts of additional revenue from the services they run only slightly better than break even?
Many fanboys have pointed out that Apple cant[sic] compete with other vendors, so they need to lock in their entire supply chain and userbase.
Yeah, and many fanboys have pointed out that Microsoft is not a monopoly and that Barack Obama is muslim. What's your point? Many people make unsupportable assertions all the time. I don't believe everything asserted by random individuals.
Yeah, pretty much... unless you want to write HTML5 apps according to Apples implantation of course.
There, fixed that for you. Such a glaring omission.
What are you twelve or something?
HTML5 is not yet a standard and Apple is tying[sic] to take control of it and force all users on all platforms into Apple's implementation of a standard.
Apple was one of the founders of HTML5 but they're collaborating on making it. I've heard no complaints from Google and Opera and Mozilla about Apple's involvement or their trying to take over. The working group has had disagreements and made compromises with one another, but if you're going to assert Apple is trying to take over the standard, you need to support that with actual facts.
. That means using Apple's chosen codec and how Apple chooses to interpret tags such as video and canvas.
HTML5 does not specify a codec. That was a compromise made when Apple and Google wanted one codec and Mozilla wanted another. As for video and canvas tags, I follow the developments. I've seen complaints about Adobe and Microsoft (not group chairs) attempting to slow progress with those tags or make them less useful, specifically the Adobe procedural issues brought up by Hickson. Those issues were then resolved and everyone moved on. I've heard not a single complaint about Apple. So, where's your evidence that Apple is trying to take control of HTML5 and prevent it from being a useful cross platform application layer? I can provide citations about the huge amount of OSS code they've donated with regard to Webkit interpreting HTML5 and on free HTML5 application development tools if you want.
Apple's move to support HTML5 is commendable, but don't doubt for an instant that they also have an interest in breaking the back of Flash.
Of course they do. I already explained some good reasons why. Getting rid of Flash gets rid of a proprietary component and replaces it with an open standard one. It's good for Apple and good for end users. Where's the problem?
Apple's mindshare with casual users is tremendous.
That doesn't really matter in terms of application development. What matters is what application developers think, and while I'm sure some of them don't research markets before deciding what to target and how, I don't think that is the norm.
The big fight right now is not among Apple, Android, RIM, Nokia et al, but rather between Apple and Android. The latter two have traditionally targeted the business and prosumer markets and have mature offerings there.
Listen, I know geeks care a lot about cool and new technology and whatnot and focus less on older more established tech. That doesn't mean you can discount the largest players as not important to a market. Apple only has about 15% of the worldwide smartphone market. Making it harder for developers to target the iPhone and other phones at the same time is only going to hurt Apple unless there are other benefits in that same action.It would be like Microsoft making the Zune less compatible with iPod accessories, not going to help in and of itself.
Your argument that Apple's exclusion of Flash is based exclusively on concern about application quality is a little naive, I think.
But you haven't presented another motivation for Apple that makes any sense or has any supporting evidence.
If applications developed with Adobe's tools are lower in quality than the native offerings, consumers will recognize that and opt not to use them.
How will users do that? Are most users going to know which applications are eating up their battery life? Are users going to blame Adobe if their security is compromised and they get a virus? Even if they do, does that mean it won't lead to Apple losing a sale next time the user buys a phone? Are users going to recognize that it is Adobe's fault a large swath of applications don't have functions they've never heard of, or will they simply think iPhones and other phones have about the same level of functionality, not recognizing that functionality offered by Apple is being filtered out? Users can be counted on to act in their own best interests and while blame is great and all, it doesn't mean they will buy iPhones because it is Adobe's fault iPhones are no better than Android phones.
Additional choices are a win for consumers here, the only one who stands to lose is Apple. Denying that their actions here are not motivated at least in part by unadulterated self-interest is disingenuous.
No, what's twisted is saying Apple is breaking cross-platform compatibility to hurt other platforms when that doesn't even make logical sense. I've explained ways in which Apple's actions make sense and are benefitting Apple. You've just asserted that somehow breaking cross platform compatibility helps Apple and is in their best interests. Clearly Apple acts in its own best interests, but you have to present what those interests are and show how an action benefits them if you want me to take your hypothesis of Apple's motivation seriously. All you have so far is an assertion and a non sequitur.
The application developers would maybe like to use Flash (or maybe not) but are hindered by insane licensing fees.
There are no licensing fees for using Flash. There are completely free, some even open-source, tools available for producing Flash content.
Adobe really tried to get people to develop whole applications in Flash, but I could never see a compelling reason to do this. HTML works well enough for most things (even more with HTML5), anything more demanding is maybe not a good candidate for implementing as a web-based application.
I think one of the big reasons for Flash's popularity is that you can build complex things in it far more easily than with HTML. So, while you could theoretically hand-code some animation in HTML5+canvas, it's far faster to do it graphically in Flash -- which is why Flash still dominates web animation (and gaming). And while you can build interactive apps like GMail using JavaScript, it's prohibitively expensive for most medium or small companies to do so -- which is why static, full-page-refresh sites still dominate the web. (And it's also why GMail's level of interactivity still doesn't hold a candle to the richness of Flash sites built by larger companies).
p.s. -- there was at least one Flash email client, Goowy. Like many startups, it got acquired and killed. But there still are other Flash-based communication/social apps out there, such as TweetDeck.
Not true. Adobe says: "There are no restrictions on the development of SWF authoring tools, and anyone can build their own SWF or FLV/F4V player."
there is also open source flash out there look up the flex sdk.
Yeah, it's not a player. Doesn't count.
as well as a few open source players. but not as good as there closed version.
Unless something has changed recently, "not as good" translates to "nearly unusable".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Uh huh. Yes we all remember how great Flash ran on Linux from the get-go. For a while you had more luck running win32 apps on linux than a flash app. So I disagree with your statement that they have a point. It may be that it currently runs on all PC-based platforms, at this present time but that was not always the case, and is unlikely to be the case in the future. It certainly runs like ass on OSX, and leaks like hell.
When you talk about apple, you seem to be suggesting that what they are doing is bad. So Apple driving people to their platform is bad, but Adobe driving people to their platform is good? How odd.
Flash is a platform, just like win32, windows forms, silverlight, Carbon, Cocoa, X etc are platforms. Some are open, most are not. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, all want to drive you to their platform because that is how they make money. This is capitalism. But you don't have to buy any of the bullshit any more than you have to buy their products. I find it odd that you like that taste of Adobe's. Apparently even people who eat shit like to argue about whose tastes better...
You seem to be assuming that only Adobe makes a browser plugin that does graphics / video / audio etc.
I think the issue may be, however, that jQuery is open source, while Flash isn't. If Adobe open-sourced the flash player, all this trouble would go away.
See, I'm kinda confused on the economical part, as a developer.
Java developer: OS=linux (free). Editor = Eclipse (free) or IntelliJ ($499(
Silverlight developer: OS = Windows $199. Editor = Expression Blend $599
Flash Developer: OS = Windows $199. Editor = Flash CS5 $699
So, Flash costs the most money.
Except that they wont tell you how, (the documentation is not detailed enough), and if you reverse engineer theirs then they can sue you.
Do you actually believe words posted on a corporate website? Forget even basic fact checking, you're telling me you're default setting is "believe"?
1. I Believe
2. Take with a pinch of salt.
3. Will fact check.
4. Its probably corporate bullshit, but will fact-check.
5. It all evil corporate lies
You're at 1 on this scale are you?
Think of it from Apple's perspective. You dump a few million into doing something cool for the iPhone .... Score! But wait, while this is built into the iPhone and Apple's developer tools, requiring just a recompile for app developers to make it happen for their app, what about third party tools? Suddenly you've got thousands of apps made with Adobe's tools and those don't get the improvements until Adobe gets around to implementing them in their Flash suite, if they ever do.
The opposite way to look at it would be this: Every app has to be recompiled for it to work. So -- there are 100,000 apps in the app store, and every single one of those developers has to get off their butt, recompile, submit a new version, wait for it to get approved, and then convince all their customers to download the upgrade. It'd take forever for the benefits to truly add up for any given user. But, if many of those apps were Flash-based, then you might just need to update a single app (the Flash runtime) to take advantage of all those compiled-in savings.
Although ActionScript and JavaScript share the same roots, AS is based off of a newer version of ECMAScript, making it a far more complete language than JS. It has strong typing, true OOP with well-defined classes, package scoping, public/private scoping, rich RTTI, metadata (akin to Java 5 annotations), generic lists, built-in E4X, etc. etc... Yes, there is a contingent that thinks strong typing and the like is just a lot of overhead... but for any sort of serious app development you really can't live without it.
No, not at all -- I'm probably a 4 on that scale, but I did my fact-checking. Gnash (an alternative Flash player) has been around forever and I've never heard of it being legally threatened by Adobe. And to the extent that "words posted on a corporate website" constitute the license for a spec you've just downloaded... they're not just words, they're a contract the company is legally bound to honor.
Also, I think it's important to look at motivation. Adobe profits from tools (which create Flash content, JPEG images, etc.). Anything that broadens the reach of the content produced by those tools is a win. Contrast this to Apple, who makes money off of hardware and thus wins when content is only available on their platform... giving them a vested interest against cross-platform efforts like Flash and HTML 5.
The point I was trying to make is that, from a pragmatic standpoint, it doesn't matter to your average website author whether something is open-source or not. Whether it's well-maintained is far more important -- because you're really, really unlikely to do the maintaining yourself in practice.
To make an analogy: I think of this as sort of Obama-style pragmatism vs. a Nader-style insistence on ideological purity (or insert your own preferred politicians).
they provide free h.264 playing facilities in their OSes
Thanks for restating the problem.
-- $G
You're the one saying that they want to use h.264 to prevent free software from competing. And when they let free software use h.264 for free, that is somehow the problem?
Your argument is just a little hard to follow here.
Actually there are a couple client-facing projects that only work in IE unfortunately. I do not work in the web development departments though.
A financial software and services provider. Why does it matter? Apparently there was some ActiveX module that management wanted them to take advantage of which required an IE only solution. Since nearly all of our clients (which are financial companies) use IE they of course, do not mind.