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Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
Two words. "Browser Games" I play Deepolis, a very responsive and media-rich game. Can't imagine it implemented in anything other than Flash. It's the same reason many linux people have dual-boot. Games.
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it, and laptops at the $400 price point are now doing 1600x900 native.
Want to develop a cross-platform game? Forget HTML5 - flash is the way to go - it works NOW on PCs, laptops, even game consoles (go to http://alphagfx.com/ and try one of the 9x9, 12x12, or 17x17 games on a Wii - the 9x9 are native resolution, but the others downscale just fine).
The only other option even close is Java - and Java sucks for game development (and how many people want to run your java app anyway?) So you have a choice - develop once for everyone except Apple iStuff, and do it a second time for His Jobsiness, or spend the same amount of time developing twice as much for +90% of the market. The math is simple - Flash beats Apple.
To the best of my understanding, this is why flash takes so much CPU processing power to play a video.
Hopefully they will be addressing this now that they're going mobile, and working on a lot of optimizations..
Check out this NetSteam class, which is used to stream videos from the internet or your hard drive:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/NetStream.html?allClasses=1
In particular, the bufferLength property reads:
"If any [thing] causes bufferLength to increase more than 600 seconds or the value of bufferTime * 2, whichever is higher, Flash Player flushes the buffer and resets bufferLength to 0"
Translation?
If flash player loads a video to the point that fills it's buffer size, it immediately flushes it's buffer and reloads the video into the buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer and reload the video into it's buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer.. etc
You can see where I am going with this. It's absurd.. but this is what appears to be going on to me.
The alternative is to set a really high buffer time, and make it so the entire video gets loaded into the buffer so the bufferLength is rarely greater than bufferTime*2. but then it will take much longer to begin playing so I doubt you have ever come across any code on the internet that actually does that..
I became aware of this when I was using flash to load a video on my local hard drive and received hundreds of buffer flush events.. one after another, after another, after another.
Having said all that, I think Flash has a lot of things going for it.. It just needs a little work still..
Adobe is obviously trying, but I think the talent is spread too thin. Some of their flash classes are written really well and some are written really poorly.
It's not that Flash isn't still used or won't go away, it's that there is no end of things to do on my iPhone as it is. Every once in a while I run across a web site that requires flash. What do I do? I don't use it. Their loss much more so then mine. I'm not saying there aren't things out there I wish I could use on my iPhone, only that other things weigh more heavily for me, and in any case it just hasn't been a big deal. If it's some site I really want to access I'll send them a message and request that they make their site compatible with iOS and non-Flash. Sometimes they do that. Sometimes they don't. I'll live.
--- What?
People, can't we all just...get along? Lets be honest folks, we know why Jobs blocked flash, and I seriously doubt it had to do with developers or performance, it was all about control. Anybody who has watched Jobs over the years knows the man is a SERIOUS control freak, always has been, always will be. Now to some that is a good thing, since by having serious control he is able to insure the user experience is consistent, and that pretty much any iStuff "just works" the way you expect it to. Now personally I like to tinker too much to give up that much control, but I can certainly see why some would prefer it.
As for TFA, I'd say the reason why flash will not being going away anytime soon is the same as the video we make fun of the Ballmer Monkey for..Developers developers developers developers. Hell with some of the easy to use flash tools out there my 16 year old kid who has never made a website in his life could make a cool website with minimal fuss. The flash toolset is well known, mature, and frankly easy to throw something together in and have it work, just like how programmers fucking HATED VB but watched in horror as it spread like the clap thanks to it being so damned easy to pick up and make something functional with. Same thing here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.