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Want Flash Player On a MacBook Air? Download It Yourself
AmiMoJo writes "MacBook Airs are no longer shipping with Flash. Apple spokesperson Bill Evans said: 'We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.'"
It has nothing to do with the latest version -- Flash has an auto-updater. If they ship with it, it'll just auto-update when the machine is first connected to the internet.
No, you're not happy to support it, considering that your company has some sort of vendetta against Flash.
So what? Just like windows, Linux ...
Either Apple gets a bad rep because Flash crashes or is too slow on Mac OS X (but it's not even made by Apple), because they supplied an older version (which could have been more stable, but not up-to-date) or because they stop supplying it and pointing the users to Adobe's website (which is the normal thing to do, and people will rightly associate Flash problems with Adobe, not Apple).
No matter what they do, people will complain.
...out of the box http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAwtBa2C4ts
Rumor has it that the new Mac OS App Store forbids relying on optionally-installed frameworks. If Java and now Flash are no longer distributed as a part of the OS then they are no longer eligible to be used for apps. How long until Mac OS users find themselves in that same "walled garden"?
Windows doesn't include it either.
Maybe some Linux distros (?), but in that case, it would be pretty ironic.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Okay, so I'm playing around with a Drupal site concept in Artisteer. Artisteer lets you drop in Flash animations as little overlays on banners and the like and it comes with a couple of samples. A dead effing simple moving cloud overlay caused the fan in my machine to crank up to hurricane speed. And this is the most recent build of Flash. IMO (definitely not being humble here), Flash blows, literally and figuratively. If Flash had to be certified EnergyStar compliant it would fail miserably.
Care to identify a source for this rumor, or are you just making shit up as you go?
Apple, Java, and the App Store . The same clause would cover Flash now it is not being installed by default.
If you have a Apple Developer ID you can see the guidelines yourself.
in this corner, our old overlord, Adobe Systems Incorporated, purveyor of buggy, virusy, CPU-hoggy Flash.
And in this corner, your new overlord, Steve Jobs, who with the One Token Ring wants to rule them all.
Which overlord to welcome ... choices, choices.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Apple is beginning to worry me.
I've been recommending Macs to techno-impaired types for a while now because they did in fact pretty much "work out of the box" and required minimal training to operate, particularly in the area of security and updates. But this is now becoming a highly questionable proposition.
Like it or not, many, many websites the average user goes to are full of Flash contents that the users want to see and some of them just plainly refuse to work without. All conversations about standards and HTML5 are likely to be met by these users with an uncomprehending expression and stubborn "but I just want it to play my video and it won't!" response. Ejecting Flash out of the basic OS update mechanism now means that the users will have to first install the stuff themselves (hopefully not from the top Google search result hosted on "fakemacupdates.cn" or some such) and then respond to any and all "update" requests from now two (and with Steve's attitude likely more to come soon) places with different interfaces and what not, thus conditioning them to click on "continue" on every such pop up they see. Up to now I taught them not to install anything at all themselves and to respond to "update" requests only from the Apple update app, which simplified things immensely.
This strategy is now no longer feasible.
Combined with the horrible iTunes 10 networked drive fiasco (and don't even get me started on the "Ping" "social network" thing) Apple is really starting to reduce their advantages to a clueless Joe User, whose herd instincts already nag at him to be "like everyone else in the office" and just get a cheap Windows 7 laptop.
Yes, ive seen the guidelines
Huh? If you had seen the guidelines then why did you accuse the Anonymous Coward of "making shit up" about the optionally-installed frameworks?
Nothing says you can't include your own interpreters in your app bundle
Impractical for Java, but possible for Flash. It does dissuade developers from going down that path though. And Apple have a history of changing the rules for their app stores. I wouldn't put it past them to put a blanket ban on any Flash application in the future.
Does anybody actually use the flash browser plugin to build desktop applications?
I have seen it used for games and installers for some Windows software. I don't do gaming on the Mac, so I don't know if it gets used there. I have done it on Windows and not realised a game was written using Flash at the beginning. They don't have to sit in browser windows.
Nothing precludes you from installing java, flash, and your own app via means other than the app store. If you want to work outside the guidelines, then you lose a distribution channel, and that is all.
That is correct for now. Who knows how much more the OS will get locked down. Also, look at the iPhone. How popular are the apps that aren't available in the app store?
I've had a suspicion for a while now that Slashdot is being astroturfed by people who are either directly involved with Google or have a vested interested in its platforms like Android. Slashdot used to be friendly to Apple, critical of some things but congratulatory toward their products and success. Since Android has come out, every Apple article now is filled with Apple-bashers, people who really seem to be working unusually hard to convince everyone that Apple is evil, not worth your time, and only used by sheep. Often, they reference Steve Jobs by name, as if he can hear them or something.
I'll get accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, and I don't dismiss the fact that there have always been Apple-haters posting on Slashdot regardless of Google, but watching the tone of the comments shift so radically has been unusual, especially when the tone in articles that are critical of Google are the exact opposite--a ton of defenders justifying Google's every move, even when they're caught archiving emails and passwords from WiFi networks or when it turns out Android isn't open at all because it's controlled by the carriers. People who bash Google get modded down or drowned out by apologists.
Apple can't even introduce a Mac App Store without it some slippery slope argument claiming that the Mac will become a closed platform, despite Apple specifically mentioning that it won't be the only source of software. Linux distros have quality-tested, centralized repositories of software. Microsoft is introducing an app store in Windows 8 according to that leaked presentation. But when Apple does it, it's evil.
There's something suspicious about the sudden antagonism toward Apple. Like I said, there's always been a level of criticism over things like prices or hardware specs, but it's never risen to the degree it's at now where even things like not pre-installing Flash is some crime, even though Windows and Linux don't ship with Flash either. You have to install it yourself, whether it's from Adobe's site or using apt-get. There's a lot of misdirection going on. Look at the recent Java article whose headline and summary implied Apple was deprecating Java itself and not simply deprecating their pre-installed JVM. Again, Windows and Linux distros don't ship with Java pre-installed like that either. Apple was shipping these things back when the Mac was still clawing it's way back out of obscurity, and they couldn't count on companies like Sun to bother with their platform.
I believe Slashdot is getting astroturfed hard. The constant argument that only rubes use Macs is an attempt to rally "independent-minded" Linux users against Apple and keep them away from products like the iPhone, because some of these trolls have--I believe--a vested interest in Android. So many of the posts are just too suspicious. If Apple had been caught archiving people's emails and passwords, or if Steve Jobs had come out and said that the only people who care about privacy are people who have something to hide (as Google CEO Eric Schmidt did), the comments to the stories would have exploded in their level of sheer Apple hatred, yet those Google stories had defenders out in full force protecting the company. Something fishy is going on.
FUD. You can easily install flash and reader (and keep them updated) through the official "partner" repositories. sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer No needs to go on Adobe website.
For one, there's a big difference between performance per watt and watts of power draw period. Mobile phones need a low power draw, regardless of performance. So suppose we have a general Benchmark X that is the be-all, end-all of performance metering. I know it doesn't exist, just as an example. Now suppose a 0.5watt ARM chip does 100 BX units. Suppose then that a 90 watt Core i7 does 40,000 BX units. The Core i7 is actually more than twice as efficient per watt at the BX test. However you still wouldn't use it in a phone. Why? Because it is 90 watts, that's why. Doesn't matter if it is more efficient, matters that it is too big over all. It isn't like a Core i7 can just be "cut down" either. Even if you only take one core and rework it to have a single execution unit and so on it'll still be quite large. It cannot be "cut down" to embedded levels, a new design would be needed.
However the other thing is, as I noted, there is no "BX," no "One benchmark to rule them all." ARM is efficient at some things, and those things are what is important to an embedded device. Doesn't mean it is efficient at all things, doesn't mean it is efficient at what matters to a desktop. It does not logically follow that ARM is good for the desktop because it is good for embedded.
As I said, you discover that the big thing in terms of desktop performance is heavy hitting vector FP math. This is particularly used in media (audio/video) stuff which is a market Apple pushes heavily in. Remember the big deal about AltiVec? I've never seen ARM benchmarks on that kind of stuff so I cannot say how it does, but I'll wager it isn't so hot. Then there are other things, like say 64-bit support. All the ARM CPUs I'm aware of are 32-bit. No problem, you aren't going to rock more than 4GB of RAM in an embedded device any time soon however for desktops, it is an issue. More than 4GB is common, 64-bit is needed. Guess what? That adds complexity, adds circuits. There are also things like the virtualization extensions I mentioned. VT-d and so on, the ability to run VMs are close to native speed. I know ARM has nothing like that, which again adds complexity.
I suspect you'd discover that when you scaled ARM up to desktop levels of performance and features, well it'd use desktop levels of power too. There's just not really a way around it. Seems some people on Slashdot have this idea that there are amazing ways to get tons more performance out of chips if only evil Intel wasn't controlling things. However actual evidence doesn't support that.