How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

snydeq writes "Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'The bigger picture — which I've touched on before — is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That's long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it's starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,' McAllister writes. 'Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"

Comments

Native Apps?

[thegarbz]

major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps.

Really? Who? Where? and will it run on the cloud?

Re:Native Apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from discussions on workstation software, the term "native app" has now become moron speak for "embeded webkit".

Re:Native Apps?

[grub]

The real question is "Will it run on an HTML5 Beowulf cluster of virtualized CSS3 clouds with AJAX, microblogging and crowdsourcing support?"

Re:Native Apps?

[martijnd]

There will be a very big opportunity for something that ties all these platforms together in the near future.

My iPhone has its own development platform
My wife's Android phone the same
My LG TV has its own App API
My Philips Blue ray player has its own App API
Samsung just announced its going to develop yet another OS for mobile phones...

The market is fragmenting so fast its with all these "App" platforms, that there will be a great incentive for the first to create the "write once" , "run everywhere" tool chain. This will of course take a few years, but so many different platforms cannot be sustained.

Re:Native Apps?

[jalefkowit]

The market is fragmenting so fast its with all these "App" platforms, that there will be a great incentive for the first to create the "write once" , "run everywhere" tool chain.

Yes! If only we had some kind of "world wide web" that you could deploy your application on, and then have it just work on any platform...

(I know, crazy talk)

Re:Native Apps?

[tonedog5]

Apple briefly banned the ability to code iOS apps using 3rd party dev tools, but then relaxed the restrictions: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/09/apple_no_longer_banning_third_party_ios_development_tools.html

The best-case scenario for RIA developers is to have a single code base that has multiple profiles for publishing to different devices. Adobe is using Flash Builder for this exact scenario. FB 4.5 allows a developer to have multiple profiles for Android, iPhone, iPad, numerous other tablets, Web, etc....

Also, Adobe AIR SDK 2.7 really improves the performance of SWF apps published for iOS devices and other devices in general. There is a noticeable difference. I think that Adobe still has a very relevant future in rich internet applications.

I'm not sure about other developers, but I'd rather write my app in a single language and then deploy it to every platform I want to publish to.

Re:Native Apps?

[object404]

To start, they should create a [write-once run-anywhere environment] for Windows. There's more than enough libraries that should make it possible.

It's called Java

Surprise surprise! It's called the Flash Platform! -> Flash/Flex/AIR

...and it does it relatively well with proper dev & if your app isn't too resource-intensive:

OP Author is yet another guy who didn't do his homework and properly research the tech he was talking about. With the Adobe AIR pathway instead of targeting the in-browser Flash Player, you can a good workflow going. Very cost effective to do minor tweaks from single code/asset base as opposed to having separate devs or doing separate ports to Android, iOS, Desktop, etc with their native languages if you lack time/developers/resources.

Check it out: Multi-Screen application running on Android, iOS and the Playbook all powered by Adobe Flex & AIR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vVi62BBLT8

For those with any doubts about the Flash Platform/AIR solution for iOS, Machinarium which was built entirely with Flash CS Pro took the #1 spot in paid apps and knocked Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies from the top spot during its release: Top iPad Game Apps: Machinarium Topples Angry Birds Seasons

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/37151/Top_iPad_Game_Apps_Machinarium_Topples_Angry_Birds_Seasons.php

So yes, it is a good production & deployment solution.

As for open source, the Adobe Flex SDK is open and free so no probs on that front. It's more or less the same thing as the JDK. Runtime/player might not be open source, but the toolchain can be: build your flex/AS3 app using any text editor/IDE you want, then compile via command line with mxmlc instead of javac ;)
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

cheerios.

Flash sucks, and was just waiting to be replaced

[Anonymous Coward]

Closed, proprietary, full of security holes, resource hungry, used by marketers to deliver enhanced annoyance to users.

The Internet was waiting for a replacement to come along.

Flash was living on borrowed time because of those who had an opinion most saw it as a necessary evil instead of a wonderful platform.

Well...no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash failed because it was proprietary. End of story. The web is no place for closed technologies.

Re:Well...no.

[Belial6]

This and it's child comments are completely wrong. The very first two words make all the rest moot. "Flash failed" is a false statement. In fact, Flash has been wildly successful. I would wager that there computers running Flash than Windows and OSX combined.

Platform apps huh?

[cHiphead]

So wait, now we're NOT writing rich applications to be delivered by the browser and instead focusing on native, platform-based apps? I thought that was EXACTLY what we were getting away from. The only 'platform' apps are iPhone and Android mobile apps due to the screen real estate available, even a tablet has the size and responsiveness to work fine with web based apps. Oh wait, a Windows 8 article, that explains it... this is just Microsoft PR being propped up on the backs of mobile interfaces.

The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any replacement(s) will be shitty, too. It won't matter who creates them, or how they're implemented. They will be shitty. That's just the nature of any attempt to have the browser host remotely complex applications. The browser is merely a document viewer and navigator; it is not an operating system of some sort. It will always fail as an operating system or an application host.

Go back to when this idea of having the browser host applications first took off. JavaScript is one of the biggest blunders of all time. It wasn't just shitty when it was introduced in the mid-1990s, it was seen as absolutely abysmal and unacceptable by basically all developers at the time. These were developers who had used real languages like C, C++, Smalltalk, and Perl. They knew shitty when they saw it, and they refused to use it. That's why JavaScript went basically untouched for a decade, until those developers had retired or moved on to other endeavors. It's only been deemed "acceptable" by a much younger and more inexperienced generation of programmers, many of which haven't used any other programming language (with the exception of perhaps PHP, the next worst language ever implemented and widely used), and thus don't realize how horrible JavaScript is.

The other technologies that followed the initial JavaScript attempt have been shitty, too. Java applets, ActiveX controls, Flash, and now JavaScript again with the latest and ever-changing-not-to-be-standardized-until-2022-or-later HTML5 nonsense, have all offered horrible experiences and nothing but problems for users, system administrators and network administrators alike. Google's Native Client effort will likely be just as horrid in the long run, although their work does seem marginally more competent than, say, all of the JavaScript work ever done.

The end result is that the browser should not be used for anything more than displaying and linking documents. Real functionality should be implemented via a native application. If more than one platform needs to be targeted, use a truly portable programming language like Python, or do the right thing and create separate implementations for each platform.

Re:The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[jbolden]

Just mentioning here the time line line is all wrong. ActiveX controls came very early in the web, 1996 as a way of exporting COM. It was an alternative to Java applets not JavaScript. Microsoft was fine with JavaScript though their main alternative was VBScript.

Over the last 8 years there have been huge improvements in JavaScript engines. It is the faster engines that made JS as an app platform possible.

Re:The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[Serious Callers Only]

Any replacement(s) will be shitty, too. It won't matter who creates them, or how they're implemented. They will be shitty. That's just the nature of any attempt to have the browser host remotely complex applications. The browser is merely a document viewer and navigator; it is not an operating system of some sort. It will always fail as an operating system or an application host.

This is a debate with a long and storied history going back to Andreessen, and probably beyond. Browsers have taken over much of the work done by native apps on many operating systems, and whether you like it or not, that's a trend which is accelerating, notwithstanding the recent trend for mobile binaries. There are a good reasons for the way the web has taken over our computing lives, and also good reasons why binary solutions like Flash are gradually being deprecated - they break one of the main advantages of the web, which is that it works everywhere - even on devices which haven't been invented yet. That is also why various companies have attempted to introduce binary solutions to web problems - in order to gain a stranglehold on the market again, as they can easily do with binary apps (all the solutions you list were attempts to do this, from applets, to ActiveX to Flash).

It's interesting that you focus on javascript as a roadblock and blunder, as javascript is not actually the language the vast majority of the code in web apps is written in - it's used as a simple way to add interactivity and animation to documents, and occasionally to allow requests for page fragments. I suppose it makes a good rant if you can focus on javascript which, if you know nothing about it, seems an easy punch-bag. It's actually quite an interesting language, though I wouldn't try to create something large in it. The javascript involved in creating a modern web application is typically pretty minimal, and often reliant on libraries like query which smooth out a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers, so javascript is not really the question when comparing flash to html development to native binaries. It's not the technology in which the vast majority of time is spent for web app development - on the contrary, it is strictly optional. The languages used for actual web development vary wildly from C variants, perl, PHP (ugh), ruby, python, smalltalk etc etc. You can use whichever language or framework you like when developing web apps, and the beauty of it is, your users won't care, whether they are viewing it on a mac desktop from 2005 or a Windows phone from 2011.

The end result is that the browser should not be used for anything more than displaying and linking documents.

The vast majority of the work many people do all day includes displaying, editing and linking documents - for that the web is a perfect fit - a far better fit than binary apps like MS Word. For something like photoshop editing huge image files, a binary is still the answer, but it does have downsides. The real question is what trade-offs does your app face, and do the advantages of a web app (faster deployment, cross-platform, document based, stateless, collaborative) outweigh the disadvantages compared to binaries (slower performance, non-local, network dependent, limited file access etc). That's not an equation which has the same answer for all apps or all people, but it's clearly one which has worked out in favour of web technology for huge numbers of apps.

Re:The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[Dogtanian]

The other technologies that followed the initial JavaScript attempt have been shitty, too. Java applets

Java came out at almost the exact same time as JavaScript (1995). Remember JavaScript was originally called "ActionScript", and Netscape licensed the name from Sun in (what I assume was) an attempt to capitalise on the hype bandwagon that surrounded Java- or more specifically, client-side Java Applets- at its mid-90s launch.

(They must have paid Sun a lot of money; I can't see any other reason why Sun would have let someone dilute and confuse the Java trademark with something that really had nothing to do with it).

FWIW, Java Applets may have been crap, but they were never a major success- in fact they were a major failure if you judge their actual success vs. the hype and publicity they got in their early years. They were never a major factor.

I also find it odd that few people notice that Flash essentially ended up fulfilling almost the exact same role that Java Applets were originally meant to meet- plugin-based apps running on the client via the Internet. I wouldn't say that Flash killed Applets though- by the time the latter had started to evolve beyond being a simple multimedia tool, the latter had already been out for years and clearly failed to have taken off *without* any major competition.

Re:The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[jbolden]

There are certain other factors at play here that I think are worth mentioning.

1) The dominant platform (COM windows apps) had a huge transitioning problem to .NET. Nothing else has really stepped forward as an application library. Cocoa / IOS is arguably the first major platform and the penetration is nowhere near what COM's was. So except in gaming there has been a tremendous lag in terms of desktop applications showing their advantages.

2) Corporate desktops, who purchase the vast majority of non entertainment software, are very reluctant to allow software installation. However they have been unable to control web applications. So end users are essentially bring in "rogue software" via. the web. This is very similar to how windows desktops replaced minis and mainframes late 80s to mid 90s. Corporate IT is unresponsive to customer wants and the web provides a means of bypassing their controls.
This goes into "cheap deployment" but I thought it was worth focusing on.

3) There has been a major shift down in power in terms of desktops. Moving from mid priced desktops to cheap desktops to laptops. This has prevented desktop applications from upping system requirements as easily as servers have upped their requirements. This may pause.

4) The dominant desktop platform has been expensive while the web platforms have been cheap. This is starting to reverse with high monthly per user fees.

Re:The replacement(s) will be shitty, too.

[Lennie]

"Remember JavaScript was originally called "ActionScript", and Netscape licensed the name from Sun "

Actually, you mean LiveScript. LiveScript is the original name. ActionScript is the JavaScript derived language used by Flash.

Youtube / Online Videos saved Flash

[TheMoonRat]

The early years of the internet were plagued with issues on how Flash was used: long Flash intro's to websites, and Flash menu's that would take ages to animate each and every time you clicked on it to name but a couple. But it was also plagued with a vast number of file formats fighting to be the internet streaming app of choice; Media Player, Real Player, Quicktime etc. Some of which were on some platforms but not others; all of which sucked up resources just to play a video on a website. Flash solved this online video problem; a single method for which to deliver streaming media content. A single app that was super easy to install for even the most casual of users. The success of YouTube meant Flash has it's lifeline, and became useful (for me). It's not the perfect solution, and moving into HTML 5 era it will become redundant once more; but it did fill a much needed gap.

That is not the only problem.

[Musically_ut]

Flash does not in particular have a very good history with respect to its own development either. Everybody on *nix has observed this so much that this has become a cult phenomenon.

Moreover, the problem does not lie completely with *nix developers themselves. Case in point, it takes them months to fix their broken calls to memcpy which were:

traced to Adobe Flash by maintainers of glibc at Red Hat, Linus Torvalds and others.

Full story here.

Relevant part of the conversation:

> Subject: Re: FP-5739 "Strange sound on mp3 flash website with Fedora 14 x86_64"
>
> Hi Shu,
>
> That's is great to hear. Would you guess it's a matter of days, weeks or
> months before this can get fixed?
> If it will take a long time for you to fix this, Fedora may need to look
> at some way to work around this bug.
>
> Best regards,
> Magnus
>

> Hi Magnus,
>
> Maybe months. Thanks.
>
> Best regards.

Re:That is not the only problem.

[Karellen]

It's not a glibc bug, it's a bug in Flash.

Flash was using memcpy(3) incorrectly. It happened to work on older versions of glibc/x86 by chance. There was never any guarantee that it would work on later version of glibc/x86, or on non-x86 versions of glibc, or non-glibc libcs (e.g. BSD libc), or basically any other Unix/POSIX/C-based system.

The whole bloody reason for API documentation, standards and the like is so that bad or non-optimal implementation details need not be fixed in stone forever! You should be able to re-implement an API any way you like "under the hood", and providing the implementation meets the API spec, you're good to go. Anyone relying on undocumented side effects of a particular implementation is doomed to pain. That's how APIs work. That's how the POSIX and the C standard work, and that's how memcpy(3) works, and that's the reason for memmove(3)'s existence.

Yes, all developers make mistakes. Sometimes we do make the wrong API call, or pass a NULL where we shouldn't, but the code accidentally works on one implementation of the API for a while. When we become aware of it, the correct response is to FIX THE BUG IN OUR USE OF THE API on all current branches and release a "point" update ASAFP. "Months" should not be an acceptable timescale for that sort of thing. Especially for something as simple as replacing calls to memcpy(3) with calls to memmove(3).

20/20 rosy view?

[MrMickS]

IIRC Apple explicitly didn't want native apps when it released the iPhone. Their original idea was to have everything web based and accessed through Safari. A lot of time and effort was put into making this work. Native apps, and the app store, only surfaced with the 2nd revision of iOS and after people had been jail-breaking their phones to be able to install native apps. Android had to allow native apps because iOS did. This drive to native apps was from the users not from the manufacturers. The whole summary is a massive rewrite of history to fit the author's viewpoint.

Re:20/20 rosy view?

[Ex Machina]

I think that Apple's expressed lack of interest in native apps in the first iteration of the iPhone OS were to discourage people from waiting for a feature and to maintain a competitive edge via secrecy.

Re:20/20 rosy view?

[gig]

No, you are totally wrong. That is the myth, not the facts.

Apple executed the iPhone launch and App Store launch exactly according to plan. Nobody bullied them into anything. When the iOS SDK was released one year after iPhone, that gave it these very significant advantages over being released earlier:

- there was a user base of 6 million enthusiastic users who were getting a little tired of their 10-12 built-in apps and had their wallets out for new apps, plus something like 3 million iPod touch users
- there was a developer base that was worked up much more than after a Steve Ballmer dance number because iPhone had seemed to them like forbidden fruit for a year, and those 6 million hungry users looked like they were walking around on plump turkey legs
- the concept of what an iOS app looks like and feels like and how it acts were better developed, and better understood by people inside Apple, by users, by developers
- there was an international version of the phone remember, original iPhone was US-only, it was sort of a beta test

They were always going to have CocoaTouch apps. iPhone very specifically cleared the way for iPad. The reason iPad had 500 full-size apps at launch and 1000 by a week later and 10,000 by a few months later was because there were already many thousands of iOS developers and lots of iOS app code in the world by then. The apps that sell iPads and iPhones are not Web apps, they are the really rich, media-heavy Mac class apps, many of them from the Mac. Of course Apple was going to leverage all the pre-iPhone OS X code when they put OS X on a phone.

Also, the SDK that Apple released in mid-2008 had been worked on for years. It's crazy to say that Apple threw it together in 6 months when they saw that the people wanted apps.

The HTML5 or CocoaTouch choice on iOS is perfectly designed. It was always going to be that way. The 2 together are a yin yang of apps. Any particular app you may want to make can be made for iPhone because either HTML5 or CocoaTouch will be perfect for it. They are much better together than if you had just one or the other.

> Android had to allow native apps because iOS did.

Android does not have native apps, it has Java-like apps running in a virtual machine. App Store launched in mid-2008, and Android launched in late 2008. There wasn't enough time there for Google to create Dalvik as an answer to App Store. Dalvik was already built way before that.

Re:Android?

[adolf]

XCode for IPhone development is free ...as long as you already have a Mac running a sufficiently-recent release of OS X.

Otherwise, not free.

Adobes core business is not flash.

[drolli]

I think flash was bought by adobe to keep control until the ris of flash could not harm them any more. Adobes core business are WYSIWYG Document systems, pdf creation, management and form server tools. There is no other integrated product suite like Adobes. You can design an excellent looking printable document which integrates well with online services.

IMHO Adobe buying flash was good for nothing else but preventing flash from becoming relevant in managing online form data.

Video

[tverbeek]

IMHO, Flash lost its way when they added video support to it (around the time that Adobe bought Macromedia, as I recall). Before that, Flash was all about the vectors. (You could import bitmaps into it too, but they wouldn't scale well, so those were best used just for static background elements.) It was a way to do animation without pushing full pre-rendered frames down to the client: just describe the shapes then tell the player how to manipulate them. It provided a toolset to produce rich user interfaces that you couldn't even hope to dream of doing with (incompatible implementations of) HTML3 and Javascript, and even HTML4 with CSS can't pull off the same stuff today. The Flash plugin was a lean and efficient client, and close enough to being ubiquitous. Then they tacked video support onto it (which was all about pushing pre-rendered frames down to the client), and it became a video-player plugin (with vector support). The fact that people talk today about replacing Flash with a video codec shows how completely that added feature usurped the original functionality.

Re:Video

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could mod this comment up, I really would. I wrote the Flash3 player for the Sega Dreamcast, and it was (at that time) a decent lean & mean format. Macromedia's player wasn't suitable for embedded use, but the format itself was fine (they'd got too many C++ dependencies and system level dependencies for embedded systems of the time). The last version I actually implemented was Flash4, and at that point the format itself was all still relatively sane and manageable.

Re:Video

[rastilin]

So what you're saying is that their decision to add video support was a good call that cemented Flash's dominance for a number of years and enabled all kinds of new ideas to hit the market? Would that be a fair summary of your opinion? ;)

Re:Video

[nine-times]

This is insightful, but I don't think that including movie playback was where Flash lost its way. I think it was when they tried to make Flash into a "platform".

As you say, Flash started out as an animation plugin for vector graphics, and it was good at that. It became used more and more for advertising, which was annoying and often overkill; advertisers used Flash for things that would sometimes be handled more efficiently by a simple animated GIF. Today, it is generally good for 2 things: playing video and making casual games.

However, somewhere along the line, Adobe decided that it wasn't enough to handle content-creation, but they had to own a "platform". PDF stopped being a print-layout format, and suddenly you could build a whole little program into your PDF. Similarly, Flash stopped being an animation plugin and became something more of a development toolkit. When you look at Adobe Air, it becomes clear that Adobe wants you to build whole applications in Flash. Someone at Adobe is hoping that the future will see developers abandon other languages and development tools, and only Adobe will control the software industry.

Still, Flash as a vector animation plugin was doomed to obsolescence sooner or later. It's too simple a function for the world to be depending on a proprietary plugin.

Re:Video

[tverbeek]

You assume that the sole purpose of a site is to distribute information in a robot-accessible way. Sometimes interacting with humans in a specific way is the whole point of a project. Ever hear of "art"?

Re:Watcom compilers were the best

[Anonymous Coward]

They are still around: OpenWatcom.

This is just terrible journalism

[dreamingwell]

Wow, this article is so full of misinformation...

"major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps"

Adobe Flash can build both native iOS and Android apps today. Many of the top games in both the iTunes App store and Android Market are made with Flash.

"Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"

Adobe Flash Builder is a plug-in to Eclipse! And Adobe's implementation of Flash Builder in Eclipse is one of the best plug-ins I've ever used. It's well featured, has lots of support and documentation, and works well on multiple platforms.

Offline use

[tepples]

A proprietary app wrapper works even when the device is not connected to the Internet because the HTML and JavaScript files are stored on the device, not transmitted on demand from the Internet. Or can users of popular devices force specific web applications to be cached?

Re:Offline use

[Anonymous Coward]

In modern browsers, any web site can cache application data and logic on a device so no internet access is needed. Google does this for their mobile gmail site and it works quite well.

Couldnt help it, sorry

[hesaigo999ca]

Adobe lost its way when it decided to do stuff other then photoshop.

Adobe lost its way when they took a great new file format (pdf) and tried to add
so much more execution (javascript for one) inside, when all it needed to be was
a copyright protected document with no way to normally alter it.....

Adobe lost its way when ti came out with flash.

Adobe lost its way when they tried to deny their apps were faulty, and that
it was normal to find a 10 zero day exploits a week in your product.

Its just the industry moving on...

[itsdapead]

"Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities,

Not surprising, when the Next Big Things are smartphones and tablets, and - of the two leading platforms - iOS refuses to support Flash at all, and Android has very patchy support (I recently did an unscientific test in Best Buy and although several of the Android tablets claimed to support Flash, only the Xoom actually opened my Flash applet).

One of the key lessons from failure of the original windows "tablet" PCs, the failure of the original EEE PC "Netbook" concept (subsequent "netbooks" have been more and more like entry-level laptops) and the rise of the iDevices has been that phones and tablets need custom-designed software that matches the native UI. That's why Microsoft hasn't been able to Borg the mobile market: the killer apps (Office/Outlook) which help it to dominate the desktop (on PC and Mac) are worthless on mobiles without a ground-up rewrite. Flash has a similar problem: even if your tablet does run Flash, many "legacy" Flash apps just won't work with a touch interface or, if they do, are too fiddly to operate on a tiny screen.

However, "HTML5" (i.e. all, some or fewer of HTML5/CSS3/ECMAScript/DOM/SVG/WebGL/whatever) is only just approaching maturity - so there could be a move back from native Apps to webapps (given they can be made almost indistinguishable from Native on iOS/Android). Amazon have already produced a webapp version of the Kindle reader (to get around Apple's rules on in-app sales).

Flash player itself is probably on the way out - for better or worse "HTML5" will probably take over, especially with Microsoft taking that road with Win 8. However, Adobe has a great opportunity: there's a great gap in the market for something like Flash Professional which can "publish" to HTML5, or even iOS/Android native code. It may not be the programmer's choice, but for certain types of app (e.g. relatively simple educational applets, or casual games) its a killer. Flash player dying doesn't have to hurt Adobe much.

Not that I'm a huge fan of Adobe's current bloatware offerings, but I don't currently see anything like Flash for HTML5 applet authoring...

Re:Tablets aren't always online

[jawtheshark]

Phones are always online

No, they are not. Many, many people turn off GPRS/3G/$CELLTECHNOLOGY_OF_THE_DAY by default to save on charges. Not everyone has a "flat" plan. I'd wager to say, most don't. Also, if you leave your country of origin (I realize that's not a problem in the US), then you have insane roaming charges. People are careful whether they use their phones for online activities. Even those stupid "wheather" applications that come by default on some HTC Phones rack up considerable charges if not turned off.

Re:$99 per year for students and hobbyists

[ArhcAngel]

Android is a Linux. XCode is free, and there is a much larger fraction of free apps on Linux than on OSX, especially excluding darwinports/fink apps. iPhone started the whole app store concept, Apple created a huge market for small application vendors.

I just don't see the $99 as much of a disincentive. If I'm willing to donate days / weeks / months of my time why would $100 even be a question?

Android is a fork of JAVA (DALVIK) that runs on the Linux kernel. OSX and iOS run on the MACH kernel and BSD *nix. Applications run on the COCOA API. As far as iPhone starting the whole app store concept...Yeah RIGHT. Handango and PocketGear have been around since 1999 dishing out all things Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian, and Android.

Does The End of Flash = Death of the Web?

[PortHaven]

Many people dislike Flash because of how it is used. Mainly, heavy visual advertisements which replaced the far worse era of continous pop-up adds.

Very few who criticize Flash have ever used it to any great extent. They've never explored it's benefits for rich web applications or cross-platform usability.

Many view HTML5 as the death nail in Flash's coffin. And think Adobe is greatly concerned. As the article says, Adobe makes tools. They will just as gladly make developer IDEs for HTML5. In fact, it'd probably be economical cause they could cut a large number of empoyees in both the Flash player and ActionScript development teams.

But there is something that is TERRIFYING in regards to the death of Flash. While so many rejoice in Flash's suffering. They are blind to the real horror on the horizon. They shout "Give us Barrabus".

Why is Flash dying? What killed Flash? Apple's decision to refuse the software to run on it's computers. And now Microsoft is joining Apple by proclaiming the death of the plugin in Windows 8.

And Slashdotters cheer blindly "Open source! HTML5! Yea! Yea!" failing to realize that there is something MUCH more dangerous than a closed source proprietary runtime such as Adobe's Flash.

The fact that it is being killed by closed proprietary platforms. I find it ironic that Slashdotters will cheer the death of the proprietary Flash at the hands of Apple saying "You can not run the software of choice on your own computers." And will applaud Microsoft joining the bandwagon. And call this "good"?

Seriously, Microsoft saw that Apple didn't even get a wrist slap for it's anti-competitive behavior. So is it any wonder that Microsoft has announced no more plugins. No one else's software but ours. Sure, we'll gain an open standard that will likely be split and marred by three main compatriots (Apple, Microsoft & Google).

The result is that you are being told what you can or cannot run on your own machine. And as this blends increasingly more with the cloud (ie: Kindle Fire). We will start to lose ownership and control over our own computers. We'll be locked into proprietary systems.

Ironically, for all Flash's proprietary aspects, it was still very accessible to both users and developers. Yes, Flash has it's problems. But it also has it's strengths. But most of all - it was there.

It's not being killed by a "technical victory". HTML5 is not killing Flash. Rather large companies are deciding to close their platforms. To limit what you can run on them. And THAT is what's killing Flash.

THIS IS NOT PROGRESS, THIS IS REGRESS BACK TO 1984.

Re:Does The End of Flash = Death of the Web?

[Dixie_Flatline]

I'm sorry, but this is a humungous pile of crap.

Apple refuses to let flash run on its iOS (and only iOS, right now) platforms because it's been a resource hog and security concern on its desktop OSes for years. They refuse to let a 3rd party application with a history of ruining the user experience onto a new platform that has a much more limited user experience, and which fewer resources and greater constraints

This isn't about Apple being the big bad mean tech company, this is about Adobe putting out a sub-standard product that drains battery life, causes crashes, opens up security holes, and otherwise ruins the web experience when things start to go sideways.

You know what else Apple tries to prevent from running on its OSes that have those same characteristics? VIRUSES. The fact that Flash has a potentially beneficial side effect doesn't actually sufficiently counter the downsides of running such an unbelievably poorly implemented piece of software. Apple has forced web developers to move on from an old and busted technology that was incumbent and thereby dominant to new technologies that are more secure, less resource hungry and more stable.

Flash was junk 10 years ago. The REAL failing of Flash is that it REMAINED junk for 10 years. Maybe if Adobe had found a way to fix their shit, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now, but it is what it is. Apple has not only the right but the responsibility to attempt to protect its customers from malicious software—even malicious software masquerading as useful software—when possible. Microsoft, too.

You don't seem to understand computers.

[Brannon]

That's fine, but why do you hang out on a technology web site?

Apple strongly supports HTML5 (and HTML5 is quickly acquiring all of Flash's capabilities) as a means of writing un-curated apps for iOS devices. There is no regression back to anything. All Apple wants is that the Apps which run on their platform won't destroy battery life, steal data, crash, or otherwise annoy their customers. This can be done by writing curated native apps or by working within industry standard protocols for uncurated web apps. Seems pretty simple to me. But then again, I understand how computers work and you don't.