Why is it any different than the "sport" of running into someone as hard as possible so another guy can throw a ball that is not even round for another guy to catch?
Any game that features a competitive element can be raised to the level of a sport if it attracts enough spectators that become interested in the outcome.
Blizzard worked very hard to tune the original SC (with help from players in Korea) to balance the 3 sides to enable it to be a stable enough base for a competitive sport (ie, there's no argument that the Terrans are better than the Zerg or the Protoss etc - they are evenly balanced). Some might say it's even more evenly balanced than a sport where the team with the most money can buy the championship (or at least make a very good go of it).
I realise your AC post was nothing but a troll, but I thought it was worth saying. I've never followed competitive Starcraft, but I can fully understand how people could.
They all use Webkit, which is in the rules for the store.
I seem to remember the last time discussions of web browsers on the iPhone though, that the overriding "common knowledge" was that there were *no* browsers other than Safari on the iPhone, when a quick search would show that there were plenty.
You can't bring alternative render engines, you have to use the version of WebKit that is already there, but it's not like this is the first alternative web browser for the iPhone, as the summary is inferring. It's more accurate to say that its the first alternative browser that uses a different engine, by tunnelling all the traffic to a remote server.
There are a *ton* of alternative web browsers on the app store, although they all use WebKit. You can't drop your own render engine of choice on there, which I suppose Opera gets around with the new vpn-style system.
You could even have a version of Firefox on the iPhone, as long as it used the WebKit engine already there instead of Gecko.
For thos of us who have used a Mac, the Flash issue is about performance. Have you ever used Flash on OS X? The result would be much the same on the iPhone (given that the core of iPhone OS is the same as OS X), except now there's no 2GHz+ CPU to make it look acceptable and all you have is a little ARM chip and a battery.
If it was about control then they wouldn't be promoting Flash's replacement for the iPad and iPhone. It really is about performance.
Don't just take my word for it - google "flash performance OSX" for a vast number of complaints about it. It really is hideous. Not just sluggish, but banging a 2Ghz core at 100% usage for website animations and video streams - ie, it drains the battery on your MacBook Pro rather quickly, and is one of the few things that can get the fans on my iMac to become audible.
In fact, I just opened the Diablo 3 page and had it sit idle for about a minute or so and then had a quick look at the CPU use. This is a 2GHz Core2Duo, and whether it is that full-site-flash or a youtube video, or BBC iPlayer stream, the CPU usage looks exactly like this:
It's not just "resource intensive", it's outrageously dog slow for seemingly no reason. It seems almost incredulous that it could be as bad as it is, but a simple H.264 stream inside a flash container (ie, no fancy extra stuff, just video in a box) is a painful hog in OS X. A 2Ghz Core 2 Duo should not be pushing 30% usage per core to play back 480i content.
Interactive flash content like games, or just heavy pages (like Blizzard's Diablo 3 site) do work, but they don't half push the CPU hard - considerably harder than the same site on the same machine booted into XP. (and we'll assume no H.264 hardware decoding on either platform - we're talking the animations and other stuff that flash does as well, it's not just video playback).
On2's flash player that was part of the program for testing your flash builds (it had a feature to create little ready made flash players from your movies) was better, and XBMC (running on top of OS X) is excellent at playing video streams that the browser plugin makes such a meal of.
It really is atrocious on OS X. (despite the considerable developer documentation about OS X's innards, although you will hear some people claiming it was somehow Apple "denying Adobe access" to the core of OS X to make flash better.
You can disagree all you want, just like you are free to disagree that slang words shouldn't be included in a dictionary - it does not change the fact that it is an commonly accepted term to describe such things (as opposed to closed, requiring an NDA to look at the specs, or reverse engineering).
Many open standards are patent encumbered - digital TV, H.264, GSM for cellphones, 802.11 wireless standards, etc etc.
So how do you explain the difference between the XBMC performance and the flash plugin? Both of them pull from the same source (and the addition of the flash verification nastiness to the iPlayer streams recently has broken the XBMC plugin). XBMC can decode that flash stream with H.264 content just fine with almost no cpu use at all (even ignoring the lack of hardware decoding).
Even with all the extra stuff that the flash plugin "might" have to do (and an iPlayer stream is pretty basic as flash comes) there's no reason it should be so awfully, awfully behind.
Are you telling me that it's normal that a 480i SD stream in a flash container should tax a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo, even with a lack of H.264 hardware GPU decoding?
Then my point still stands, just replace "Quicktime" with "Qt".
It would have no bearing to an "Apple Cultist" (although it might get ordinary computer users to take notice, perhaps even some who use Apple computers).
Oh I know it's not, as shown by the large amount of code needed to write something like the Album Artwork screensaver (which I know it not a browser plugin) compared to the coded needed when you have the new API.
How long before Microsoft creates an XBox Live store for Windows, where you can only get software for Windows from there, and developers must only use.Net.
(hint: different business models can exist in the same company).
It is nowhere near a monopoly. Not even close. It is just very widely used.
At least, I have seen many anti-Apple posts on/. talking about how the iPhone is "insignificant and a tiny share of the market", especially in articles that talk about the success of the iPhone, who then go on about "antitrust! monopoly! waaaah!" when something like this crops up.
*please note sarcasm, and please someone go outside and find whoever thought Cider was acceptable performance on OS X and beat them with a sock full of oranges.
Ah yes, I forgot about the 9400M - I remember a forum discussion about it that it seemed to be a *very specific* implementation - ie, that even cards with the same hardware that were not 9400M's (even a more powerful Nvidia card based on the same core) would not work.
But you're right, I should have remembered that the 9400M has acceleration in OS X.
No, indeed but CoreAnimation just makes it *easier*, it doesn't mean things weren't impossible before, it just required a bit more effort.
The charge is that Apple deliberately hobbled Adobe's attempts to make Flash decent on OS X when it's really just a case of Adobe not committing enough resources to make it work well (despite other developers, even open source projects that are maintained in spare time (ie, not the core business of the people working on it) got much better performance on OS X, even without CoreAnimation.
He said "OpelCL and similar" - OpenCL is not the only documented framework on OS X that Adobe could have used. And it's not like other third party developers couldn't make decently-performing apps and plugins on OS X before that. VLC plays back video content just fine, and has done for ages. There are even third party SWF players that perform better than the flash plugin itself from Adobe.
I used to produce commercial video for a living, and part of the production would sometimes feature web delivery, at a time when flash streaming was the "best" way to ensure cross-browser compatibility. At the time we were doing this output from Final Cut Studio and using On2's flash video encoder/builder to create self contained flash movies that could be included on websites. The inbuilt flash player from On2 performed better than the same file in the browser, so either they know something about Flash that Adobe doesn't, or Adobe doesn't really care about the OS X version of the plugin. I suspect the latter.
Apple released OpenCL to make things easier for developers, so instead of having to do A, B, C, D, E to solve a problem, the API already has A, B and C done for you, cutting your workload. It doesn't mean that you couldn't do it on OS X before. Apple also aren't the only OS vendor to add new APIs with new versions.
If you remember the demo on the release of CoreVideo, Steve told the crowd about the differences between two identical-looking videos - one of them being the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver, with the tiles of album covers that flip over. The number of lines of code needed to make that screensaver (by Apple) was an order of magnitude more, compared to the version they just produced using the new framework that they were releasing - ie, they didn't have it "reserved for themselves in a proprietary manner" before that time.
No, it's clear from third party development on OS X (as well as the extensive documentation on Apple's site for developers) that the faults with flash like squarely at Adobe's door.
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Why is it any different than the "sport" of running into someone as hard as possible so another guy can throw a ball that is not even round for another guy to catch?
Any game that features a competitive element can be raised to the level of a sport if it attracts enough spectators that become interested in the outcome.
Blizzard worked very hard to tune the original SC (with help from players in Korea) to balance the 3 sides to enable it to be a stable enough base for a competitive sport (ie, there's no argument that the Terrans are better than the Zerg or the Protoss etc - they are evenly balanced). Some might say it's even more evenly balanced than a sport where the team with the most money can buy the championship (or at least make a very good go of it).
I realise your AC post was nothing but a troll, but I thought it was worth saying. I've never followed competitive Starcraft, but I can fully understand how people could.
Not to mention the whole fiasco with the Italian league. A severe blot on the sport.
Although the FT is not under Murdoch's wing (yet) I am always reminded of Mark Watson (I believe it was his line) on Mock the Week:
(in the style of a voice over) "You're watching Sky News....... you might want to double check everything you just heard".
They all use Webkit, which is in the rules for the store.
I seem to remember the last time discussions of web browsers on the iPhone though, that the overriding "common knowledge" was that there were *no* browsers other than Safari on the iPhone, when a quick search would show that there were plenty.
You can't bring alternative render engines, you have to use the version of WebKit that is already there, but it's not like this is the first alternative web browser for the iPhone, as the summary is inferring. It's more accurate to say that its the first alternative browser that uses a different engine, by tunnelling all the traffic to a remote server.
There are a *ton* of alternative web browsers on the app store, although they all use WebKit. You can't drop your own render engine of choice on there, which I suppose Opera gets around with the new vpn-style system.
You could even have a version of Firefox on the iPhone, as long as it used the WebKit engine already there instead of Gecko.
For thos of us who have used a Mac, the Flash issue is about performance. Have you ever used Flash on OS X? The result would be much the same on the iPhone (given that the core of iPhone OS is the same as OS X), except now there's no 2GHz+ CPU to make it look acceptable and all you have is a little ARM chip and a battery.
If it was about control then they wouldn't be promoting Flash's replacement for the iPad and iPhone. It really is about performance.
Don't just take my word for it - google "flash performance OSX" for a vast number of complaints about it. It really is hideous. Not just sluggish, but banging a 2Ghz core at 100% usage for website animations and video streams - ie, it drains the battery on your MacBook Pro rather quickly, and is one of the few things that can get the fans on my iMac to become audible.
In fact, I just opened the Diablo 3 page and had it sit idle for about a minute or so and then had a quick look at the CPU use. This is a 2GHz Core2Duo, and whether it is that full-site-flash or a youtube video, or BBC iPlayer stream, the CPU usage looks exactly like this:
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/4771/flashosxperformance.jpg
Yes, it joins the other 50 or so browsers already on the iPhone, already available from the app store as well as Safari.
Maybe they had to add a new row in the iTunes Online Store view.
It's not just "resource intensive", it's outrageously dog slow for seemingly no reason. It seems almost incredulous that it could be as bad as it is, but a simple H.264 stream inside a flash container (ie, no fancy extra stuff, just video in a box) is a painful hog in OS X. A 2Ghz Core 2 Duo should not be pushing 30% usage per core to play back 480i content.
Interactive flash content like games, or just heavy pages (like Blizzard's Diablo 3 site) do work, but they don't half push the CPU hard - considerably harder than the same site on the same machine booted into XP. (and we'll assume no H.264 hardware decoding on either platform - we're talking the animations and other stuff that flash does as well, it's not just video playback).
On2's flash player that was part of the program for testing your flash builds (it had a feature to create little ready made flash players from your movies) was better, and XBMC (running on top of OS X) is excellent at playing video streams that the browser plugin makes such a meal of.
It really is atrocious on OS X. (despite the considerable developer documentation about OS X's innards, although you will hear some people claiming it was somehow Apple "denying Adobe access" to the core of OS X to make flash better.
Indeed, I likely did (someone else pointed it out) but I have always seen that abbreviated as Qt rather than QT, which is Mac shorthand for Quicktime.
My bad on that, although my point still stands - it was more about "Apple Cultists" not caring about what happens on any other platform.
You can disagree all you want, just like you are free to disagree that slang words shouldn't be included in a dictionary - it does not change the fact that it is an commonly accepted term to describe such things (as opposed to closed, requiring an NDA to look at the specs, or reverse engineering).
Many open standards are patent encumbered - digital TV, H.264, GSM for cellphones, 802.11 wireless standards, etc etc.
Is that on OS X or Windows?
On OS X, typing "google.com" into the url bar and hitting enter redirects you to google.co.uk.
Typing a search into the search box at the top right sends you to a results page from google.co.uk.
Perhaps it it based on International settings in the pref pane?
So how do you explain the difference between the XBMC performance and the flash plugin? Both of them pull from the same source (and the addition of the flash verification nastiness to the iPlayer streams recently has broken the XBMC plugin). XBMC can decode that flash stream with H.264 content just fine with almost no cpu use at all (even ignoring the lack of hardware decoding).
Even with all the extra stuff that the flash plugin "might" have to do (and an iPlayer stream is pretty basic as flash comes) there's no reason it should be so awfully, awfully behind.
Are you telling me that it's normal that a 480i SD stream in a flash container should tax a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo, even with a lack of H.264 hardware GPU decoding?
Then my point still stands, just replace "Quicktime" with "Qt".
It would have no bearing to an "Apple Cultist" (although it might get ordinary computer users to take notice, perhaps even some who use Apple computers).
Yes, but being anticompetitive is not illegal (and thus does not violate any antitrust laws).
Yes, yes it is.
Just because it's proprietary code doesn't mean you can pick and choose the things the "tech community" call open.
It's not just confined to open source and completely transparent, royalty free projects and standards.
It's a well defined and understood word, as the opposite to "closed" standards that require reverse engineering or an NDA to work with.
Oh I know it's not, as shown by the large amount of code needed to write something like the Album Artwork screensaver (which I know it not a browser plugin) compared to the coded needed when you have the new API.
It was hard, it wasn't impossible.
And add to that all the games "ported" to OS X using the Cider wrapper.
I'd rather be hit in the face repeatedly with a wet fish. They are laughably bad.
In 1/0 seconds.
How long before Microsoft creates an XBox Live store for Windows, where you can only get software for Windows from there, and developers must only use .Net.
(hint: different business models can exist in the same company).
It is nowhere near a monopoly. Not even close. It is just very widely used.
At least, I have seen many anti-Apple posts on /. talking about how the iPhone is "insignificant and a tiny share of the market", especially in articles that talk about the success of the iPhone, who then go on about "antitrust! monopoly! waaaah!" when something like this crops up.
As it stands, it's not a monopoly.
Yes, I don't need Cider.
But I really should have it!
Apps inside Cider wrappers were so awesome!
*please note sarcasm, and please someone go outside and find whoever thought Cider was acceptable performance on OS X and beat them with a sock full of oranges.
Ah yes, I forgot about the 9400M - I remember a forum discussion about it that it seemed to be a *very specific* implementation - ie, that even cards with the same hardware that were not 9400M's (even a more powerful Nvidia card based on the same core) would not work.
But you're right, I should have remembered that the 9400M has acceleration in OS X.
There's a feedback form for the iPhone on Apple's site - they are doubtless listening to feedback.
No, indeed but CoreAnimation just makes it *easier*, it doesn't mean things weren't impossible before, it just required a bit more effort.
The charge is that Apple deliberately hobbled Adobe's attempts to make Flash decent on OS X when it's really just a case of Adobe not committing enough resources to make it work well (despite other developers, even open source projects that are maintained in spare time (ie, not the core business of the people working on it) got much better performance on OS X, even without CoreAnimation.
I guess you didn't live through the 90s then, if you think this "makes Microsoft (of the 90s) pale in comparison".
Or you're being wilfully ignorant. One of the two.
He said "OpelCL and similar" - OpenCL is not the only documented framework on OS X that Adobe could have used. And it's not like other third party developers couldn't make decently-performing apps and plugins on OS X before that. VLC plays back video content just fine, and has done for ages. There are even third party SWF players that perform better than the flash plugin itself from Adobe.
I used to produce commercial video for a living, and part of the production would sometimes feature web delivery, at a time when flash streaming was the "best" way to ensure cross-browser compatibility. At the time we were doing this output from Final Cut Studio and using On2's flash video encoder/builder to create self contained flash movies that could be included on websites. The inbuilt flash player from On2 performed better than the same file in the browser, so either they know something about Flash that Adobe doesn't, or Adobe doesn't really care about the OS X version of the plugin. I suspect the latter.
Apple released OpenCL to make things easier for developers, so instead of having to do A, B, C, D, E to solve a problem, the API already has A, B and C done for you, cutting your workload. It doesn't mean that you couldn't do it on OS X before. Apple also aren't the only OS vendor to add new APIs with new versions.
If you remember the demo on the release of CoreVideo, Steve told the crowd about the differences between two identical-looking videos - one of them being the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver, with the tiles of album covers that flip over. The number of lines of code needed to make that screensaver (by Apple) was an order of magnitude more, compared to the version they just produced using the new framework that they were releasing - ie, they didn't have it "reserved for themselves in a proprietary manner" before that time.
No, it's clear from third party development on OS X (as well as the extensive documentation on Apple's site for developers) that the faults with flash like squarely at Adobe's door.