Adobe flash's official blog on ipad | Hacker News Reader

Adobe flash's official blog on ipad

blogs.adobe.com

35 pointsprat12 comments

So in short, Adobe have capitulated trying to push the Flash plugin on the iPhone platform, and instead have decided to at least take a sliver of the application authoring tools market. Surprisingly smart move for them.

Am I the only one that's happy with no flash on the iPhone or iPad? After seeing what flash does to the CPU of both Macs and PCs, I definitely don't want flash running on any mobile device. Also, my AT&T "3G" connection is slow enough that loading extra flash would make page loading times even worse.

I am not a Flash developer. But with the exception of this past year, I've gone to Flash in the Can conferences and loved viewing what the Flash community has developed. There are some really beautiful works of art, proofs of concept, games, and even user interfaces developed in Flash.

That said, the only true mass market commercial successes involving Flash are solutions for which equivalent alternatives exist or are very very close to existing. HTML5 solves the video dilemma that Flash was a nice, elegant solution for. In 2004 we were stuck in the quagmire of "Click here for QuickTime, here for Windows Media, or here for RealPlayer". It had a nice 5 year run but now an alternative exists.

IMHO, Flex is Adobe's last stand. Until recently AJAX user interfaces have been a complete pain to deal with. For the record, I prefer the HTML/CSS/JS approach, but implementing an interface using any of the existing frameworks save for SproutCore or Cappucino is a completely different experience to what Flash/Flex developers are used to. Once frameworks like SproutCore and Cappucino truly get mass market acceptance in the developer community (e.g., probably in 5 years time when MS comes full circle with ASP.NET implementing a sane implementation of web forms only using the MVC approach) I think Flash will die.

Apple is correct in the same way they were correct about the death of the floppy disk. They're about 5-7 years ahead of the competition and until then you'll have people complaining about the lack of Flash just the same way you had folks complaining that an iMac didn't ship with a floppy drive in the year 2001 (long after Apple ditched it and long after they were appropriate for sharing files).

It's beautifully ironic that the biggest push against a proprietary de facto Web standard is coming from a system so proprietary that it can't be forced to support said web standard.

That said, I'm firmly in the camp of those who'd like to watch Flash wither at the vine.

Personally I'm fairly certain not having flash on the iPad will hurt flash usage far more then it hurts iPad sales, and I'm very happy about that.

I posted a comment to the blog this morning, suggesting that many users don't want Flash because of its poor performance on non-Windows platforms, and mediocre performance on Windows. Unsurprisingly, the comment wasn't approved.

Still, I stand by what I said: show us a Mac Flash plugin that doesn't use ridiculous amounts of CPU, that doesn't drain my laptop's battery or peg a core at 100% just to show a few ads on the page. Show me something that doesn't require browser vendors to work around just to prevent browser crashes, and then maybe, MAYBE, I'll consider Flash on the iPad a good idea.

How Adobe can continue to do such a half-assed job with the Flash player on Mac and Linux, and then act all surprised and indignant when Apple shuts them down, I'll never understand.

Oh, and as for their native app generation – they can compile Flash apps to native code that doesn't run well except on the iPhone 3GS. If they can't make native iPhone apps that are fast enough to use, what makes anyone think they can make a flash plugin that is?

I would love to put out a "ipad" like device that is completely flash based. The flash haters would hate it, but the many dev's can easily bring their apps to the device, as well as offer the ability to play thousands of already created games for free, watch millions of videos, and work with the hundreds of flash based web apps.

I'd buy it!

The only way such a device could profit in the market would be if it's version of Flash fixed all the performance and battery life problems that are keeping Flash off Apple's mobile devices. If the performance still sucked, then the device could only remain on the market if it was being sold at a loss, which could lead to anti-trust problems for Adobe (forcing their way into the mobile space the same way Microsoft forced their way into the video game console market). If the performance was fixed, then it seems to me that it would be in Adobe's best interest to try to get it on to Apple's mobile devices ASAP lest more open alternatives like HTML5 actually start to catch on.

I can't speak for all Flash haters, but a device where you choose to have Flash would be fine. The problem for many is that Flash's near ubiquity means if you don't have it, or don't want it, you lose access to things, many of which don't need Flash for any fundamental reason, just history and business and inertia lead us here.

This is why popular devices without Flash are good. They make people think "Is it worth using Flash to enhance this site for some portion of my audience? And if I can deliver the same content without Flash is the added value worth the extra time and effort?"

It would basically not have any battery life at all. So no, you wouldn't buy it.

I guess as these applications won't be run embedded in a browser that the Flex code won't be able to interactive with JavaScript - which is a shame. It looks like I will have to use HTML 5 Canvas to get OpenShapes (http://shap.es/docs) to work on this platform.

If the iPad makes developers stop using Flash, I'll pay any price Steve Jobs asks.

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