Flash Co-Creator Responds to Steve Jobs
coldhardflash.com
coldhardflash.com
Flash is less open than HTML5 in the browser, it churns the battery, it's slow, and it's unreliable. It crashes on the Mac often, it doesn't support hardware video decoding (yet) and there isn't a stable version released for ANY Arm platform yet. Adobe is so far behind it's not even funny, and the arguments that Apple should have allowed Flash from the start are ridiculous because three years later it's still not ready for prime-time.
As for app development, Flash produces much larger apps that run slower and use more memory than native iPhone apps. There's no way to provide a truly 'native' UI (CocoaTouch) so developers will have to re-invent everything in ways that doesn't work or look like regular iPhone apps. Like Adobe Air apps, Flash apps on the iPhone would end up working and looking different not only from other native apps, but from each other as well. Users would have to get used to different behaviour from every app, instead of having a uniform set of behaviours that they can quickly learn and internalize.
If you're going to complain about Flash on the iPhone, it would behoove you to specify which specific implementation of Flash you're referring to, and compare it just to the equivalent offering for the iPhone. Otherwise, you're just making confusing arguments that don't hold water.
This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82
And why should Apple devote resources to Flash when they're working on a technology that does the exact same thing in WebKit, canvas, etc..? Flash is not a standard, no one agreed to improve it or support it. They only agreed to support HTML/JS/CSS web standards. No one owes Adobe their support.
Microsoft could ignore Flash and push their own Silverlight instead. The lack of cooperation might make Flash inferior over time, but that's the risk Adobe took by not agreeing to become a standard when offered the chance.
Agreed. Why has it taken this long to develop a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for Linux? Yes it's a difficult software development task, but a company like Adobe should thrive on solving difficult software development tasks where its competitors fail. Apple certainly did. One of the main problems that I see with Flash (and Adobe in general) is they make closed platforms--that are bad! If they were closed and worked great they wouldn't have half as many detractors. If they were more open (so that other developers could fix them), same deal. Instead, they're closed and bad which is, in my view, the worst possible situation.
This is mainly why Adobe's marketing tactics are pushing me away from the platform - instead of making a legitimately good product, they're more interested in telling us how good it is.
If Flash is so great, just port it to the iPhone and install it (with ad-hoc distribution) to the 100 top journalists and bloggers, and see what they think.
It's kind of a holy war of pure capitalism in a way.
I'm not against flash because that happens to be the stance I get after choosing my preferred corporate side, I'm against flash because it's a pain in my side personally as an end user and that happens to be Apple's side so hey hello Apple.
Interesting perspective I haven't seen in other articles on this topic. By existing for years in popularity, its almost a required technology in order to truly maintain internet history, as would be the case with image formats for instance; though, granted, its arguable whether the majority of Flash content is truly worth maintaining in perpetuity.
While certainly it may be displaced as a choice for new content, can Flash ever truly "die" given that a likely sizable portion of the web will never be converted to anything else?
In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but because it's too good?
Disregarding the many legitimate but ultimately fixable gripes against it Flash is a great and above all versatile platform to develop on whether it's animation, rich media or applications. It's a massively streamlined path from idea to prototype to finished product - we can prototype games in day(s depending on the scope) and that can include animations, audio, cut scenes and everything else.
Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.
Regarding the "feel" of Flash's standard UI controls: I agree (and apparently, so does Adobe, as they continue to ship a completely new framework with just about every major release).
However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use. CPU and Battery are debatable issues, but Flash has serious memory management issues. On a device like the iPhone or iPad, with a max of 256mb of RAM, no swapping, and a browser that has trouble keeping a few "tabs" in memory, adding Flash to the mix seems like a recipe for disaster.
It'll be interesting to see how Android handles this. Hopefully it'll spawn some much-needed improvements to the Flash VM.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...
Most benchmarks show great improvements in performance and memory use between 10 and 10.1.
It's because this isn't REALLY about technical issues. If it really was, Apple could easily say "Sure, we'll include Flash if you give us a version that performs to our satisfaction under these scenarios, otherwise too bad", and that would be the bulk of the argument for not including Flash. I haven't seen much evidence of this happening.
Why don't we just get rid of Flash for good and end it all?