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Comment by mcav | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has developed both for Flash and Cocoa: Yes, Flash (and its IDE) is better suited for game development. (2D, sprite-based games, that is. Not 3D.) That said, Flash is horrible for the kinds of programs you would typically use Cocoa for (ones with UI controls, data, etc). Flash's UI controls look and act glitchy. Not a good experience, for developers or users. Flex die-hards may feel otherwise, but I try to stay far away from Flex and any other Flash-based UI-centric apps.

Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.

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I've found Flex, particularly MXML+Binding, to be one of the nicest GUI frameworks I've developed with.

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.

10.1 is not just a port, it's a bunch of changes that were made specifically for mobile devices - including suspending execution state, reducing performance of player instances when in hidden tabs/outside of view, hardware acceleration, better reuse of bitmap instances (targetting lower memory), and a bunch of other stuff. I'm not the one to say how successful they were with that, but apparently they had "much-needed improvements" in mind alright.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...

Most benchmarks show great improvements in performance and memory use between 10 and 10.1.

Agreed on MXML+binding.

>However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use.

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.

But isn't this pretty much what Jobs said in his rant. To quote: "We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it." The way I see it, "we have ... asked" implies Apple were at least somewhat open to the idea to include Flash support.

I stand (partially) corrected. This doesn't seem to be the main argument in all of the stories (see, for example, "freedom from porn"), but there has been a lot of noise in the discussion, so point taken.

I was thinking about games and (potentially design-heavy) simple apps (quizzes, educational apps &c.) mostly.

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).

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