Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacharypinter | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

>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.

Agreed on MXML+binding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com