Smokescreen - a Flash player written in Javascript and HTML5
smokescreen.us
smokescreen.us
I wouldn't be surprised to see HTML5 outperform equivalent Flash content in a year or so.
the Actionscript VM is open source. I remember there is an LLVM implementation days ago.
Regardless, with HTML5 you have all the benefits of an OSS rendering engine where performance can be improved by individual implementors (eg, Apple improving WebKit on A4/ARM) or groups of developers with similar interests (eg, Google/Apple/other contributors to WebKit for x86). Where as with Adobe's Flash plugin, you're pretty much reduced to hoping or praying that Adobe will fix problems relevant to your interests.
In other words, the performance may suck now in some demos, but the situation is better than relying on Adobe... for some companies anyway.
this, my friend, is why HTML5 is never a competitor to Flash.
Write once, debug everywhere, hell I'll just stick with Flash.
But by banning Flash, Apple is pushing advertisers to HTML/Javascript, which ruins the experience for those marginal, blissful few who use Flash blockers on other platforms. Really, you couldn't have asked for a better indicator, short of a mandatory <lowvaluecontent> tag. :)
In an ideal world, it would be open-source and locally-installable, a la Privoxy.
In a slightly-less-than-ideal world, it'll be hosted somewhere "out there". It will probably be wonderful for 6-12 months, then bog down as everyone starts using it, then the site owners will use it to start serving ads themselves. At which point their only hope for any kind of redemption will be if they've called the service some variant on 'samsara': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saṃsāra
People who make things deserve to get paid. If you don't like what they make, fine, don't read it.
If you try and rip other people's content sponsors with a bayesian content classifier they'll be more likely to have subtler 'product placement' style sponsorship to avoid your ad ripper. They may also have things that appear as ads to your rip app that are required to navigate or read the site. However, rather than avoid a technical war, why not consider either going somewhere else or accepting that content you like is made by people who like being compensated for it?
A few reasons:
If the creator deserves to get paid, he can put up a pay wall and we can do business or I can go elsewhere. If that basic business model doesn't work, that is a strong hint that something is fundamentally broken about advertising.
Also, you pose it as giving me a choice of going elsewhere. How does that work when given a link on HN or in an email or whatever? On some sites, there's an ad right away and I can click a link to skip the ad, I can click "back," or I can look at the ad if it's interesting. Fine.
But if ads are embedded in content willy-nilly, I am blasted with them before I get to make the choice of whether to read the content. Again, there's something broken about the model if the content producer can't set up a simple gate where I can choose whether to do read their content+ads or go elsewhere.
Finally, ads in content are a deeply broken model. The reason Google is worth a zillion dollars is that ads at the moment of search are hitting me when I'm making a decision and they are providing value, even if they are biased. Ads in most types of content are hitting me when I'm not trying to make a decision.
There are some exceptions, and I'll bet they survive. An ad in StackOverflow for a programming tool that matches the answer to a question might work when I'm trying to solve a problem. If sites like that do a good job of working with ad networks to deliver the right ads, they might survive.
Almost all other content-based ads are going to continue to git shriller and shriller as they try to maximize dwindling attention. The attention is dwindling precisely because they are trying to work around a deeply broken interaction.
I am pretty sure everyone would choose <highvaluecontent> tag for SEO.
yes, it's all still being improved and the engines will be a lot faster in a few years, but how about first creating a true alternative, then start bashing flash.
I don't mind getting rid of flash, but please, lets try to move forward with technology at the same time. Not two steps back, just to remove a competitor so we end up at the same point three years later...
Also worth noting that in one of their demos they say that it only supports up to a "sizable subset of Flash 8" for playback currently. From: http://smokescreen.us/demos/intro.html
Flash was invented out of a need for artists to be able to create animations on the web. Now there is a back catalog of Flash content which is losing a home. A swf player of some kind is needed to preserve that content. Someone had to build this.
It would be great.
Some of us would like to play Flash games on the iOS.
That, and the porn.
That is all.
It will be interesting to see how the performance works with more complex games.
Tell me you're not comparing the decompression and rendering of a video against a simple animation.
Your first comment expressed very little. It would have been better to simply upvote the thread; saying "smart" or "I agree" or "good idea" tells us nothing more than your vote would have. It makes for boring reading, and as such, it gets downvoted as a form of discouragement.
Complaining about downvotes makes for even more boring reading. Instead of complaining, learn from the experience. If you want to express "I agree" or "good idea", just click the little up arrow. Only post a comment if you have something substantial to say.