Adobe: Same code on five screens | Hacker News Reader

Adobe: Same code on five screens

androidcentral.com

32 pointsGarbage31 comments

Well, honestly, if it's the same "works" as AIR for Linux in its current state, then it might be nice demo, nice screen to watch, but that's all. You can try, for example, StatusNet Desktop application (from identi.ca), and it feels like a crap. It's painful to install, not only you need AIR runtime (that's quite understandable), but there's an installator (like with Windows apps) that puts something (actually a lot of something) somewhere to /opt, and then, the application feels very alien, doesn't work well, lock itself all the time, and it isn't even "pretty". After seeing few of them, I can say that at least on Linux, AIR applications are nowhere close to the native applications (or possibly even web ones inside the browser!) in almost any aspect. I wouldn't recommend any of them, neither the environment itself (though better written apps could make some difference).

groovesharks desktop version runs nicely though

Too much of this and we will see apps that are based on the lowest common denominator of all platforms. Developers will get lazy and you will get iOS apps that don't do anything when you rotate the screen, have tiny icons/graphics. Desktop apps with no keyboard shortcuts (wait...isn't that Adobe Air already?), menus, hover events, the list goes on.

A neat tech demo, but in reality hardly anything developed in this manner is going to be able to compete with anything native on the platform, and the resulting time saved will be revenue wasted.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. AWT, anyone?

Lots of people unimpressed here for some reason. I bet if this was an HTML 5 demo we'd all be falling all over ourselves to talk about how awesome it is, and we'd see some copies by the end of next week.

But because it's using flash...

I find this attitude kind of sad, this guy is demonstrating something that is the holy grail of cross platform development.

But why do you think the anti-flash sentiment exists in the first place?

When I bought my HTC Sense based phone, Flash was forced on me. I'd be generous to say I can play half the flash based videos I meet on the web. When I do manage to play something my phone heats up to a few degrees cooler than the sun and my battery drains at a rate of knots.

My desktop is a 64-bit, quad-core monster running Linux. Can I play full screen Flash videos? No. Throw a HD video at mplayer and it's runs as smoothly as silk and creates hardly a bump on my processor graph.

Holy grail of cross platform development? You must be kidding.

I wasn't aware that he was demonstrating a video in an flv wrapper. He was demonstrating an interactive app running on 6 different platforms running on a very wide variety of form factors.

I also can't play blue ray rips on my phone. Does that mean video isn't cross platform?

Thank you for exactly demonstrating my point above.

I really don't understand why everytime somebody brings up flash the response is "well video in flash sucks!"

So what?

Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform and so this video isn't in the slightest bit exciting.

Asking why people always bring up Flash video in these debates is like a robber asking why the breaking and entering has to be mentioned in his court case.

> Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform...

I think my counter question is then "doesn't perform compared to what?"

Compared to a natively compiled piece of software written in C or ASM? Yeah, it doesn't perform well at all.

Compared to Java? I'd say modern Java runtimes are faster in general.

Compared to Javascript? I'd like to see some benchmarks with modern runtimes like v8, but I'd wager that Flash (Actionscript) performs better.

Here's a rather old comparison benchmark. http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/

According to this, ActionScript 3 and Flash Player 9 were approaching Java Applet speed in many of the tests.

Here's a newer one http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/232

In this test, Safari, FF 3.5.2 and AS3 all have about the same runtime. Every other browser tested run 2-9x slower.

And another followup http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/534 The results are about the same.

Here's a very recent one (March 2010) with similar results. http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/

Flash performs about as well as the very best Javascript implementations out there, and far far better than most implementations of Javascript that live in the browsers that are actually being used in the world.

I understand your point, Adobe has provided some rather abysmal ports of Flash to platforms other than Windows. But on the platforms it has been ported to (no matter how flawed) it runs about as well as the best available implementation of Javascript on that platform.

As for video, Adobe, for some reason isn't offloading video decoding to your GPU. That could be problem of your platform, or a problem of Adobe. But just the same Javascript isn't rendering the video on your Linux box when you watch a video...you certainly wouldn't want that. Talk about bad performance!

But we aren't talking about video when we talk about HTML5 and Flash. Video is a separate and distinct problem. Flash didn't even support video until quite late in it's life cycle, it's an "oh yeah let's toss this in too" feature. We're talking about making interactive applications in those respective environments. And we're talking about those applications being cross platforms, running on multiple systems, on multiple platforms, in multiple form factors.

And for that, right now flash is the better platform, it performs about as well in raw computation as the very best Javascript engines, has a better development environment, is currently more cross platform than a similarly complex Javascript HTML 5 app, and is generally a more mature technology.

I can't even get a complex HTML 5 app to run the same on 3 different browsers on the same machine! Imagine targeting every major browser that run under Windows, OSX, Linux, iPhones, the iPad and Android devices with HTML5 technologies! It's simply not there yet.

But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere.

Remember though what happened when Apple told developers that they could only use web app for the iPhone? There was an uproar because developers---good developers at least---want to be able to make use of all the features that make a platform unique.

That's why we live Cocoa + HTML5, or Android SDK + HTML5, etc... If you want a common cross platform target use HTML5, if you want to make an app that feels like a good citizen on the platform and makes use of the latest innovations in said platform, you use the native SDK.

It's all about the right tool for the right job.

And Flash is inefficient, controlled by one company while at the same time not being a good native framework. Basically you got the worst of native SDK and the worst of HTML5 and put them together... and you expect people to be impressed by that???

> But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere.

I think you mean, "HTML is open and will be a standard." For now it's not much of a standard, is poorly implemented on the target platforms, and most certainly does not behave exactly the same across platforms.

I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that it us using Flash - a HTML5/JS demo of the same app would be equally unimpressive (although I think people generally have lower expectations when it comes to HTML/JS apps vs supposedly 'native' apps).

The entire point is that it's not the holy grail of cross platform development because in a real world application you would never be able to truly build-once and and deploy everywhere. Hell, if you've ever tried to deploy a Flash app across Windows/OS X/Linux you'll come across slight differences between those platforms (Windows is generally the best supported/least buggy, with OS X and Linux being second and third class citizens, respectively.)

I would rather have seen a demo where they took the same application logic (which admittedly for Reversi is very limited), and hooked it up to different versions of the user interface, demonstrating how much code you could reuse in a cross-platform manner while presenting native interfaces designed for each type of device.

I don’t think many people would be very impressed by HTML5 Reversi.

Gosh, I can feel my perfectionist side in big pain right now.

Adobe could have tried to pull a more subtle way than: "Welcome to lazy town!". So much for all those thinking the UI is important, and that maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS should be very important. :(

I find Adobe's strategy a bit naive (or more accurately only looking at the short-term). If you become the paladin of the lazy developers, you will get plenty of money at first, but you'll get plenty of bad reputation, and that can be really hard to get rid off (just as Microsoft).

> and that maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS should be very important.

I don't think maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS is very important. In fact I would go so far as to say that attempting to shoe horn novel interface requirements into local OS look-and-feel requirements is a detriment to interfaces.

A bad interface is a bad interface no matter what. Same goes for a good interface.

But I think that if you look around at most of the most successful pieces of software across all platforms (by pure volume), very few of them look anything like the prevailing look-and-feel guidelines for their host platform -- I'm talking about Office, Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, GarageBand, iLife...

iWork at least looks like a piece of software that conforms to the look-and-feel rules.

But then we get something like Aperture 3 which could be something running on just about any platform.

Most of the top iPhone apps could be running on anything with a big touch screen (and some of them are almost pixel identical across platforms): Pandora, Remote, Yelp, New York Times, Jott, Netflix, Shazam, etc.

People care about app consistency across platforms not local consistency with the OS.

Web apps blow the idea of local OS consistency out of the water. I won't even list million user web apps because we all know what those look like, and they pretty much look the same no matter the platform. Sites that try to "look like" some OS, end up looking rather silly to be perfectly honest.

No, maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS is not anywhere near the top of pretty much anybody's priority list these days.

I understand your point, but I think it's an exaggerate view. I am happy to admit that if there's a good reason a rule should be broken, then it's ok too: but you need to know what to do. Like all rules, once you understand them and know what you are doing, then it may make sense to break them.

But imagine a user that faces an interface that looks familiar but it's all different. Maybe the most external button in the title bar expand it. Or something that looks like a button has to be double clicked instead of clicked once. The point of having a consistent UI for the whole OS is that the user doesn't need to relearn a new interface for each product.

That said there are cases where the current UI is not good enough, maybe because the developer has a new, never done before idea. Then it's ok. Apple does it, for example, as do other mac developers.

The other exception is when it's a very specialised piece of software that is not for the masses but for a very specialised niche. I consider CAD applications, Photoshop and Aperture are like that. It's not _as_ useful to use the same look because they are software that has to be learnt anyway.

However... Firefox and Chrome do try as hard as possible to conform to the UI interface so I don't follow your examples there. And iTunes is loath by everyone as a awful piece of UI, so I wouldn't use it as an example either.

Similarly many people (at least on the Mac) hate the completely alien look Photoshop has, or Office. Microsoft did put a lot of effort with OS X to follow OS X conventions, and despite Photoshop not being a mass market product, Adobe has preferred to have a uniform cross-platform interface, and there's a lot of complaints for that.

So yes, if you have a novel interface requirement then you are more than welcome to break the OS standards. But otherwise if there's no need (from a user perspective) I don't think it's a good idea.

> Like all rules, once you understand them and know what you are doing, then it may make sense to break them.

I actually agree with this whole heartedly. I think we're on the same wavelength here. Just like all good literature violates supposed rules of good form for the language.

But I think that following OS conventions is the wrong set of rules to learn and target. There are already good interface guidelines. It just so happens that some OSs (OSX) do a particularly good job at following those guidelines.

It reminds me of this http://catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

The meta-problem here is that the configuration wizard does all the approved rituals (GUI with standardized clicky buttons, help popping up in a browser, etc. etc.) but doesn't have the central attribute these are supposed to achieve: discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next. Does your project have this quality?

A good interface can look like anything so long as it follows good GUI conventions. And fortunately most OSs follow pretty good GUI conventions so targeting the conventions of that platform are in a way following good GUI conventions transitively. I just wouldn't limit myself as to say that the measure of important should be following OS conventions when it should really be following interface conventions. The CUPS story I linked to brings that problem directly to the forefront. They're already doing the appropriate interface rituals with respect to their OS. The problem is that they are not doing the appropriate rituals with respect to good interface design.

(I also agree that some tools, like Photoshop, have absymal user interfaces. But I think it's because they don't follow good interface conventions in general, not because it doesn't look like an OSX app or a Windows app http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...).

Sort of a neat tech demo, but two main issues with it:

1) In the real world, you're essentially never going to have a desktop app with the same artwork/assets as a mobile app. You're going to have a high res version for the desktop (designed with mouse and keyboard controls in mind) and a lower res version for mobile (designed with touch screen controls in mind).

2) Reversi is an incredibly oversimplified example.

Still, a neat tech demo.

Re: assets, you might not actually if all the assets are vector. It's not that uncommon in Flash, since originally it was just a vector animation tool.

You should have different assets for very different resolutions anyway. E.g. small details look good on a desktop screen, but obstructive when scaled down to mobile resolution.

I know a few people doing Flash on embedded devices. They tend to steer away from vector graphics and lean toward bitmaps because there's a performance hit.

Vectors can be drawn on start-up then cached as bitmaps.

http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV...

I was referring more to the UI design aspects of it - on a small touchscreen, the interface design should be different than an application written for the desktop.

Larger touchscreen friendly buttons, smaller fonts, more tabular displays of data, etc.

That is actually pretty cool, and impressive that it's the exact same code.

Near the end of the video he says "There's no other technology available that lets you do this.". I'm not sure how accurate that is. I see no reason why this game couldn't have been made in html/javascript to run on all of those platforms from one codebase.

Could you do it with Mono too?

Or QT...

Or Java (I know Java's getting a bad rap these days, but for non JNI code, Java hasn't been half bad at developing code for multiple operating systems --- admittedly, Java doesn't go as far as the iPhone :/ and the jdk isn't exactly the same for Android)

edit: s/interfaces/operating systems. I don't know why I said the former...

Countdown to HTML/JS reversi on 5 screens in 3... 2...

Update: its already done (works for me on Chrome, ipad and iphone at least). http://davidbau.com/reversi/

Wonder whether there is any code of the kind "if (platform1) doA() else if (platform2) doB() ..." in there.

It would be better if rotating the screen adjusted everything except the orientation of the board, so you could turn the screen around to look at the board from another angle.

Hold on, didn't Jobs make all write native apps? How did this ever run on an iPhone or iPad?

"and the look and feel is the same across all platforms"

This is why you fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com