Motorola Xoom will ship without Flash support
engadget.com
engadget.com
Probably noone can imagine YouTube or banner ads without Flash technology nowdays, but new devices are coming to market where Flash isn't best choice anymore. Just as floppy disks served world in it's days but are now replaced with USB keys or broadband connections and clouds storages so it looks like Flash had it's days and will be replaced by other solutons (like H.264 codec).
Putting Flash on Android tablets seems like they want to compete "has flash" VS. iPad's "does not have Flash", but that doesn't really serve to users.
It goes the way nature has invented long time ago and it's called evolution - where old dies (even very best of it's time) away and new takes over.
Regardless of what Adobe says, Flash does not work on mobile devices as of 2011.
Go read the HN guidelines, too BTW.
Granted, Apple probably throws a lot of hardware at those events in order to make the tech. look good. So, not an objective appraisal by any means, but it's worked well for me.
The truth is, Adobe's engineering incompetence aside, Flash is a lot, lot better to make programs with than HTML5. Silverlight is a lot, lot better to make programs with than HTML5. Java, C#, Python, Ruby, C++ are all, as a whole, a lot, lot better programming languages than Javascript.
Imagine replacing DVDs with 8 tracks. That's what's happening. It's a perverse scenario, but I can't understand how you can say that it's evolution, evolution is about progress, not regression.
It's Adobe's own fault for neglecting the Mac and Linux for so long, crashing browsers, etc., added with the general menace that PDFs are too and Silverlight was just too late, but let's not pretend the technology's better. It's pretty pathetic and the snail's pace progress of html5 is embarrassing.
And where's ECMAScript 5? What the hell has happened to that, it seems to have dropped off the planet!
Your comment isn't very coherent.
-- Other than the fact that "better" is entirely subjective, how many modern web applications in widespread use are based on Flash rather than JS+HTML5? Gmail, facebook, twitter, google docs: no flash. Youtube: flash only for the video codec, not functionality.
-- "ActionScript is a dialect of ECMAScript": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript So what language features were you thinking of that make ActionScript/Flash better than Javascript?
-- Security holes in Flash vs. HTML5? hmm...
-- HTML5 on 64bit Linux? Check. Flash? still buggy.
Trains were not replaced by faster trains, but by airplanes.
Good First class travel experience from Europe to Australia will not be replaced by Excelent First class experience, but rather by Suborbital flight (even without meal) which will bring you there in 2hours.
I don't trust Motorola on anything anymore. Their hardware was pretty good, but their service and communication with their customers is abysmal.
And what does it have to justify it's $100 price premium over the iPad?
I think it also has two cameras, a significantly faster CPU, other features like that. Really though, the main thing it has going for it is Honeycomb. Most people will be very impressed with it after playing with a demo model in a store. It's much more futuristic and cooler than the now-old iOS icon-grid paradigm.
The obsession with emulating a desktop/laptop experience is mainly the domain of those of us who are already experts in that experience; for average users who may generally dislike the "real computer", it's not a selling point.
* Dual-core CPU
* Two cameras
* 4x the RAM (1GB)
* Expandable memory (SD slot)
* Supposedly 4G LTE data
Many of these may be more even when the iPad 2 comes out, but we'll have to wait and see.
Reportedly the memory is upgradable as well.
Steve Jobs and others are right: Flash apps are not meant for touch screens, or mobile devices in general. I miss it only a little when I'm using iOS.
Money quote: Adobe will offer Flash Player 10.2 pre-installed on some tablets and as an OTA download on others within a few weeks of Android 3 (Honeycomb) devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom.
Edit: About Youtube: Yes. You can go there and watch the videos just fine. I think you're (transparently) redirected to the YouTube app.
This is part of the reason Flash was blacklisted from iOS: features have to wait on Adobe’s schedule to be enabled, instead of being available out-of-box.
Google isn't holding back on major OS updates because Adobe isn't ready.
And it does. And 3rd party plugins that Apple has no control over reduce the quality of that experience, increase support costs, and generally add instability.
Adobe's software used to be indespensable to me, but now there's Pixelmator, which carries the true (old) Adobe legacy. Does anyone know if Pixelmator is going to make a vector tool? If they do, lots of designers will be completely Adobe-free!
I think Adobe absorbed a bad corporate culture when they acquired Macromedia, and that better accounts for why they're making such bad products now. On top of this, Adobe will never be a successful platform vendor because they suck at making platforms, and the market has too many platforms already.
Will competition somehow make Adobe good again? It might, but it's by no means certain. The long-term alternative for them is failure in the marketplace.
Signs of things turning around for Adobe will be when they: > Make HTML5 the primary target for all Adobe software (make authoring for Flash not the default). > Dump Air. > Make the new Acrobat a slim wrapper around HTML5, facilitating a transition away from Acrobat toward standards. > Stop trying to be cross-platform. Use native UI in all software. Dump the installer on platforms where installers aren't standard (Mac OS X). > make completely new creative applications for iOS. An iOS-based desktop computer is probably coming. If Adobe was smart, it would try to make great native tools for creative professionals again. > Fire the executives they picked up from Macromedia and lay off legacy staff.