Adobe admits testing Flash Player for Lion on ONE MAC | Hacker News Reader

Adobe admits testing Flash Player for Lion on ONE MAC

obamapacman.com

15 pointsApple-Guy13 comments

This kind of invective has no place on HN. While valid points can be made about the lack of testing of flash on lion, the ill-supported headline, and repeated use of "FAIL" in the post only show laziness on the part of the author, not Adobe.

Adobe: "based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration."

So is it more likely that Adobe conducts testing only with identical computers? Or did it based its premature conclusion on a very low sample rate?

And how did Adobe came to the conclusion with the wrong OS version anyway?

Neat headline ... except Adobe saying that the problem relates to one configuration doesn't mean they only tested with one configuration. It may just mean they never correctly correlated the cause of the problem to the system configuration until now.

If adobe tested with more than one GPU config in the 5 months Lion was available to developers, Adobe would not have posted the original statement of Lion disabling Flash GPU acceleration.

So I guess by that logic, now that they've stated that the problem is isolated to one configuration, it means that they've tested with EVERY configuration of that Apple has ever come out with. Good work for one day! Companies are made of people. People make mistakes.

How interesting Adobe keeps getting kicked, especially from the Apple crowd. It seems just a decade ago, people bought Mac's explicitly for using Adobe products. Not defending either side: I just think it's an interesting turn of events.

No. Macs used to provide a better environment for using Adobe products, including OS-level color profiles, a ton of printing stuff, and most importantly: Mac-only fonts and resources. An agency could amass upwards of 200k of fonts, and not really be blamed to avoid transferring to a Windows platform that would save them 500 per machine, every three years.

The difference now is that a lot of web dev’s use Macs strictly for the UX: since Flash’s performance negatively—in such a severe way—degrades the experience, it’s become loathed, even as it’s been tied into Adobe’s own apps as UI chrome. If Adobe had respected the UX of a Mac—including all the low-level coding things that form the basis of UX, there’d be a lot more sympathy towards their plight.

For me, it’s like watching the fall of Quark all over again.

To a degree. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple for the second time and the company was going under, he actually made it a point in keynote presentation that the collaboration with Adobe (especially as far as Photoshop was concerned) should be intensified. A few years later, the CEO of Adobe appeared on a Stevenote and he was extremely enthusiastic about Apple.

I'm not sure what happened then, but one factor might have been Apple developing their own software to replace Photoshop, Aftereffects and other creative tools. That couldn't have been good for their relationship.

From the user perspective, dumping Flash is still a good idea. If only web video didn't rely on it, everyone could just uninstall it or at least they'd all run a Flash blocker plugin that was enabled by default in browsers. So I guess the hate triangle between Apple, Adobe and their users built up to the point where Adobe staff just go "whatever" when there's a technical problem on the Mac.

Adobe's best bet is now the Windows world, where there are much less viable alternatives to its creative suite and where there are less geeks around who like to install Flash blockers. It also makes sense from a business perspective as the Windows platform seems to be much more enamored with keeping legacy apps functioning. Compared to that, stuff for OS X just stops working when the next big version arrives.

Remember Adobe purchased macromedia, they didn't create flash.

Umm, you can have many macs with only a single GPU configuration - if they are all identical models. Similarly, you can have one copy of Lion and install it on multiple machines (AFAIK). There is nothing in their statement that proves that they were only using one mac.

The better question is, why did Adobe test with only ONE GPU config?

Is it: Adobe can only buy and test one computer config, but test on dozens of computers with that config, or they were too lazy to test on multiple computers?

Heck, I got 4 computers with 5 GPU in this room with me right now.

"Adobe Laziness", that pretty much sums it all up

Is it even laziness or just pure incompetence? We must be careful, if we say mean things they may take away out 64bit builds for Linux, again, for the third time. And then bring them back again.

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