Flash Player exits Android
bbc.com
bbc.com
I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology.
It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
I think Adobe really believed they could strong-arm Apple on that. I think they were spoiled by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility at all costs[1], and thought that surely it would hurt Apple more than Adobe to let PS languish. I think they were so sure of this, in fact, that they made few arrangements for the contingency that Apple might just call their bluff. So when that happened, they had an uphill battle to fight.
[1] This story comes to mind: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/
Recent? I don't use Adobe tools one way or another, but recent is hardly the word I'd choose. It's been, what, over a decade now, or near enough to make no matter[1]. Yes, this starts with Macromedia, but it isn't like Adobe isn't working with a group to build useful tools. Just because they support their own format doesn't mean they aren't supporting other formats.
This doesn't mean they only focused on standards compliance. They are a tools company, and they build tools for people to use.
So, do you really mean HTML?
[1] http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/ - Note the section "Release of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX."
That wasn't entirely their fault. Apple actually did promise a 64-bit Carbon and included it in developer previews, but yanked it shortly before Leopard shipped.
That is true, but on the other hand it looks to me that try to scare developers away by charging them for using it (That includes that they have to open their books, who likes to do that?). I still think they are pretty clueless. Also I wonder why I should use Flash for platform independed game development, steam for Linux seems to be around the corner.
Yet, they still managed to do it before Apple got around to making iTunes use Cocoa ("oh, the irony", right?). The reality of the situtuation is that sometimes, even for flagship products, even for first-party products, sometimes portability is a critical concern, and Cocoa's reliance on Objective-C makes it very difficult to nigh-unto-impossible to not simply end up with tons of code duplication.
When using Cocoa, you will find yourself constantly needing your data in the form of some random Objective-C classes. Carbon, on the other hand, stores all of its core data structures in C objects defined by a library called CoreFoundation.
This library, CoreFoundation, is something that you actually will find a copy of along with your Windows version of iTunes in the form of CoreFoundation.dll. Along with another few easily ported C libraries, this allowed iTunes to maintain the same networking and storage backends on Windows and Mac OS X.
On mobile, users love apps and distributing and supporting them is far, far easier.
Further, flash runs so poorly on mobile devices, and has for so long, that anyone serious about their "premium copy-protected video" jumped-ship for a dedicate app years ago.
So it doesn't matter what Adobe does. No-one is going back to mobile Flash at this point. Providers' app investments have been made, the same source content (h.264 video) is used in both places, and they get far more out of their own dedicated app.
Further, Adobe's money is made via content creation apps. Flash was a means to that end, but they don't need it. They can still make money off production tools, particularly while people still need to maintain a content pipeline that churns out resources that work on mobile and desktop.
Maybe in the cost benefit analysis it would be better to devote time and resources on HTML toolsets.
I do think they really tried, for a while, but it just didn't work.
Adobe employees created Photoshop 20 years ago, and was tremendously successful until Flash died in the last five years.
Flash and Dreamweaver were acquisition s.
Prior to that Adobe's business was based on PostScript, and they developed Illustrator to take advantage of PostScript's capabilities. Then they licensed Photoshop.
It initially seemed like a good thing for Android to support Flash but as time as gone on it's become apparent that the end result is a lot of sites produced a premium iOS experience and sub-par Flash based one for Android. Whether this flawed experience was due to limitations in the platform or lack of effort on behalf of the service I wouldn't like to say but it happened either way.
Hopefully now with Flash unequivocally end-of-life'd (on mobile at the very least) we might see Android devices being served the same experience as iOS devices.
Contrast this with flash - Lots of flash apps require vast amount of memory, download not fit for mobile, and most importantly clicks done with mouse. For all other cases it's fine.
Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
I agree about the difficult this poses. Given the kind of wide range of Android devices, simple content protection might not really be possible. Verifying a device as Android doesn't really tell you much about the kind of hardware that it is running on, so for business types this kind of uncertainty makes them unwilling to try alternatives.
Big Content will not really care about Android until it is easy enough and/or profitable enough to service. Given that Android doesn't have an easy way to implement DRM schemes right now, it is unlikely that many companies will be rushing forward to work on Android until some easier solutions are available.
I suspect that this is because iPhones are "cool" and someone high up just demanded that it should happen.
Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs.
That's certainly true for supportability. It's easy to test and confirm that it works on the 2 or 3 iphone models, less so for all the Android devices. That's potentially bad from a PR point of view.
For drm-esque security it makes little difference though. The 'attack' in this case was from people running a script and pretending to be an iPhone, not from people running unauthorised software on iPhones themselves.
I know flash is dying but unfortunately a number of sites (mostly video sites) which I frequent regularly have not made a full (if any) conversion meaning there is a whole sector of the internet that is not accessible from my tablet.
As I bought it as a media consuming device, I expected less of a harsh cut from Adobe and Google.
I suppose that's why he's using development builds of Firefox - they have their own engine. Opera would work as well.
It's not as stable as the desktop version, but I don't see any problems with the quality of video.
(Off topic: now that I mentioned it all, it felt like we have a lot of hardware, but then I realized altogether I payed less than the cost of a high end laptop for it.)
Of course, that doesn't mean much and I always have a Windows virtual machine running for just these scenarios.
EDIT: That's probably why I can't convince myself to put Linux on my desktop as the primary OS. I just don't want to take the time to compile github scripts or scour the Internet for drivers/workarounds/fixes to make all of the basic computing functions I take for granted on Win7 work.
But, different strokes for different folks: and choice is usually never a bad thing. Of course, I learned long ago not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Personally, I have a few Windows virtual machines and an old, cheap Windows XP laptop around for those rare occasions as well as a Windows 7 dual boot install for .Net development.
However (again, anecdotally), I've not had a problem with using Linux day-to-day. Nothing has been difficult and I appreciate the power the CLI affords me.
I gave up.
apt-get install youtube-dl
youtube-dl URL
pacman -S youtube-dl
There is no need for Flash. There never was. With a UNIX-like system you can download any video and play it at your leisure. No slow starts, hiccups, timeouts, or whatever annoyances people tolerate with Flash.
The video is a file. You get the file and play it. Simple.
I would guess there are some video formats that Windows Media Player, not to mention other Windows video players, will still choke on. This does not happen with Mplayer (which is also available for Windows, but is truly a UNIX-style program).
And of course audio can be extracted from any video. Youtube is like a giant Napster. But the mp3's are hidden in flv/mp4/3gp/webm/etc, and Youtube has better lawyers.
My youtube downloader is 30 lines of sed and can use any tcp client (wget, curl, whatever -- there are so many). It takes me about 15 minutes to write and could probably be smaller. But there are plenty of more complex solutions, e.g., there's a nice one done in Lua called quvi.
It is trivial to set up a server that takes the youtube watch?v= url and returns the download url for the video file.
Obviously this probably makes some people uncomfortable. But this is how the web works. Anything that is uploaded can be downloaded. IMO, it's more respectable to try to be honest than lying to people that video can be "protected" from download by using some convoluted Flash scheme.
Flash is fading into obsolescence. Youtube is getting stronger every day. And the lesson from that is clear, at least to me.
And as for all thos people who love the concept of "streaming", youtube still uses progressive _download_.
If I want "streaming" I download to a file on a ramdisk and let Mplayer read from that file as the download progresses. With a fast connection, using ffmpeg to do the download will allow you to do transcoding on the fly if you need it. Mplayer gives flawless playback, every time.
Can we say the same for Windows?
I noticed that mine did. It was impossible to ignore. My tablet would frequently become unresponsive when I went to sites that had Flash content. Or sites with Flash content would be unusable because they relied on mouseovers in a way that doesn't work with touchscreen devices.
After a week I got around to figuring out how to disable Flash on the device. At which point my desire to give up on the Android tablet and get an iPad after all diminished considerably.
Lets hope Adobe focus on HTML5 tools.
What for? Any developer for Flash now sees the sign on the wall. It will not die off, but it will become niche/irrelevant.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243529/the_beginning_of_the_e...
"The things Adobe is working on for desktops--advanced 3D gaming and premium copy-protected video--already exist in mobile through native apps and HTML5. As mobile and desktop platforms merge, Flash Player will get overtaken."
Most of their customers are people that had their first page made by a friend, nephew, acquaintance, cheap freelancer - and now realize that nobody uses it and that people don't find them on Google.
(here's a guy who 2 years ago said that flash is effectively dead long live html5 video)
pps. i won't really miss flash. but i do miss the time where every site had h264 vids up