IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life
adobegripes.tumblr.com
adobegripes.tumblr.com
A lot of people at Adobe use Macs. A lot of people at Adobe work on Flash player. They don't just sit around screwing off all day; Flash on OS X is lousy but there isn't much they can do about it.
I don't know why Apple does it. Stability? Stubbornness? You're right though. If Apple won't let Flash player work well on OS X, they sure as hell aren't going to let it run on iPhone.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=5
See this Adobe PDF for an explanation about Linux: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote...
What Adobe probably means by "restricting tech" is that Apple does not allow alternative code interpreters on their device, as to not facilitate AppStore circumvention.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote...
http://gizmodo.com/5407204/benchmarked-the-quad+core-i7-imac...
> I think Xbench, which hasn't been updated in years, is a solid benchmark for that old program that you depend on but has been long abandoned or at least ignored by its developer.
A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.
Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...
Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on within 5 minutes -- it's horrible.
This "30 minute battery life" smells fishy. It is a friend of friend of a friend who woke up one day in his hotel room with his kidney removed and his iPhone battery drained.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsSHlCDIzNg&feature=relat...
and watched the resource use. While the video was playing, the minimum CPU use from Safari was 48%, with frequent spikes above 60%. As soon as I closed the tab, CPU use dropped to about 2% and stayed there. On a laptop with a full charge and power-management profiles to optimize usage you can get away with this; on a power-constrained mobile device you most certainly can't.
Compared to what? Silverlight uses a bit more CPU time when playing MP4 videos compared to Media Player or VLC but about the same as Google Chrome. It may be different on OS X. How does Silverlight's video performance on OS X compare to native Quicktime for example (which is relatively slow on Windows)?
My Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 9.10 uses about 5-10% CPU at most for flash video, and usually a little less for flash-only sites. The only problem is that when it crashes the browser is sans-flash until you restart it.
Not optimal.
Do you believe that this opinion both motivates and justifies Apple's refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone?
I realize that Flash is annoying, and of course I'd expect to be able to turn it off on any reasonable platform---most of the time, I really don't want it. But when I do, let me make a big-boy decision about battery life versus usefulness all by myself.
Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?
Yes, I am under that impression. If Apple shipped with Flash, people would constantly complain about the battery life of the phone. I have been working on user interfaces for a couple of years now, and I can tell you that my user interface code is constantly at fault. Every segfault, random pause, incorrect data, data corruption, missing file, and plugin bug gets filed under "user interface" by anyone who is not directly part of the project.
Now, its possible that you're the guy who would spend a week testing battery life under various conditions to determine that Flash was at fault. Maybe you would publish all of this to your blog, and 1,000 people would read it and agree. Even if these were both true, the other 21 million iPhone users would be bitching about battery life all day long - and they would not care that Flash is at fault - and they certainly would not be able to live without it now that they spend 29 of their 30 minutes of battery life in FarmVille.
Apple has no control over Flash, and Flash sucks on every platform except maybe Windows. If Flash really mattered, one of the other smartphones would support it and make the iPhone obsolete. This is what competition is for. What we need is more diversity and interoperability in this industry. Flash on every device is not diversity.
And Apple's walled garden does nothing to promote either diversity or interoperability.
Separate your dislike of Flash from your reasoning on this subject for just a moment. What if it were Sun wanting to deploy a JVM for the iPhone? How about a .NET CLR? These certainly promote both interoperability and diversity.
Now, would Apple allow them? Why not? Because they'd impact battery life? Hardly. They'd disallow them because it would loosen their grip on the iPhone software ecosystem. The bottom line is, Apple's business model with respect to the App Store relies on being the only game in town.
Downvote away. No matter that I'm on topic and making reasonable, if contentious, points. My karma isn't so important to me that I'll let y'all's fanboiism gets in the way of actual discussion.
> And Apple's walled garden does nothing to promote either diversity or interoperability.
I want diversity of full device stacks. Many competing operating systems. Microsoft's business plan and the previously high cost of computers has convinced people that hardware and software are separate things. Apple's take is that they are not - they come together to form one device. Apple produces devices that while internally sealed, interoperate with well understood file formats like HTML, Doc, PDF, and MP3/AAC. This is better for the consumer, who honestly shouldn't care how these complicated systems work.
> What if it were Sun wanting to deploy a JVM for the iPhone?
Well thats great, they can, just like Adobe can release Flash for the iPhone [ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ ]. The issue at hand is whether MobileSafari has a Flash plugin. I personally do not care for one, and Adobe hasn't gone the extra mile to make it compelling.
> The bottom line is, Apple's business model with respect to the App Store relies on being the only game in town.
Silly, unsubstantiated remarks aren't as interesting as they sound in your dorm room. Apple doesn't need to make any money at all from the AppStore, they're sitting on a $40b pile of gold. From what I can see, they're trying to make a great product, and everyone else who failed to do so on their own wants a piece.
Snarky, wildly inaccurate drivel doesn't lend you any much-needed credibility. If you're unaware of Apple's obsession with lock-in, I'm impressed you can get an internet connection from whatever planet you live on.
Apple doesn't need to make any money at all from the AppStore
Oh really? They just take a 30% cut because they're kind-hearted? True, it's not a huge chunk of their revenue, but it's a very high margin business and you can be damn sure they will fight to grow it as much as possible.
Moreover, your comment about a "pile of gold" is naive. Most companies in the tech sector, Apple included, are expected by investors to maintain a "growth" attitude. If you don't believe me, look at the incidence of dividend payments in high-tech companies versus the market as a whole. Sitting on a huge pile of gold does little to nothing for your stock price[1]; investors want to see up-and-to-the-right. This is a simple, if unfortunate, fact: Apple is on the prowl for every new revenue stream they can find, especially those that print margin dollars, because they must always appear to be a growth company, even though you and I know this is a noble lie at best.
[1] other than establish the "ground floor" valuation for your stock; point is, it does relatively little to drive investment when, by comparison, your peers are shoveling their cash hordes into idiotic buybacks and low-return R&D just to keep the illusion that they're taking over the world. I have substantial experience with this phenomenon at the company I work for.
While it is useful for web apps, JavaScript in Mobile Safari is not sufficient for creating the vast majority of standalone applications.
Flash, while hardly a world-class systems programming language, is a step beyond JavaScript in several respects.
Most importantly, it is more consistently cross-platform compatible, meaning that I could actually take advantage of preexisting Flash applets on the iPhone, whereas oftimes when designing a JS app one must consider a far wider range of discrepancies between platforms. In other words, given a randomly-selected JS applet and a randomly-selected Flash applet from all available to me, the probability is greater that the Flash applet will be correct in an officially-supported Flash VM than that the JS applet will be correct in Mobile Safari.
Nonetheless, it's still totally believable. But it probably represents almost no optimization on their end. If I can play a 3d multiplayer game over 3G for an hour without the phone crapping out, a think some vector graphics are surmountable. There just has to be a desire there. And clearly Apple doesn't desire to be supporting a proprietary standard when HTML5 does the same thing in a completely open way.
Now, we just need a Flash (the big desktop creation app) equivalent that spits out HTML5 code. Anyone working on that?
Some of the most intensive games out there are using about 100% of the iPhones power and still get several hours of battery life. Even if the app used some pathological combination of CPU/GPU/Disk/Network resources you wouldn't get it down to 30 minutes,
I was just discussing this exact idea with a friend yesterday (although it's something I personally wouldn't be interested in). If done correctly, you could backend to HTML5+JS+CSS and still emit SWF for legacy support. Would certainly be interesting.
Unless there is some compelling reason to use Flash though, open tech (like AJAX) wins every time.
So why can't we just admit that what we really want is a way to play those other video formats (especially ON2, you porn lovers) on the iPhone?
I find it a little dubious that Flash would even be competition for the app store. The whole reason the app store and the iTunes store are so successful is because it's incredibly easy and, much to the chagrin of some people on here, centralized. Joe Schmoe can easily download and install a new app on his shiny new iPhone pretty easily with the app store. He knows where to go for new apps. That won't necessarily be the case with Flash.
I bet there's more to the story than performance issues, but I'd imagine it has more to do with Adobe producing a crappy product than it does with any of this nonsense. Apple thrives on the user experience being good, end-to-end, and I'd imagine they'll outright reject anything that sullies that.