Flash Co-Creator Responds to Steve Jobs(coldhardflash.com)
coldhardflash.com
Flash Co-Creator Responds to Steve Jobs
http://coldhardflash.com/2010/05/flash-co-creator-jonathan-gay-responds-to-steve-jobs.html
27 comments
Amazing how groupthink works. Even people that don't work at Adobe now refuse to see the issue from the other side's perspective.
This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82
And why should Apple devote resources to Flash when they're working on a technology that does the exact same thing in WebKit, canvas, etc..? Flash is not a standard, no one agreed to improve it or support it. They only agreed to support HTML/JS/CSS web standards. No one owes Adobe their support.
Microsoft could ignore Flash and push their own Silverlight instead. The lack of cooperation might make Flash inferior over time, but that's the risk Adobe took by not agreeing to become a standard when offered the chance.
This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82
And why should Apple devote resources to Flash when they're working on a technology that does the exact same thing in WebKit, canvas, etc..? Flash is not a standard, no one agreed to improve it or support it. They only agreed to support HTML/JS/CSS web standards. No one owes Adobe their support.
Microsoft could ignore Flash and push their own Silverlight instead. The lack of cooperation might make Flash inferior over time, but that's the risk Adobe took by not agreeing to become a standard when offered the chance.
This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without Apple's help. Like http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82
Agreed. Why has it taken this long to develop a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for Linux? Yes it's a difficult software development task, but a company like Adobe should thrive on solving difficult software development tasks where its competitors fail. Apple certainly did. One of the main problems that I see with Flash (and Adobe in general) is they make closed platforms--that are bad! If they were closed and worked great they wouldn't have half as many detractors. If they were more open (so that other developers could fix them), same deal. Instead, they're closed and bad which is, in my view, the worst possible situation.
Agreed. Why has it taken this long to develop a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for Linux? Yes it's a difficult software development task, but a company like Adobe should thrive on solving difficult software development tasks where its competitors fail. Apple certainly did. One of the main problems that I see with Flash (and Adobe in general) is they make closed platforms--that are bad! If they were closed and worked great they wouldn't have half as many detractors. If they were more open (so that other developers could fix them), same deal. Instead, they're closed and bad which is, in my view, the worst possible situation.
It's the same as the political party noise machines (primarily Republican) - keep repeating a falsehood and enough people might believe it to be true to serve your ends.
This is mainly why Adobe's marketing tactics are pushing me away from the platform - instead of making a legitimately good product, they're more interested in telling us how good it is.
This is mainly why Adobe's marketing tactics are pushing me away from the platform - instead of making a legitimately good product, they're more interested in telling us how good it is.
He makes good points about video codecs, but it's nonsensical to imply that a 486 could handle anything like modern Flash usage.
Not a chance. I remember PCs from that era struggling when playing MP3s.
I'm getting tired of those discussions. From Apple's point of view, Flash is like MSDOS: they don't want to support antiquated apps.
If Flash is so great, just port it to the iPhone and install it (with ad-hoc distribution) to the 100 top journalists and bloggers, and see what they think.
If Flash is so great, just port it to the iPhone and install it (with ad-hoc distribution) to the 100 top journalists and bloggers, and see what they think.
It is tiresome now in itself. It is a far more interesting topic to look at from a different point of view though. It is amazing how people will ally themselves zealously when really the sides they are picking are corporate entities vying for future profit margins in one way or another.
It's kind of a holy war of pure capitalism in a way.
It's kind of a holy war of pure capitalism in a way.
Except it isn't just between apple and adobe. I wrote a little browser called Arora and constantly had to deal with the pink elephant in the room that was flash. While my browser ran good on arm boxs, tvs, and random embedded hardware eventually those who were messing around with arora on embedded hardware would come and ask me how to run flash at which point my only option was to tell them to give lots of $$$ to adobe who may or may not give them something they can use (assuming x86 or arm to begin with!). On the desktop it wasn't much better. Flash would cause crashes, behave stupid and without the source it made things harder then it should have been. Not to mention memory leaks. I quickly added FlashBlock as a standard feature to Arora. Flash also prevented me from looking into serious process separation (back before it was big with chrome) due to the amount of work involved because of flashes dependency on a top level window. As a user I hate how flash uses memory and cpu. As a developer I just hate flash.
You say that as if it doesn't affect me.
I'm not against flash because that happens to be the stance I get after choosing my preferred corporate side, I'm against flash because it's a pain in my side personally as an end user and that happens to be Apple's side so hey hello Apple.
I'm not against flash because that happens to be the stance I get after choosing my preferred corporate side, I'm against flash because it's a pain in my side personally as an end user and that happens to be Apple's side so hey hello Apple.
The casual game ecosystem is huge and owes its existence to Flash. Casual programmers (i.e. not us on HN) who are more or less graphics designers are not going to be able to grok programming a complex JavaScript html5 app and be able to leverage their graphics skills appropriately. Furthermore, they need their source code and media to be compiled and closed so others don't make quick rip offs of their games and post them as competition on kongregate. Flash is here to stay.
"People built it in Flash because there was no other decent technology from companies like Apple, Microsoft or Real Networks that enabled this kind of content to be created and delivered. To say that all this content should be discarded because Steve Jobs is afraid that people will build Flash content that runs on mobile devices running any operating system instead of building content that will only work on Apple mobile devices is doing a disservice to the efforts of all those individuals."
Interesting perspective I haven't seen in other articles on this topic. By existing for years in popularity, its almost a required technology in order to truly maintain internet history, as would be the case with image formats for instance; though, granted, its arguable whether the majority of Flash content is truly worth maintaining in perpetuity.
While certainly it may be displaced as a choice for new content, can Flash ever truly "die" given that a likely sizable portion of the web will never be converted to anything else?
Interesting perspective I haven't seen in other articles on this topic. By existing for years in popularity, its almost a required technology in order to truly maintain internet history, as would be the case with image formats for instance; though, granted, its arguable whether the majority of Flash content is truly worth maintaining in perpetuity.
While certainly it may be displaced as a choice for new content, can Flash ever truly "die" given that a likely sizable portion of the web will never be converted to anything else?
Tangential hypothesis du jour: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash (in the "middleware" sense, ignoring Flash-as-plug-in) on their iAppliances because it would offer a _significantly_ superior development experience when compared to Objective-C/Cocoa? From my experience w/ Flash development, it would be _perfect_ for at least ~50% of the (rather) simple games and applications that are on the App Store nowadays.
In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but because it's too good?
In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but because it's too good?
As someone who has developed both for Flash and Cocoa: Yes, Flash (and its IDE) is better suited for game development. (2D, sprite-based games, that is. Not 3D.) That said, Flash is horrible for the kinds of programs you would typically use Cocoa for (ones with UI controls, data, etc). Flash's UI controls look and act glitchy. Not a good experience, for developers or users. Flex die-hards may feel otherwise, but I try to stay far away from Flex and any other Flash-based UI-centric apps.
Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.
Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.
I've found Flex, particularly MXML+Binding, to be one of the nicest GUI frameworks I've developed with.
However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use. CPU and Battery are debatable issues, but Flash has serious memory management issues. On a device like the iPhone or iPad, with a max of 256mb of RAM, no swapping, and a browser that has trouble keeping a few "tabs" in memory, adding Flash to the mix seems like a recipe for disaster.
It'll be interesting to see how Android handles this. Hopefully it'll spawn some much-needed improvements to the Flash VM.
However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use. CPU and Battery are debatable issues, but Flash has serious memory management issues. On a device like the iPhone or iPad, with a max of 256mb of RAM, no swapping, and a browser that has trouble keeping a few "tabs" in memory, adding Flash to the mix seems like a recipe for disaster.
It'll be interesting to see how Android handles this. Hopefully it'll spawn some much-needed improvements to the Flash VM.
10.1 is not just a port, it's a bunch of changes that were made specifically for mobile devices - including suspending execution state, reducing performance of player instances when in hidden tabs/outside of view, hardware acceleration, better reuse of bitmap instances (targetting lower memory), and a bunch of other stuff. I'm not the one to say how successful they were with that, but apparently they had "much-needed improvements" in mind alright.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...
Most benchmarks show great improvements in performance and memory use between 10 and 10.1.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...
Most benchmarks show great improvements in performance and memory use between 10 and 10.1.
>However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use.
It's because this isn't REALLY about technical issues. If it really was, Apple could easily say "Sure, we'll include Flash if you give us a version that performs to our satisfaction under these scenarios, otherwise too bad", and that would be the bulk of the argument for not including Flash. I haven't seen much evidence of this happening.
It's because this isn't REALLY about technical issues. If it really was, Apple could easily say "Sure, we'll include Flash if you give us a version that performs to our satisfaction under these scenarios, otherwise too bad", and that would be the bulk of the argument for not including Flash. I haven't seen much evidence of this happening.
But isn't this pretty much what Jobs said in his rant. To quote: "We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it." The way I see it, "we have ... asked" implies Apple were at least somewhat open to the idea to include Flash support.
I stand (partially) corrected. This doesn't seem to be the main argument in all of the stories (see, for example, "freedom from porn"), but there has been a lot of noise in the discussion, so point taken.
Agreed on MXML+binding.
I was thinking about games and (potentially design-heavy) simple apps (quizzes, educational apps &c.) mostly.
Regarding the "feel" of Flash's standard UI controls: I agree (and apparently, so does Adobe, as they continue to ship a completely new framework with just about every major release).
Regarding the "feel" of Flash's standard UI controls: I agree (and apparently, so does Adobe, as they continue to ship a completely new framework with just about every major release).
That's valid ... sites like http://www.kongregate.com and http://www.armorgames.com have some pretty amazing pieces of work on it.
Disregarding the many legitimate but ultimately fixable gripes against it Flash is a great and above all versatile platform to develop on whether it's animation, rich media or applications. It's a massively streamlined path from idea to prototype to finished product - we can prototype games in day(s depending on the scope) and that can include animations, audio, cut scenes and everything else.
Disregarding the many legitimate but ultimately fixable gripes against it Flash is a great and above all versatile platform to develop on whether it's animation, rich media or applications. It's a massively streamlined path from idea to prototype to finished product - we can prototype games in day(s depending on the scope) and that can include animations, audio, cut scenes and everything else.
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Drama, drama, drama.
Why don't we just get rid of Flash for good and end it all?
Why don't we just get rid of Flash for good and end it all?
Even Apple users does not find this reasonable. And also here is an opinion pool which shows most of the people thinks that this is a wrong move: http://www.applevsadobe.net
Wow. That is not even close to being a legitimate poll.
Surely my Russian grandma and my dad, an important part of the demographic that we care about as far as the iPhone users go, have voted, and those using the Flash authoring tool on a daily basis have not.
Flash is less open than HTML5 in the browser, it churns the battery, it's slow, and it's unreliable. It crashes on the Mac often, it doesn't support hardware video decoding (yet) and there isn't a stable version released for ANY Arm platform yet. Adobe is so far behind it's not even funny, and the arguments that Apple should have allowed Flash from the start are ridiculous because three years later it's still not ready for prime-time.
As for app development, Flash produces much larger apps that run slower and use more memory than native iPhone apps. There's no way to provide a truly 'native' UI (CocoaTouch) so developers will have to re-invent everything in ways that doesn't work or look like regular iPhone apps. Like Adobe Air apps, Flash apps on the iPhone would end up working and looking different not only from other native apps, but from each other as well. Users would have to get used to different behaviour from every app, instead of having a uniform set of behaviours that they can quickly learn and internalize.
If you're going to complain about Flash on the iPhone, it would behoove you to specify which specific implementation of Flash you're referring to, and compare it just to the equivalent offering for the iPhone. Otherwise, you're just making confusing arguments that don't hold water.