Thoughts on Flash
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Darn! PHP is more popular than C#. That can't be right. ;P
That is very sad.
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adj. /ˌdɪs ɪnˈdʒɛn yu əs/: Steve Jobs. "First, there’s “Open”. Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc." Yet anyone can create a Flash application, and anyone can consume a Flash application. On the other hand, only those applications specifically blessed by Apple can ever be deployed on an iPhad, and even then, Apple has (and has exercised) the right to remove that app from circulation. I find it insulting that Steve uses this as an argument that not allowing Flash is "based on technology issues". Here's another: "Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash" But what about flash based websites? An iPhad cannot access them. However, I actually think that discouraging the development of Flash based websites is not a bad thing. "although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5" On "Adobe are slow": http://www.neowin.net/news/apple-opens-hardware-acceleration-for-flash-other-third-party-software[^]: Via the latest 10.6.3 update for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple seems to be finally allowing third party developers to access the low level H.264 decoding power of the GPUs within its Macs. 6 days later Adobe released the first preview with their hardware accelerated 'Gala' release. Granted, this isn't quite what Apple are saying, but you can't go on about Standards and open platforms while deliberately locking others out of your own platform. Steve says "We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers" which is exactly what Apple does to anyone trying to develop on the Mac platform. Do as we say, not as we do.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open He does not say that Apple in not closed. All he says is that he thinks web should be open. In other words, no one has control over web and it should remain like that. (Now, if Apple had the most popular browser in the market, then things may have been different but they don't.)
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we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open He does not say that Apple in not closed. All he says is that he thinks web should be open. In other words, no one has control over web and it should remain like that. (Now, if Apple had the most popular browser in the market, then things may have been different but they don't.)
That's fine, but he's being very sanctimonious in trying to take the high ground on openess in the web while ignoring his own company's practices. If he had just said "Flash is a dead-end technology that should and will be replaced by HTML5. Why bother going through the hoops to provide support for a technology that is old, highly inefficient and lacks innovation" then I would say "hear, hear".
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open He does not say that Apple in not closed. All he says is that he thinks web should be open. In other words, no one has control over web and it should remain like that. (Now, if Apple had the most popular browser in the market, then things may have been different but they don't.)
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
He does not say that Apple in not closed. All he says is that he thinks web should be open.
Mmm, yes, but... He's deliberately conflating the two ideas in this essay: "Flash is bad because it's closed unlike the open web and also our closed, proprietary dev platform is better because it's ours". There's a valid argument to be made for excluding Flash if you're really pushing standards and interoperability... but once you're talking about native iPhone apps that's all irrelevant.
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Thoughts on Flash[^] by Steve Jobs Love him or hate him but IMHO he's got this one right. Thoughts?
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Where is yours to say that Java is dead?
- View a random site. Does it have a Java applet? Probably not. 2) Download a random program. Is it a Java program? Probably not. So where is Java used then eh? Some niche markets? Java is also taught at lots of colleges, I'm sure that contributes to the perceived "popularity" even though it is nowhere to be seen in real life.
harold aptroot wrote:
- View a random site. Does it have a Java applet? Probably not. 2) Download a random program. Is it a Java program? Probably not. So where is Java used then eh? Some niche markets?
- http://nanohub.org/[^] -- lots of java apps there. You'll have to log in to use them. Most of them are nanoscale semiconductor design simulators and they run very fast (of course they're running on remote supercomputer). Let me pose my own questions: 1) View a random site. Does it use .Net? Probably not. 2) Download a random program. Is it a .Net program? Probably not. .Net is DEAD I tell you.
-Sean ---- Fire Nuts
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harold aptroot wrote:
- View a random site. Does it have a Java applet? Probably not. 2) Download a random program. Is it a Java program? Probably not. So where is Java used then eh? Some niche markets?
- http://nanohub.org/[^] -- lots of java apps there. You'll have to log in to use them. Most of them are nanoscale semiconductor design simulators and they run very fast (of course they're running on remote supercomputer). Let me pose my own questions: 1) View a random site. Does it use .Net? Probably not. 2) Download a random program. Is it a .Net program? Probably not. .Net is DEAD I tell you.
-Sean ---- Fire Nuts
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I fully agree with what Steve says about how openness and standards are important, if not critical. I've said similar myself before and I'm fully in support of not-supporting flash. Unfortunately with Apple's decision only a few weeks ago to change their AppStore licensing agreement to require the use of Apple's propriety toolset (and forbidding anything 3rd party like MonoTouch) they are just as bad, if not worse than Adobe. What a hypocrite. Shut up Steve, fix your own company's business practises before you criticize others. Personally I will never buy an apple product until they change their practises and treat developers with respect.
Simon
Simon P Stevens wrote:
and forbidding anything 3rd party like MonoTouch
Actually, it sounds like MonoTouch is A-OK. (But yeah, Jobs is being hypocritical here.)
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah Himango -
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I am biased here because I love CSS (because I spent lot of time learning/understanding it in detail).
100% agreed on that man. I think people that hate CSS the most just don't know it. I will never, ever go back to the old way. I can't stand seeing cluttered HTML now.
Jeremy Falcon
People don't hate CSS because there is a better way (i.e. cluttered HTML markup) - they hate CSS because it's a friggin mess when it comes to cross browser compatibility. Yeah, it's the best we have right now, but that doesn't make it good. HTML+CSS is fine for simpler layouts. It get very hairy very fast if you want to do tabs, custom ad rotators, dynamically resizing popups, etc, and actually have it work on every commonly used browser. Most of our website development time is spent finding CSS hacks to work around browser compatibility issues, because we happen to work on dynamic sites that require such things. Don't get me wrong - the IDEA is great. The implementations suck megaballs and have no consistency.
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Also funny is that at one point you did criticize XAML based UIs :). Now Microsoft has changed you a lot. Not that there is anything bad with it :).
I'm going to repost some tidbits from another of my posts below: HTML+CSS is fine for simpler layouts. It get very hairy very fast if you want to do tabs, custom ad rotators, dynamically resizing popups, etc, and actually have it work on every commonly used browser. Most of our website development time is spent finding CSS hacks to work around browser compatibility issues, because we happen to work on dynamic sites that require such things. Don't get me wrong - the IDEA is great. The implementations suck megaballs and have no consistency. --- I think his point is that layout in XAML is just way easier. It is much simpler and much more intuitive than CSS layouts. I don't think he actually wants XAML, just something LIKE it. An HTML table isn't even close to comparable to a XAML grid. XAML layouts are just soooo much easier to work with. Trivial two-column layouts like CSS Zen Garden are easy to style, and HTML+CSS works great for that. But for the kind of apps I work on, CSS is a nightmare. What percentage of sites have swappable CSS themes? I'd pin the figure below 1%. Most people just want ONE nice, functional layout. I would take the ability to do that over swapping CSS themes anyday. Your points on layout could be solved by splitting things into a content definition file and a layout definition file. For example: Content:
<content id="main">Main Content</content>
<content id="sidebar">Sidebar Content</content>Layout:
<grid>
<columns>
<column width="100px"/>
<column width="*">
</columns><content id="main" column="0"/>
<content id="sidebar" column="1"/>
</grid>So you get your semantic content representation and a proper layout engine. You could still have a CSS style sheet for defining fonts, backgrounds, etc. You would get seperation of layout, style, and content, which would be soooo much cleaner than hacking up your sematic HTML representation with hacks just to get it to display properly.
modified on Friday, April 30, 2010 1:15 AM
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Michel Godfroid wrote:
it looks like for the Windows Phone 7, we may see the same business model
Really !? :doh: I hope they have more sense than that. I haven't read much about the Win phones yet. I understand the recommended route is to develop silverlight apps for it?
Simon
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Yes, like Microsoft. Large parts of the .net framework are provided open source. the CLR and C# are covered by ECMA standards. There is even an open source sample implementation of large parts of the CLR called Rotor. There is a competing Mono framework based on the same set of standards. There are open source compilers and IDEs that include C# and target the .Net runtime. Microsoft doesn't block any of these activities, in fact some of them are actively run by Microsoft. But even if you don't like the restrictions of .net, you are free to use C++, python, C, Java, in fact, you can use whatever tools or languages you want. Microsoft do not make any restrictions on the tools you are allowed to use to build for their platforms. If you can build it, they will let you. Microsoft do not make any restrictions on the types of applications you are allowed to write. If you want to write a competing media player, a competing office product, or a competing language/framework/IDE you are free to do so. You can also use whatever distribution channel you want for your apps On the other hand, lets look at Apple. To build for the IPhone you have to use a Mac, and thanks to the 3.3.1 changes you now have to use their toolset. You also have to get approval from Apple that your app doesn't compete with any of theirs, and meets their (sometimes secretive) requirements for inclusion in the AppStore.
Simon
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Yes, like Microsoft. Large parts of the .net framework are provided open source. the CLR and C# are covered by ECMA standards. There is even an open source sample implementation of large parts of the CLR called Rotor. There is a competing Mono framework based on the same set of standards. There are open source compilers and IDEs that include C# and target the .Net runtime. Microsoft doesn't block any of these activities, in fact some of them are actively run by Microsoft. But even if you don't like the restrictions of .net, you are free to use C++, python, C, Java, in fact, you can use whatever tools or languages you want. Microsoft do not make any restrictions on the tools you are allowed to use to build for their platforms. If you can build it, they will let you. Microsoft do not make any restrictions on the types of applications you are allowed to write. If you want to write a competing media player, a competing office product, or a competing language/framework/IDE you are free to do so. You can also use whatever distribution channel you want for your apps On the other hand, lets look at Apple. To build for the IPhone you have to use a Mac, and thanks to the 3.3.1 changes you now have to use their toolset. You also have to get approval from Apple that your app doesn't compete with any of theirs, and meets their (sometimes secretive) requirements for inclusion in the AppStore.
Simon
I totally agree with you there, but there's one issue... The upcoming Windows Phone 7 needs you to develop in a proprietary extension of Silverlight, or to use XNA. I dunno if that may change a little, but it's not really open. At least Microsoft claim that they won't really be policing the content of apps, so you shouldn't get apps rejected for secretive reasons. I also think they are going to actually provide (openly) their guidelines. So yeah, should still be muuccchhh better than the iPhone scene...
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I fully agree with what Steve says about how openness and standards are important, if not critical. I've said similar myself before and I'm fully in support of not-supporting flash. Unfortunately with Apple's decision only a few weeks ago to change their AppStore licensing agreement to require the use of Apple's propriety toolset (and forbidding anything 3rd party like MonoTouch) they are just as bad, if not worse than Adobe. What a hypocrite. Shut up Steve, fix your own company's business practises before you criticize others. Personally I will never buy an apple product until they change their practises and treat developers with respect.
Simon
In my book, functionality goes before openness by a mile. Openness is just a means to an end - enabling others to provide the applications if the proprietary owner fails to do so. Which makes openness important to diversity and longevity - but opennes as such doesn't help me. The new apple devices are purely for consuming, not for creating. Which is kind of sad remembering the halo around its name the Mac had in the design community.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
Game, set, match. Reasonable, informative, and accurate statements that pretty much dismantled a bunch of people's complaining.
Accurate my ass. First, there is "Open": Well... the Flash Player or Flash IDE may not be open source (is it iPhone OS or all their tools?), but the SWF specs are available from Adobe's site, anyone can make their own compilers and players, and indeed, people have done in the past. Plus the Flex SDK is open source. Also, Adobe has also participated on WebKit development and some open standards. Lastly, is H264 open? because I've heard the opposite (I'm not being sarcastic, but truly asking). MODIFIED: It seems that, although others have done it (and are still doing it), it's against Adobe's licenses to make your own Flash Player. Too bad for this one, even if I can clearly see the reasons behind this. Second, there’s the “full web”: Most sites use Flash, one way or the other, a lot of them make bad use of it, but that doesn't change the situation. HTML 5 is not cross compatible yet, and just a few sites have adopted it, or will do so. There are way more Flash games that iPhone ones (a lot of them shitty, but a lot of children or casual gamers don't care either). Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. - Reliability: I cannot talk about Macs here, since I don't know of any potential user of them. Never saw any crash on a Windows or Linux OS, I've heard some people complaining to have had crashes with it, but not a lot, and I know at least one of them had registry issues that were the culprit of Flash crashes. Also, I've seen several iPhones frozen more than once, just yesterday saw one to freeze a couple of times, but sincerely, I see nothing "wrong" with it (I mean, it's something that happens with hardware and software). - Security: Flash have several security flaws, but they work on improving them, for example, they are working with Google to bring a better plugin model in order to fix a lot of these faults. - Performance: Adobe could do better, yes. Although a lot of times is the developer the one to blame, a lot of those "developers" are just kiddies, or designers that believe to have understood what a GC is (if they even know there is one) and use rather bad techniques. Also, the compiler has part of the fault as well, it's been demonstrated that some SWF files can be up to 8-10 times faster when compiled or recompiled through other tools, of course, Adobe's fault in this one. Adobe is already showing a lot of performance improvements for Flash 10.1, but they still can do better. Even so, HTML 5 isn't better in this area... th
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In my book, functionality goes before openness by a mile. Openness is just a means to an end - enabling others to provide the applications if the proprietary owner fails to do so. Which makes openness important to diversity and longevity - but opennes as such doesn't help me. The new apple devices are purely for consuming, not for creating. Which is kind of sad remembering the halo around its name the Mac had in the design community.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server.peterchen wrote:
The new apple devices are purely for consuming, not for creating.
Very good point actually. In this area as a software dev I would say I fall into the creator category, which is probably why I'm not interested in owning any Ix devices.
Simon
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That move was done to stop Adobe's attempt to get Flash on the iPad. If Adobe had gotten it on, a lot of lazy programmers would have ported every flash based app they could and even browser plug ins would have been submitted. That would have ruined their attempt to push the standards. The point was to have developers not be subject to 3rd party adoption of new stuff. If Monotouch failed to update something for months after Apple did, the people depending on it would be stuck. What about when they make an update that takes advantage of some new tech and that 3rd party toolset no longer works because they haven't coded for it? This same update could break your App and you would be unable to respond. How many customers would that cost you? What about if a 3rd party stops supporting the toolset altogether and you now have to redo the entire thing if you want to put out an update? How much development time is lost? So which is looking out for developers more? Allowing some other company to drag their heels and cause your product to suck because of it, or having you always have the stuff you need when the implement it? The model is not perfect. But they seem to have the developer in mind as well as their own interests.
I'm mostly with you, and I think that's, along with other commercial reason, the main cause of this battle. I think Steve Jobs just wants to get his piece of cake with HTML 5, or try to get more money or something from Adobe. It seems Windows Phone 7 will be getting Flash support.
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Having developed under the chaos of the Microsoft model for the last 20 years and seen the long list of development models and technologies first evangelized then all too quickly abandoned by Microsoft I've grown pessimistic. The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days. Just wish I had the time to actually do it. :doh:
Mike Mullikin wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days.
Golden... my thoughts exactly :) -- Rogelio
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Thoughts on Flash[^] by Steve Jobs Love him or hate him but IMHO he's got this one right. Thoughts?
In my opinion Jobs is right. afterall iPhone is his child, so he'll try to get the best for it & protect from even bad! For Adobe it is very good criticism from one of the best tech-person on earth. Now Adobe should try to overcome all of these issues & prove their mettle!
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Mike Mullikin wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days.
Golden... my thoughts exactly :) -- Rogelio
RogelioP / BASIC-Pascal-C-Logo Spoken Here wrote:
The simplicity and order of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development appeals to me these days. Golden... my thoughts exactly
Well the simplicity and order of communism and socialism has appealed to many millions of people as well.