I thought I'd relegate Flash to its own thread. It doesn't currently pollute the iPhone nor iPad, so why should it pollute threads about those devices?

This sweet bit of information from ARM VP, Ian Drew, about the delays with their push into a Smartbook category:



This is what happens when you put your eggs in someone else's basket. Someone who ultimately has different goals the you do.

When Apple acquires Adobe, we may see Flash on their "i" platforms.

Lovely demo of Flash running on the Nexus One:

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/may/08/android-flash-demo-flashcamp-seattle/

I think Adobe are doing a better job than Apple to help Flash's demise.

I'm not a fan of flash but I don't really like that mobile computing platforms are increasingly headed to a closed platform future. Closed platforms are good at making things clean and pretty, but with the disadvatange of higher prices and less innovation in the long term.

Competition will help to drive innovation. Apple has consistently out-innovated the industry at large over the past 10 years with a number of supposed "closed" systems.

Flash proliferation would be the true definition a closing up a system. Imagine Adobe controlling the development cycle on not one, not some, but all mobile platforms. Scary.

/me opens that ecozoo page up on his Nokia N900 and it runs fine. A little bit slow for my taste... but it works.

I'll wander back to MeeGo now then

If you want an open system then you're going to have to work for it...

An interesting quote from http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2007/05/mobile-is-dead.html
"There is only one internet, and if your device cannot access it, you’re out of luck. There is only one internet."

Oh, Flash sucks, big time. But Google, if you're going to do it, make it work!
(Oh, and Apple, I call bs on all the hypocritical claims of "too proprietary" or "not suitable for a mobile")

Looks like the N900 runs Flash 9.4, whatever that version means. The "Open Screen Alliance" is about bringing Flash 10.1 to mobile devices, and was the runtime in use during that presentation. I wonder why Hulu didn't work, since thats a big reason US based users want Flash on their mobile devices.

Out of curiosity, does the N900 work with BBC's iPlayer, using the Flash player on the web site and not the 3GP streams?

As for the too proprietary comments out of Apple, I'm assuming they mean the inability to make their own Flash player and open source it, though I've not seen concrete evidence either way here. As pointed out in other threads, the specs seem to be available for most of the pieces, but I'm not certain if it's possible to create a fully 10.1 compatible player. Nor have I found any info on if Adobe is being open about the upcoming Flash 11 specification to allow a player to support it.

The not suitable for mobile mostly comes from battery life issues. Take for example the Anandtech benchmarks on the recent laptops from Apple. The first one is browsing to sites with no flash in Safari to a new page every 20 seconds with iTunes playing. The second one is the same condition, but with 1-4 animated flash banner ads on each page.



Using the Core i5 system, Flash will kill nearly 2.5 hours of battery life with just basic banner ads, when running on OS X on x86. If Adobe can't optimize Flash for OS X running on the same CPU instruction set Windows does, then I can understand Apple not expecting anything different on the iPhone when it uses the same APIs, but for ARM.

(Graphs from here.)

It's too bad they don't describe their methodology. I'd be curious to see the flash ads they're testing against.

I ran the first flash ad I found in a standalone Flash player. It's not nothing, but it consumed less than 30MB RAM and around 3% of one CPU on my MBP 2.4GHz Core2Duo 17. The activitymonitord consumed more memory (though less of it resident) and CPU time. Meanwhile, with ads blocked, Firefox sat there doing nothing and consuming 15% of a CPU.

Well, to be fair, here is Ryan Stewart demoing Flash 10.1 on the Nexus One, without the crashes.

Some of the videos looked a bit choppy, but overall worked. No idea the impact on battery, as the unit was plugged in for the demo. The one game he slowed off was pretty simple, so hard to say how well it will run with the more advanced games out there.

Wow, that was pretty impressive. Granted, it's not as nice as using Flash on the desktop, and you have to interact with it differently, but that's what I say about all mobile browsing (including the iPad).

I'm sure it takes a great deal of battery power to run that stuff, but I don't really worry about power anymore, with the charging regimen I employ

Hopefully there is an option somewhere so that you can selectively enable Flash. While I do think that it will be nice to have Flash available, I definitely don't want to waste my battery in order to have Martha Stewart's worthless Flash menu.

(Tangentially, it's like the guy said to himself "What stuff on the web would irritate Bitt the most?". I hate HIMYM, I hate hockey, I hate Martha Stewart, I hate financial "news", and I hate that the Tories won a plurality in the UK Parliament.)

Why do you hate hockey?

I dislike sports in general, but hockey is the only major league franchise we have locally, and it's a pain in the ass at best, and a financial headache at worst. In addition, all the "fans" down here pretty much just want to see a fight and couldn't care less for the sport (not that that necessarily fails to describe fans in more traditional hockey locales).

It also means that we'll never get a sports franchise I would actually attend.

Adobe releases back-handed PR ads targeting Apple:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/13/adobe-targets-apple-in-ad-campaign-launched-today-publishes-ope/

Adobe's founders clearly don't know anything about Flash, including what it is and isn't. Seems they have a muddled concept of the web and freedom as well, let alone Apple's role in running their iPhone and iPad platforms:



Again, I think this is a despicable act by Adobe of attacking (at least the intelligence) of its consumers. I'm not normally vindictive, but I really want to see Apple crush Adobe on this front - sweeter still would be if Apple had Microsoft backing them on this one.

Fanboys are weird. What exactly stood out as wrong in that quoted text you provided? Are you really trying to say that people shouldn't be allowed to use devices as they desire, because that's about all I read in that? I can't use my baseball bat to hit rocks or to spin around and run dizzily around the yard simply because that's not how it's marketed?

I used to be a big Adobe fan and supporter, much more so than I've ever been an Apple fan. This (what I'm talking about in the previous post) has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with Adobe. I'm not arguing whether it's wrong or right for Apple to do what it's doing with its platform. I'm dismayed/disappointed/pissed at Adobe making this into a PR campaign.

I'm an Adobe customer and as such I'm pissed off they don't just shut the fuck up and get back to work to make their tools better. Their pro tools carry large upgrade fees, yet they're still slow and buggy as hell. They don't follow platform UI guidelines and they still, after close to a decade of being bundled, don't work well together.

BTW, the analogy of the bat doesn't hold water. You can do whatever you want with your iPad - Apple have never told consumers what they can and can't do with a device.

The MLB restricts which bats are allowed into Major League games. The F1 restricts which tires and materials constructors can use. Etc. etc. etc. What Apple is doing is not new and it's certainly not worthy of all the news and attention it's been getting.

I don't like Apple having as heavy a hand with the app approval process. At the end of the day however, the best apps are going to be built using Cocoa, even if there were no restrictions on wrappers and cross-development frameworks. And as far as the web goes, every single major site on the web has, is now, or will be, moving away from Flash for at least mobile access. Adobe can see the primary reason for the Macromedia acquisition slipping into irrelevance. That's a big expensive pill to flush down the toilet. They certainly didn't acquire Macromedia just to add Dreamweaver to their CS bundle.

This whole issue isn't going to end well for Adobe. That was already clear back in 2007.

Bitt, I know you know what you said is loose. I *knew* someone would come back with the image example. It's weak though. Because the image format is irrelevant as long as it's one supported by HTML, which JPG is. You can transform the image within HTML, so in that regard, the content respects the bounds put upon it by the markup and style layers and is directly produced/drawn/displayed by the rendering layer. Flash isn't. It's a whole other framework running inside a box. That framework can be anything, even another browser within the real browser. The bottom line is that Flash duplicates (and augments of course) what's outside of it, albeit in a way that has no relation to the building blocks used in those outside layers - and without any regard for even duplicating the same type of rendering.

You can argue that anything you serve via HTTP is "the web" but that's not the point here. Flash is essentially a stand-alone entity that people have shoehorned into web browsers. To display content that would otherwise use the web browser for rendering. Sure, you could do a bunch of stuff in Flash that wasn't possible using the browser's rendering engine, regardless of what markup used or how much javascript you threw at it.

But it's no more "the web" or a "web site" than a custom application written using ActiveX, C++ or whatever you want to use, shoehorned into the display rect of a web page. Flash is essentially a virtual machine, and the web site is the thing that holds it.

Flash != Web. Never has, never will. I'm sorry, but essentially, asinine is anyone who has been developing in Flash for the web. You have to draw the lone somewhere and I've drawn it at a pretty comfortable and easy to see and define place.

You'd have to argue much harder to say that the iPad doesn't display the whole web than you would otherwise. The comment in the commercial is totally fair. You can't play Flash games on the iPad. You also can't run Windows games nor Mac games, in our outside a web browser.

Yes, some sites do use a lot of flash content and that content will be missing when the sites are viewed on an iPad. Yes, some of that content may be essential to the site. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for those sites - most of them use Flash blocks unnecessarily to say the least. Once they wake up and realize that the web site is everything around their non-standard Flash blocks they can move on to create something usable by everyone. The fact that Flash doesn't work on the iDevices is actually the least of the problem for these folks. But it's finally a significant enough catalyst that they can't ignore it.

There is exactly one reference to JPEG or JPG in the HTML 4.01 spec:

No image formats are explicitly supported by HTML. None. It doesn't even suggest that browsers "SHOULD" support any particular image formats. In fact, it encourages HTML authors to use the OBJECT tag instead of the IMG tag, and the OBJECT tag is the same tag that the HTML spec says is to be used for "applets", and it goes out of its way to say that "applet" includes more than just Java applets:


In what way? Changing the size? You can do the same thing with OBJECTs.

I'm sorry, but you're just flat-out wrong here; your position is indefensible.

I'm not going to argue that Flash is a defined part of the term "web site", but I also wouldn't argue that the terms JPEG and PNG are, either. That said, if the web browser was unable to render JPEGs or PNGs, I would consider that to be something that kept it from being able to render "all the world's web sites". In the same way, I would consider something that fails to render Flash unable to render "all the world's web sites". I recognize that their point here is (or at least was) that Mobile Safari had capabilities in the same league as those of desktop browsers, as opposed to the crap that came with smartphones before the iPhone was introduced. There's clearly some point at which an image or object format can be considered irrelevant (for example, I don't think a browser's inability to render SVG would raise many eyebrows), but I don't think that there are many people that would claim that Flash is an irrelevant part of "all the world's web sites".

IMO watching Apple and Adobe bickering about Flash is like watching Sarah Palin prosecute Piers Morgan for shooting Noel Edmonds. You just don't want any of them to come out the winner.

Peter

Adobe brought an ad to a gunfight

Much of the same arguments seen around (and that I've made) about Adobe's ad-based attacks on Apple and consumers. I agree with a bunch of it, however, I don't agree with the conclusion. I don't believe getting Flash running smoothly on Android guarantees its appearance on an iDevice. It might open the door, but I still think Apple wants complete control of the source tree for their platform, something they can't have when shipping Adobe® Flash®.

I couldn't agree more. Apple preventing people from using Flash on their mobile systems just allows Adobe to claim prejudice, as opposed to letting people install Flash apps and find for themselves that it sucks and blame Adobe directly.

Problem is, people* wouldn't blame Adobe, they would blame their iPhone for being crap and hold it against Apple. Only two years down the road when their contract expires and they buy an Android phone will they maybe realize it's this Flash® thing causing them problems.

It's the same way people tend to blame Microsoft, or HP or whoever when some random cheep Chinese hardware they plugged in caused a blue screen. Technically it was a bad driver from said Chinese company, but the end user doesn't care. "The dumb HP computer isn't working again"


*people being the general consumer electronics population base, who could care less about the technical details

There is some validity in that argument, moreso if Flash were incorporated transparently in the browser, but I think people would notice if certain applications worked well and others didn't. They might not blame Flash directly, but they would blame the application.

I would be totally down with Apple refusing to make Flash an integral part of the browser, requiring the user to explicitly and individually approve Flash applets in the browser. But their position is waaay beyond that.

Regardless, you have a point.

While not specific to that quote, the feeling I get from Adobe's comments is that they are trying to use a lot of PR double talk to cover up the real issues. Take for example their stance on security:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/how-secure-is-flash-heres-what-adobe-wont-tell-you/2152

The same goes for this whole "open" thing. Gruber wrote a great summary here:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/flash_almost_as_open_as_office

It's giving me flashbacks to the way Microsoft was acting about security and openness a few years back. Microsoft initially tried the smokescreen tactic when their products were being exploited left and right, before locking down and putting honest effort into securing their systems. Same thing on the open side. They embraced Java enough to make their own incompatible version of it (J#), while wooing developers with this new "open" language. Glad I never wasted time learning to code in J#, since it ended up getting Microsoft into legal trouble.

Is Apple any better regarding open technology? Nope. But Apple is at least pretty honest about it. I know up front that my iPhone isn't an open platform, and due to Apple's honesty, I can evaluate the device and decide if it's right for me or not. Adobe on the other hand is touting Flash as this big open thing, encouraging people to come join hands and release more Flash content, supported devices and so on.

Here's a choice interview with Adobe's Chuck Geschke - all about Apple.

And some excerpts and commentary over at Daring Fireball.

And here's an editorial by the Macelope on MacUser.com about the Adobe ads.

Could it be because Hulu blocks it? They're all about blocking platforms from accessing their content.

That may be it, though it's odd they would block it even before final versions of Flash have shipped for any mobile device. For the PS3 and other platforms, they only blocked it after people were using it.

It's going to be a big disappointment though if people run out to buy a mobile device that supports Flash, to find it doesn't support Hulu. I really wish they would figure out what they want to do, as I'm really liking the idea of just watching what I want on on a non laptop portable device. As it is right now, I still find it easier to go to Frys and buy a DVD box set of a show then figure out where online to get content.

I imagine they have a whitelist of acceptable Flash versions, rather than a blacklist of unacceptable versions. Makes maintenance a lot easier.

A whitelist would make sense, but it definitely wasn't that way a while back. The PS3, Boxee on Apple TV and others were all reporting pretty odd user agents and flash versions that I doubt they had whitelisted. Only once they realized people were *gasp* watching TV shows on their TV did they start cracking down, blocking them based on blacklists. Boxee played a cat and mouse game for a while, until it just became too unusable on the Apple TV.

I think Boxee is still playing the game, but IMO the experience you get, with the workaround they're forced to use, isn't worth it.

I still freaking LOVE Boxee, though. Can't wait for them to even announce when the Box is going to be out...

At this point I don't expect the box until the end of Summer at the earliest, based on a couple of comments I've read in their forum. I hope I'm wrong though. There isn't really any official word forthcoming on it, probably since it's a DLINK product. Boxee itself is still in beta stage and an update hasn't been released since at least mid April. Maybe the next release will be a big one and put it into RC status.

Even if I could watch Hulu here in Canada, I don't think I'd bother. I know they're still quite popular in the US, but they're poised to be left behind unless they're working on something revolutionary they haven't yet let on about.

Yeah, the lack of news has been discouraging. You would think they would at least have a date in mind, but that seems to indicate that they really aren't ready.


Yeah, I'm certainly not saying I'm a fan, and even the networks that created Hulu are slowly abandoning it and creating their own portals on their own websites.

I'd be more excited about it if the case weren't so asinine. What's wrong with standard stereo component size? Failing that, what's wrong with something that at least allows greater packing density?

True, though I give them some credit for doing something different. They simply couldn't make something standard stereo size, as people would wonder why it's so much larger than every other device like this on this market.

But I don't care about the form factor. The capabilities will be more than enough to make up for it. Besides my WDTV Live is already on the top of my other equipment.

Too bad Boxee didn't go to Sony for styling. They could have had something that looked this good:



That's a current product. Based on something from 2003. I think if I had seen that back in 1982 I would have thought it looked like an out-dated piece of crap.

I thought the same when I first saw it to in renders and some pictures. But then I saw it on a video somewhere and realised that it is quite small, and the RF remote lets you put it pretty much anywhere. It could hide behind your TV, away in a corner somewhere. Even better than it looking nice is not having to look at it at all.



Pretty cool, looking forward to getting one in the UK.

Its a tape boom box. It by definition is a out-dated piece of crap even before the horrendous styling on it. I think all AV equipment should come with walnut trim like that boombox however and some chrome.

It's not the looking nice (or not) that I care about. It's the "can't put anything on top of it, and beside presents a problem, too"-ness.

Then make it half-width. Clip corners if it needs flash. Being designed to rest at a tilt is absurd, though.

I don't like the layout of the box either, but more horrendous still is the "powered by DLINK" on it. It's most certainly NOT powered by DLINK. The only things you can claim power that device are "Boxee" or "NVIDIA"

My box will live forever hidden inside my base cabinet, so in practical use, its styling won't bother me.

Half-width? Once you do that then the box is going to be relegated to near the top of your AV stack anyway. I have one other thing in my home theater stand that could fit on top of a half-width device, so if it came down to it it's not the end of the world to have to put one thing on top of the other.

But as was pointed out, it can go anywhere with that remote. You never have to see it. It could fall behind all your other equipment and it wouldn't matter.

You don't need access to that slot on the side?

I think the slot in the side is an SD card slot, but I don't think I'd ever use it - all my media lives on my NAS and anything temporary would come on a USB thumb drive anyway. I'll use the USB port to add an IR receiver though. Or a cable linking to my URC MSC-400 which can act as a keyboard in response to IR.

They could have made a solid black brick like Lacie is fond of doing:



That blue LED would bug the shit out of me...

That's why they make electrical tape.

Oh good lord no! I really wish companies would stop putting SD card slots on everything.

I long for the day when the Eye-Fi becomes standard. I bought one for my wife and it's one of the most magical bits of electronics I've ever used.

Flash on Android sounds like a real winner to me:

Looks like Adobe hasn't really improved anything with the final release of Flash for Android:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/mobile-flash-fail-weak-android-player-proves-jobs-right

But again, this is just a geek thing. The consumer space doesn't care about Flash running on a phone or personal media device. In my expert opinion, Apple wouldn't have sold as many devices had the browsing experience been destroyed with a Flash player.

Most consumers don't know what flash is or what it's for, and they won't until they try to use something that requires flash on a site that requires it.

Personally, I don't care if my phone runs flash, but if I'm buying an iPad, which is primarily a media consumption device, then I want it to consume all the media available to it. The difference between myself and the average consumer is that I know what media the iPad won't consume when I make my purchase decision. I think a huge number of users will assume the best browsing experience on the planet includes using all the web sites they can on their desktop machines.

I really have no real love for Flash, but I do not like it when a company strong arms the industry. I think Apple may kill flash (and potentially Silverlight) off with this move- and that saddens me. This is NOT the consumer choosing their browsing experience, it is Apple choosing for them.

Apple simply put their foot down and said they are no longer waiting for Adobe to get their act in gear. Ultimately if Flash dies off due to it, it's because Adobe failed to deliver on their promises. Safari on iOS supports plugins and has since day 1 back in summer 2007. Apple sat waiting on Adobe to deliver Flash for mobiles for nearly 3 years before moving on. To put in perspective how long 3 years is in the mobile space, this was Android in late 2007:

Google mobilized quickly and changed the direction of their platform before it even shipped, and is now looking forward to version 3.0. Adobe in that time well, just now delivered a kinda working Flash solution.

Not only is Apple moving on, so is most of the web. There are plenty of free and cheep games on the iOS platform, more and more appearing on Android, and I'm sure a number will appear on Windows Phone 7, all without Flash. Nearly every video I want to watch on the web works fine on my iPad, either right in Safari, or from a a dedicated app providing an even better experience then a website.

It was easy for Google and Android handset makers to move onto something new after late 2007. They simply copied the iPhone. I say that in all seriousness. Most Android phones out there have stolen a large amount of Apple IP, in both physical and software design. LG and Samsung are still releasing handsets today that look like a 3 year old iPhone. It's going to be a while before anyone else has anything as remotely attractive and solid as the iPhone 4.

Had the iPhone not come to market, the phone pictured above would likely have been very similar to marketed Android handsets. Ok, back to Flash...

The link I posted takes a good real-world look at Flash on Android. It's shipping now. Was it worth any kind of wait? I think the author is very generous (toward Adobe) in the way he expresses his "no" sentiment.

The web browsing experience on an iPhone and iPad is still better than on Android with Flash, on websites that feature Flash content. Many webmasters and large corporate sites have come to the conclusion that Flash simply sucks, never mind that it sucks especially bad on a mobile platform. Many sites have already made other arrangements. Personally I try not to browse the web at all on a handset because it mostly sucks, regardless how good the browser is - the screen is just too small for a non-mobile-specific site.

One thing I do want is an equal footing for desktop systems that don't want to run Flash. I long ago changed over to the YouTube HTML5 beta, I just want them and Vimeo (and similar) to make that the default for everyone.

The only place I regularly miss flash is on the BBC website as all their video and audio (except iPlayer) is still flash only.

I can't agree with Bruno on the usability of the web on a phone though. I find the web very usable on mobile safari, even places like empegbbs

Maybe I'll change my mind once I've gotten a bit more time on an iPhone 4 with the retina display and an alternate browser - I hate mobile Safari. It's in the way when you don't want it to be and then when you need something from it, it's missing or a PITA to use. Webkit page scale rendering is also fairly shite - it introduces a lot of broken seams and odd font sizing. On the desktop version of the browser the fonts don't tend to be an issue, but the seams are still there on things like adjoining graphics, etc. Firefox didn't have that issue when I last looked at it.

I guess when it comes down to it I only really care that the content is readable, navigable and accessible. I care less about minor visual glitches, but having seen how beautifully crafted your HTML/css is I can understand that it is painful to see Safari breaking it

Though it has to be said I also don't see that many sites where Safari introduces as many "tears" in the design as it does on yours.

Why? Flash is just another alternative for delivering web content. If programmers can use it to make better sites, then why limit their options? If they end up delivering crappy sites because Flash is crappy, then the customers will voice their opinions and use sites that deliver a better product. But that's a different thing than taking the option away altogether.

I'd rather have multiple options for developing rich web content- competition drives everyone to step up their game. As I've mentioned before, we are using Silverlight and it is just awesome. The XAML approach to writing software, whether web or desktop, is very powerful. It was designed from the ground up with writing applications in mind (unlike HTML, which was designed for presentation, causing us to wrestle with it for years as we try to deliver decent web applications). Now I know it isn't all about making my life as a developer easier, and I sure want to deliver what is best for the customer, but the better tools I have the faster and better I'll be able to build software.

I'd love to see a web where flash, HTML5, and Silverlight are all solid options for web development depending on your needs or preferences. The customer would only benefit from this, as these three technologies (and maybe even more) would compete to offer more features.

I don't want to get started on another Flash is not the web rant, so I'll try really hard not to.

My comment was directed toward video streaming. If sites have non-flash alternatives in place, then I'd like to be able to use them on the desktop as well. I've seen sites that default to HTML5 video on a mobile product that then default to Flash on the desktop - with no option to change that. I don't keep flash enabled on my notebook. I have to click on a placeholder to fire up flash on an object by object basis (or override the blocker for that site).

I also think it's super-lazy and poor design to include embedded Flash video on the main page of a blog instead of an image attached to particular story. If you want people to be able to play the video on the front page, then throw in some javascript as well to swap out a static image for the flash content. At least that way everyone, whether Flash is enabled or available can see the image. And if they can enable flash they can then decide whether or no to do that. One super-guilty site is The Unofficial Apple Weblog - bloody annoying.

As a web designer, with today's landscape, I think it's silly to develop a site in Flash. I mean, Flash is fine if you wanted your "site" to run standalone outside a browser or in a kiosk environment, but it just limits your exposure tremendously. The web seems very divided over Flash, and that's on top of a large number of devices not supporting it. Just not something I'd ever do, even if I personally didn't object to Flash. As it stands, I won't use it in web design, even if someone asks me to add a Flash feature to their site.

It should tear the same way on other designs that use multiple images positioned next to each other.

My main site actually has some table markup which I want to get rid of, but I've seen the exact same problem on purely CSS-driven layouts. I used to see it on Apple's site as well, but it was harder to notice because everything was near white.

EDIT: You can see it on Apple.com right now actually. If you zoom (in or out) you will notice a white gap appear between the "support" and "search" rectangles in the top navigation.

I didn't say I didn't see it on other websites. I was saying that yours was one of the (relatively small set) of sites that is very badly affected by it.

If I zoom right in on the Apple site I think I can see the tearing you are pointing out. Whereas without any zooming on yours I can straight away see half a dozen obvious bits where it clearly isn't looking how you wanted it to. I come across very very few sites that mobile Safari causes anywhere near that level of problems, so much so that I can't name a single one at the moment that I have noticed having tearing issues.

N.B. this isn't a criticism of your designs in any way, I am impressed with the level of visual design that you managed to wring out of HTML

I take it back, I really can't see the tearing on the Apple site that you mention. This is on an iPhone 4 and I guess it is entirely possible that mobile Safari handles these cases differently with more memory/cpu to throw at the problem.

On the Apple site I am seeing the issue with the regular version of Safari. I haven't gone on recently with the mobile version. On my site, Mobile Safari used to display the site correctly when no zooming was being done. I probably have to look at it again as I haven't done so with the latest iOS update. I may also need to adjust the default Safari page width which tells the browser how many pixels nominally make up the width of the un-zoomed page. That's what it bases its scaling off of I believe.

Here's another nice video showing real-world Flash usage on a Nexus One with WiFi on a 25Mbit FiOS WAN connection. Abysmal.

The bottom line is that sites and video need to be re-implimented to support MOBILE Flash. So you still can't use 10.1 to browse the "real internet."

http://www.technovia.co.uk/2010/08/just-how-bad-is-flash-on-android.html

And this is why Apple doesn't have Flash on their mobile products. Video works on the iPhone and iPad right now without Flash. We need a major web browsing platform to not support Flash to make sure it doesn't continue its grows and become a defacto web standard.

Looks like Flash apps are GO on the app store. No Flash player for the browser, but developers can now submit apps to the app store that have been created with CS5.

I wonder if any money changed hands to make this happen? Perhaps Apple has been seeing some quantity/quality of apps coming out on other platforms made with these tools (are there any?) Maybe it was necessary to also allow other tools that many developers had already been using...

I wonder what Adobe is going to say publicly about this latest policy update...

Press Release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html

They're also publishing a review guideline to let developers know how their apps will be reviewed.

The double standard of forbidding translation of Flash into ObjC but allowing .NET apps to be converted into ObjC was a little stupid to say the least.

Flash on Android is definitely on par with Flash on the desktop, when it comes to security anyhow. Make sure to keep those installs up to date, and be wary of turning Flash on by default.

I wonder if this will have any impact on the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator on the Android platform. One of the markets that actively exploits Flash is the MMO gold farmers. Their main attack up till now has always been keyloggers on the PC of the player to snag their password. There has already been a few attacks on the authenticators too, this may make it worse.

I'm not going to start another thread for another proprietary framework, so I'll just lump this in here.

Goodbye Silverlight. We hardly knew ye.

Is that an axe I hear being sharpened?

No big loss there. I think I've only come across two sites ever which needed Silverlight and only one of them was mandatory. I just ignored that site and kept looking elsewhere.

Not really interpreting that as saying they are killing silverlight. I can't imagine they will given that it is 90% the same as wpf and the two are growing closer every release. It isn't going to be the cross platform tech they though, but that doesn't make it unimportant. It's still going to be (alongside wpf) a good option for line of business apps, depending on the need of the business. That is what we are using it for and it is working out great. But if I were developing a media rich consumer facing app, I'd go with something else.

I doubt they'll kill it outright, but this is the sound of the death note for its consumer-centric web deployment. With any luck MS will end up snubbing Flash as well. It's really not in their long-trm best interests to help out Adobe. They need to figure out their priorities soon. They're a software company and Adobe is much more potential competition to them than Apple is, especially in enterprise.

Both Silverlight and Flash possibly going away on the web and both companies showing their plans to focus on HTML 5. All less then a year after people claimed the iPad would be DOA for not supporting Flash. Things change quickly it seems.

Adobe was demoing a Flash to HTML 5 converter recently. Here's the demo.


I'm betting this is a major part of CS6, if not an update to CS5.

Now to get this whole video codec mess sorted out for HTML 5 video tags, and there might be a proper portable across any platform and browser world wide web.

I knew the iPad wouldn't suffer for not supporting flash or silverlight- I figured it would go the other way, and it looks like it has. It bums me out that apple has that kind of power to limit the tools available to developers, but I'm not surprised it is working.

Mostly I'm just bummed that xaml development, which is such a better development experience over HTML and JavaScript, will never be a viable option for creating a consumer web application. I can take solace in the fact that I may never be tasked with creating a consumer facing app.

I can also take some solace in the fact that our application has no critical logic in the silverlight portion of the app and if we had to replace the front end with HTML, it would not be that difficult.

Would you have been similarly bummed if Microsoft still had the same power? Silverlight for the web was a direct attempt to kill Flash and limit developers choices. Silverlight was also a factor in several US states extending the Microsoft antitrust settlement terms for 5 more years (till 2012) due to the fear that the Windows platform still has enough power to kill competition if a specific tech is embedded into it with a competitors excluded. Windows XP shipped with Flash. I'm sure Microsoft would have liked to bundle Silverlight into Vista and 7, when they also pulled out Flash.

Should it be easier for developers to do their jobs, at the cost of consumers choice and ease of use? While these two aren't always tied together, it seems they are for web development.

Situation 1. Developers have access to use Microsoft Visual Studio for Silverlight, Adobe Flash Professional for Flash, and other tools for HTML 5. Because of the developer choice here, consumers have to go manually download and install proprietary plugins on their platform, or in the case of Windows today, an alternate browser with proper HTML 5 support. Developers have to spend time writing across multiple languages if they want to reach the widest audience possible, or accept that the use of their app/site will be limited to a smaller group of people.

Situation 2. Developers have access to many tools from many companies, but they all output HTML 5 code. Consumers can just use the browsers they have, on almost any device they have. And competition will be in the tools and browser side, to see who can make the best development tool or runtime platform, not the best development language that ends up fragmenting the market.

Situation 2 seems to be where the web is headed, with even Microsoft putting in the proper effort to get IE 9 up to the same level Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera have been at in the browser arena for ages. Adobe is developing HTML 5 tools, and many other companies are too. So while developers won't have a wide choice of languages to choose from, they will still have a wide choice of tools to work with. And that little bit of choice restriction on the development side then makes things much simpler, and much more consistent for the people that mater, the end users of the developers content. Without the end users (be it actual home users, or just other coworkers in an office) to consume the content, there wouldn't be a need for developers.

Who knows, the new IE may very well make Firefox/Mozilla the worst browser out there, instead of only the second worst.

As a consumer, downloading Flash has never been an issue for me, and it's usually a painless process to acquire. I never wanted MS to kill Flash, I just thought it was nice to have options.

As for your situations- I'd prefer situation 1 if the best plug ins became fairly ubiquitous the way Flash has (until the iPad). If a plug in became favored by developers and a lot of apps were written with it, it's no big deal for consumers to download it once and have it on their systems. Most didn't mind with Flash, and I don't think too many plug ins are going to rise to the top enough to be this common. Maybe it would have never happened with Silverlight- but without the iPad coming out my money would have been on Silverlight becoming fairly common to most computers.

Situation 2 is where we're going to end up, and it sucks (imo) because we're still tethered to a language that was never designed for applications. Sure we are making changes (and I'll admit, I haven't looked deep into HTML 5 which I know has drastic changes), but at the end of the day we are still shoehorning in application-like behavior into something that was designed for presenting and navigating documents.

The thing that bums me out is that on one hand you have something designed from the bottom up for creating web applications. On other other, you have something shoehorned into a document presentation language that wasn't originally meant for writing applications. Web development is constantly about abusing HTML enough to trick the browser into behaving like an application, and it's the users who suffer because they want to have the kind of behavior they see in traditional desktop applications in their web applications.

I've been waiting for YEARS for someone to come along and come up with a better way to write web apps than pushing HTML to limits. When Flash came out I REALLY thought that was going to be it, but Flash really didn't work out that way- as flashy as it was, it was never a good choice for line of business apps, and that is a huge driver of software that is written today. Once Silverlight 3 hit the shelves, we finally had a well designed product that could do the flashy stuff, but ALSO allowed the ability of writing really great line of business apps across the web. I actually regret that it came from Microsoft, because if it had been developed by someone else I think people would've given it a lot more credit.

So what I see is that, despite having a powerful tool with XAML based applications that can run on the web, once again we are returning to shoehorning stuff into our beloved hypertext markup language. It isn't that I want to make the developers lives easier in spite of the consumer. It just seems to me that it is far more challenging to write a web app than it needs to be, and ultimately the consumers suffer because of this.

An example- people have become so used to certain aspects of web apps that are there because of the limitations of the toolset we've had for the last 10 years that those behaviors become expected even when superior options are available. In the current app we're writing (in Silverlight) we have so many tools that behave in a more intuitive, easier to use way, but the product owner continually asks for things to be done in a way resulting in a more difficult end-user experience because it is a "web app". In fact, once we went out of browser (essentially turning it into a desktop app) she all of the sudden started becoming OK with certain controls because it no longer felt like a web app. Our abilities hadn't change, but suddenly since we weren't in a browser more fluid presentation became OK.

My point is, consumers have gotten used to a crummy user experience because of the toolset we've had available and they would be better off if we were able to develop apps in a better way. It isn't just about making the developers lives easier, it's about building a better product.

The web wasn't designed for applications. Many times people are trying to shoehorn what belongs on the desktop into a web browser. Adobe bought Macromedia because of Flash and only because of Flash. They saw how ubiquitous it was getting. MS likely developed Silverlight for pretty much nothing else than to compete in the same space.

If you need something that so advanced that it can't be done in Javascript or on the server side, then re-consider using the default web browser. Develop something to download and launch.

I agree 100% here. The problem is, people are demanding apps to be done in browser even when a desktop app would be better. I would be more than happy to keep the web within the confines of what HTML does well, but the people who pay my bills may not allow it. I've actually been fairly fortunate in my ability to avoid most of the craptastic technologies for writing web apps. I avoided asp classic completely and only built the smallest of apps with asp.net. I did write a huge jsp app, unfortunately, and that was enough to convince me that writing web apps in browser fundamentally is a broken concept. At the end of the day, web apps are all the rage and it's what product owners demand, even if there isn't a good reason to do it.

Yeah, but you're not even really writing a web app. You're writing a Silverlight app whose VM happens to exist inside a web browser. Based on what you've said before, the exact same thing could just as easily run outside the web browser, and even be launched from the browser itself. And if it can run inside the browser, the software already exists on the machine to run it completely independently of the browser. I suppose that at least starting it from the web browser gives you some control over version management.

So what you're saying is that your customer wants a desktop app, but they also want it, for no good reason, surrounded by the trappings of a web browser window.

I'm not saying you can do anything about that. I'm just pointing out the absurdity.

Yes, it is absurd. In fact, our SL app IS being deployed out of browser now, but it took a while to get the PO to this point, and I'm not sure she's altogether pleased with it. She agreed when one of our TAs convinced her that a SL app using client certificates would be more secure than running in browser.

I suppose what I can see as a good evolution is something akin to a browser that can run on any platform, but is designed for running applications. This would allow people to write applications that are easily accessible and rich in behavior. I guess I kind of hoped that plug ins would serve this need, as everyone already has a browser. The problem, of course, is that plug ins are all proprietary, and what we'd really need is a good, open standard that was built from the ground up for writing apps.

For you it's never been an issue. For many people who lack the technical skills this community has, the situation is different. They may download and install Flash properly, and get to the content out there. But do they keep Flash updated properly to avoid the security implications it brings to the table? Are they even aware of the security problems? In most cases, no.


I definitely see your point, but the answer to the problem isn't to run off and go create more proprietary languages and plugins. Even if Apple hadn't come along with the iPad, some other company would have changed the face of computing with a similar device, and we already see computing changing on the really mobile side due to smart phones. The more proprietary languages people are tied to, the more they can't move to new computing platforms. If Apple was out of the picture, I'm sure Microsoft would have had no problem continuing on their path of proprietary technology while entering the era of these new computing platforms. In the particular case of Flash, Adobe never demonstrated Flash running on iOS at a sufficient quality level for such devices, so ultimately situation 2 is occurring due to the inactions by Adobe as much as the actions of Apple.


What's stopping the industry from getting together and creating a new, proper, open standard for running applications on the internet? Why do we instead have a situation where Microsoft, Adobe, and to some extent Sun feel the need to own and control the technology? It took the iPads success to sound a wakeup call to these companies that they needed to start working harder, due to them watching their monopoly, or near monopolies start to erode.. Maybe from here, they will work towards ensuring HTML 6 or whatever follows does what it needs to, without being tied to just one company.

Business apps have been a main driver in the past, but I think thats only been due to the lack of focus on the consumer market. We are starting to see a new era where consumers are finally integrating more computing devices into their daily lives, and there is going to be more and more demand from the space for good applications, web or normal ones. Apple is doing well today because they saw this, and put proper focus on the consumer market first. Microsoft is still mostly focused on the enterprise and OEMs, and unless they change a bit more rapidly, they may see the end of their consumer rule over computing. Consumers will one day get so fed up of "the damn PC not working again" that they may just move entirely to a device like the iPad. $500 looks cheap compared to the cost of a PC, and repeated visits to the Geek Squad desk to clean up a machine due to a single web link. Once consumers aren't afraid of harming their machines, the app market will explode in the consumer space.

I WILL point out this though- the PO doesn't really know the difference between an SL app running in browser or a JavaScript site. All they know is you are running a "web app", and that's what they want.

To be fair, our current PO was burned before by a thick client app because of deploying patches- she doesn't want to experience that again. Fact is that can easily be dealt with, but once you've been burned you don't want to go down that road again. When we decided to take our app out of browser, she had to be assured that we'd be able to update the application seamlessly (which we will have no problem doing). I think the update issue is a large reason people choose web apps, but there are correct ways to deal with this that do not involve running in a browser.

On a different note- I'll also mention that as great as I think SL is as a technology, there are a lot of surrounding technologies in the MS stack that I believe are very misguided. It seems that everyone I hear talking about SL is trying to write apps in a way that hides (from the developer) the idea that you are actually writing an app communicating over the web. This was what made asp.net trash (you try to abstract the disconnect nature of developing a web page, and you get developers who don't understand the consequences of some very natural decisions) and I see it with a lot of the stuff that is being pushed for Silverlight. Out of browser or in browser, there are fundamental difference between an app running with all of its resources locally available, and one that has to communicate over the web in order to do its business. You cannot treat these problems the same no matter how hard you try, and it seems MS keeps trying to help developers out by giving them tools to do exactly that.

What's stopping it, I imagine, is that it is a difficult task to come up with such a thing, and it is far more likely for someone driven by selfish interests to focus on the problem, devote the resources, and come up with a solution. Unfortunately, this ends up with a proprietary solution that is a non-starter for the community at large.

I mean, jeez, how successful has the community been at creating (and following) a simple standard for displaying and navigating documents? Sure MS has been the real problem child here, but the point still stands- you STILL cannot fire up a browser and expect it to behave in a consistent way when it comes to interpreting HTML, a far simpler task than running an application.

Now with XAML you have a really powerful language, designed from the ground up to write applications. You have out of the box support for MVVM, clean separation of your view and data/BL, flexibility, power, and all manner of other great things. The problem is, the only interpreter for it is something controlled by MS. And say they released it into the wild and said "have at it- it's completely open- we just want to make money off of our tools" no one would go for it because they don't want to be tied to something born from MS. And of course this is a legitimate response.

It just sucks, imo, that the situation is the way that it is, and I have no idea how to fix it. I truly believe we need a clean break from HTML for running apps on the web, and now I see that the solution cannot be proprietary. I believe it will be decades before anything like the web browser, but designed from the ground up for apps, is available as an open standard, and it's a sorry state because the technology exists RIGHT NOW but we cannot use it. I just get frustrated when politics get in the way of progress, however necessary it may be.

And please note- I don't really include the plug in itself as the technology that exists "right now". In a perfect world you'd have something like XAML, but as an open standard, and many different interpreters (analogous to IE, Safari, FireFox, etc.) that would run it, thereby not tying ourselves to a less than perfect solution controlled by a single company.

How is the answer not already existent in Java, or more specifically, the JVM? Save some codec-type stuff with patent issues, and copyright issues with using the name "Java", it's a completely open specification (well, GPL open), with a number of alternative implementations, it's not language-dependent, etc., etc.

Java apps still require an install and you cannot seamlessly navigate between them. Now if Someone would create a java plug in, and if this plug in could be run in all browsers, then you'd have something. An alternative solution is to create a "navigator" shell app that works like a browser, except for java apps. In either case it would be nice to create a display language like xaml designed for visual styling, multimedia, and databinding. This wouldn't be strictly necessary as java has the swing library already (I guess- all my work with java has been limits to jsp, so my visual styling was done in HTML), but it would greatly aid developers in creating the rich content users are expecting these days.

The problem with a new, browser style "navigator" app, is that you have to convince users to install it and developers to write for it. Additionally users have to decide when they start their session whether they are going to be consuming or interacting. The issue with a plug in is getting the ipads of the world to support it. You might have more success with Java because it is open.

Either way, clearly the experience users want is to open his or her browser, hit a link, log in, and do their business. When they are done with that business, the want to go to a new link (maybe found via search) and do new business elsewhere. They may even want to browse some documents in between and likely want to do it all in within the same context. The java of today does not support this experience and the only way to deliver it is through a plug in or manhandling HTML.

Given that Apple are deprecating their porting efforts for the JVM on OSX and Google's troubles with Oracle, I reckon the chances of Java appearing in any form on iOS are as lower than Flash appearing.

Java has "Web Start", which makes installation very easy. Basically, you go to a web page where a small piece of metadata is downloaded which then tells the Web Start application to check to see if it's already cached and if it needs to be updated. This is apparently pretty similar to Microsoft's "One Click", if you're familiar with that. (I'm not.)


Huh?

I mean that part of the "web experience" people expect is I'm on one "page", be it an application or content, and I have hyperlinks that lead me to another page.Even with lots of different content, the browser adds cohesiveness to the whole experience and I think users expect that.

As for the "Web Start" thing- well all I can say about that is, for whatever reason it doesn't fit the bill for the product owners who "want a web app". It probably should, though.

Do "Web Start" and "One Click" apps allow you to download in pieces? That is, can you dynamically downloaded parts of the app as the user needs them so they aren't hit with a big download all up front? I know you can do this in Silverlight, but I haven't really investigated "One Click" type solutions to see if that is possible. I think it's important because you do want your "web apps" to be quick to load.

Really, though, it's hard for me to really say what is important to users and why certain decisions are made. On every project I've done I've argued against creating web apps unless there was a really good reason- I figure if you want a rich user experience, use a tool designed to provide one.

I believe that Java Web Start allows piece-part downloads, yes. I have no idea about One Click.

Necropost to my own thread... Nice.

Adobe seems hell-bent on waiting until the 4th anniversary of "too late" to finally ship a version of Flash that can play video on a mobile device.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/18/flash-10-2-hits-android-today-adobe-hopes-for-viewable-720p-pla/

Incidentally, with Apple's more relaxed rules for the iOS App store, I can't immediately think of a reason Adobe wouldn't be able to have a stand-alone Flash Player approved. They could create their own web browser using the WebKit API and handle the Flash right within the app.

The one reason I can think of doesn't have anything to do with Apple. The performance would still be complete crap because Flash sucks. Everyone at Adobe knows this. They knew it when they bought Macromedia. But they still want to beat that dead horse in hopes it will bleed more money.

Flash is more than just a video player, though. I installed Kongregate for Android a while back, and I've been having fun playing Flash games on the go.

It is, but there's no denying that video ranks pretty highly (if it's not #1) for Flash use on the web.

I just wish sites would use HTML5 video tags properly. Most are still just detecting the user agent strings and feeding HTML 5 video to iPads and IPhones only. This is the wrong approach. Instead they should detect the platforms capabilities and use what is best in the situation.

I tried going without flash on my work laptop, using Safari. It's capable of playing any HTML 5 video the iPad is. Sites would refuse to send it though, unless I faked the user agent string. This is even a problem for other devices, like the Xoom. Until yesterday, Flash wasn't available, but the device could have played video in a ton of places. Sites are already assuming Android will always have Flash it seems, like ESPN. Seems not much has changed since last summer when I had the Captivate that kept being fed Flash it couldn't handle instead of HTML 5 that it could.

With extensions you might be able to force certain sites to use a different user agent string instead of leaving it set all the time. Or, like the YouTube extension I have, it just forces that specific site to use HTML5 video tags. I've found the YouTube preference itself always gets hosed after a while.

But yeah Tom, I totally a agree. You want shameful? TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog was *constantly* posting stories with a flash video as the main image - super annoying. And utterly short-sighted of them.

Shameful?

Should I start a Flash Death-Watch thread?

From Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, IE lead:


Another way to say that the web's future does not include Flash.

6 months later, and this still seems to be the case. Maybe with the recent announcement from Adobe that their streaming server 4.5 will also serve HTML 5 video for iOS/Roku clients will help fix this properly.

Having now had hands on experience for a while with a tablet with Flash (The HP Touchpad), I'm firmly in the "don't want" category. The video experience is painful and noticeably bad in most cases on the Touchpad. iPad, continues to deliver me solid video playback on the sites that support it. And the ones that do continue to grow.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2548802/adobe-killing-mobile-flash-plugin-android-playbook



All tied into the "realignment" Adobe is going through, that resulted in 750 people to be laid off. Hopefully those folks land on their feet, that seems like a large number for an area to absorb quickly, even for Silicon Valley.

Ouch. Bad lack of forward vision helped doom it.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ex-flash_manager_adobe_ignored_smartphones_until_i.php

"Icaza noted that Adobe’s focus hit the more popular feature phone market through the launch of the iPhone and the rest of the smartphone market"

"even though half the mobile Flash team at Adobe carried the Apple iPhone in 2007, they said it was a niche."

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125219/flash-mobile-android-4-1-not-supported

Keep in mind that if you want Flash on Android, download it before tomorrow. Adobe will be pulling it from the Google Play store for new installs.

Maybe now web sites will start supporting HTML 5 video properly. It's annoying to me, even as an Apple user that sites like TheVerge.com use Flash for every video, except when the user is on iOS. Android users, with the same HTML 5 video capabilities of iOS, get locked out unless they have Flash installed.