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.