Adobe clutches chance to bury Steve Jobs 'hog' insult
After calling Flash a "CPU hog," Steve Jobs has given Adobe the chance to live down this now famous insult. And Adobe is taking it. Steve Jobs also called Flash "buggy" and littered with security holes. And he summarily banned it from both the iPhone and the iPad - even when it's translated into Jobsian machine code. But with …
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Ok, that's video, and everything else?
I'm always told how good flash is at building applications, farmville seems to be the most popular. And I know people with >2GHz dual core windows machines who gave up on FV because their computer is too slow, and let's be honest, we oldtimers have seen better than that on our C64s some 30 years ago.
@ Henry Wertz 1
I've just Googled, and the oracle tells me that Flash for Blackberry is claimed to be arrived in "H2 2010", i.e. not at the present time. I'll reiterate that full, proper Flash doesn't seem to be on any mobile device at this moment. Call me again when that changes.
I think that in a few years, no-one will be able to believe that there was so much brouhaha over this. No-one's getting upset at Java not being included, are they? I suspect Flash will go the same way (and good riddance frankly, on any platform).
@EWI
You could say the same about OS X..., relatively not many people would even care if it disappeared off the face of the planet. In fact it would probably be better as software developers could put more time and effort into developing on better platforms without having to conform to dictatorship lock-downs that Apple enforce.
It's a very unhealthy situation that Apple are trying to promote! Choice should be with the user, not chosen and enforced by the vendor! It's a shame really, Apple have some good ideas but as before it will come crashing down around them because of the way they try to control everything, they have not learned from their mistakes.
Current method
With a EEE PC that includes a 3G modem, you can make Skype calls from anywhere.
And you get Flash and a full PC experience. I would prefer a 5" EEE PC, but the 10" works well on the road. With a solid state drive, they boot up almost immediately.
Coverage
"With a EEE PC that includes a 3G modem, you can make Skype calls from anywhere."
Either your experience of 3G coverage is very different to mine, or we have different definitions of the word "anywhere".
Good plan
"Choice should be with the user, not chosen and enforced by the vendor!"
Try removing Flash from your system and then getting a full web experience.
Not that I'm saying Flash is the only product you would have similar problems with, but for some quite popular sites there isn't an actual "choice",just "use" or "do not use".
Don't like Apple? Buy someone else's phone/music player/computer.
Don't like IE? Use Firefox/Chrome/Opera/whatever
Don't like Flash? Use erm.........oh.
It's ok if the site is something that's nice to have fluff like YouTube, but what it it's your online-only banking site?
So yes, choice good, but don't delude yourself that we have it.
Bit of an exaggeration
All the people on this and the other related posts saying flash is dead, get a clue.
Do you seriously think web designers are going to give up on flash just because it won't work on the iphone and doesn't work well on OS X? Forget Apple's shiny PR maneouvering for a minute and compare the number of other computers on the internet capable of running flash fine with the number of macs and iphones, you'll notice a bit of a difference in the numbers.
It took years for people just to stop using tables in their HTML and for IE6 to go away (still happening), the death of flash and the adoption of HTML 5 video aren't going to happen in some spontaneous revolution once the standards are finalised.
Bit of an exaggeration?
@Ramshackle: I'm a Flash and web developer but must confess that I have currently reduced or stopped using it, mainly because whenever I mention the gorgeous sites I've developed to people, they immediately get out their iPhones to have a look and cannot access it. This proved particularly embarassing with clients who took the line that if most people in the meeting cannot access the site on the leading mobile browser, then the site needs to change as that was somehow representative of their target audience. Frustrating to say the least...
If this was just one or two people I wouldn't think much of it, but I can't remember the last person I talked to that didn't have an iPhone these days (including me lol) Overall, I think this is having a very big effect on Flash developers (as to how much, this depends on whether you develop whole sites or just banners or just cartoons etc.) as everybody with an iPhone/iTouch/iPad is unable to access it, and those are pretty big numbers...especially if you look at the ad space hits from such devices.
Perspective
So let's get this into perspective, flash introduces hardware acceleration in version 10.1 which is not even out yet...And at the same time Apple is helping Adobe by publishing these API's...
Funny all this talk about bad architecture etc as before this version Flash didn't use hardware acceleration on Windows either....So what was the excuse before this version for the bad performance?
must...kill....Flash...
No, what will kill flash is every man and his dog installing stuff like ClicktoFlash - and not bothering to ever click on it.
No clicking = no obtrusive advertisement taking over your screen = no hits = no money. Hopefully, eventually, the purveyors of Flash crap will get the message and give up on it.
At 10% and rapidly rising with madly high customer satisfaction Microsoft would start a small war to have themselves, the Mac platform is here to stay.
Woah, hold the phone...
"the Jobsian cult has added an API that allows third parties to hardware-accelerate H.264 video on the Mac"
You mean they couldn't before?? That is so incredibly shit!
Quicktime?
99% of developers could hardware decode video on Mac: just not Adobe. Qucktime does much more, with about 3 lines of code - Create a quicktime movie object from a URL, attach it to a MoviePlayer view, tell it to play.
The new API (which I've looked at) is for decoding individual H264 frames. You've now got to fetch them yourself, unpack the frame, send it to the HW (via the API), get it back (via a callback), and the draw it on the screen. LOADS more work, and only people working on a few specific apps will need it - that's not to say it's not a useful API, but most people want to create/edit/play/save video which QT does. This is for people who JUST want to DECODE it.
It's simply Adobe not wanting to do things to fit in with the OS. Adobe are still programming for MacOS 7, because after 10 years they're only just waking up to the fact that Apple are serious about this new fangled MacOSX.
But
Who the hell wants to use quicktime as a format? It's awkward, doesn't play well on anything except a Mac and (let's be frank) pretty annoying
Using Quicktime? Just about everyone.
'Basic' says: "Who the hell wants to use quicktime as a format? It's awkward, doesn't play well on anything except a Mac and (let's be frank) pretty annoying"
Well, anyone using the open standard H.264 video format, which uses a container format that looks rather like QuickTime (because it essentially is.)
(QuickTime is a container, not a video codec.)
Adobe Flash needs an API that supports individual hardware decode of frames, rather than pushing the entire H.264 stream through (as already supported by the QuickTime API for a long, long time) because they need to be able to compose other graphics on top: those writing the ActionScript behind many of the Flash-based video players want to be able to add DoGs, adverts, etc. on top of the video "on the fly."
Not correct
The statement that Adobe couldn't use hardware acceleration before is incorrect. Apple has always offered hardware acceleration via CoreVideo, but Adobe chose to use its lousy port from Windows and therefore wanted the ability to access the hardware directly (which is not allowed on Macs for security reasons).
Let's look at the reality.
1. Other companies doing much more hardware intensive things than Flash managed to get by with the public APIs. Why couldn't Adobe?
2. Even other Adobe apps do far more complex things with the public APIs, why not the Flash group?
3. Adobe always had access to hardware acceleration if they chose to use it. CoreVideo provides hardware acceleration, but Adobe wanted to write their own insecure, buggy software to bypass Apple's safeguards.
4. The hardware API that Adobe was whining about affects only h264 video. What is Adobe's excuse on everything else? My MacBook Pro goes to 120% CPU usage simply by opening a Flash page that doesn't even have animations on it. Why is that?
5. Adobe STILL doesn't have a full version of flash that will work on mobile devices. Even 10.1, (even if it does come out this summer as delayed), will only work on devices with 800 MHz A8 or above - which is an almost insignificant number of devices.
6. Even this 'new, improved' Flash with hardware acceleration still sucks CPU cycles like crazy. Look at Engadget's results. On the i5 system, it actually uses MORE CPU cycles than the old version. But even the i7 result tells you something. If it's taking 50-60% CPU on a Core i7 with multi-GB of RAM and fast video card, how do you expect it to work on a 400-600 MHz mobile device with 128-256 MB of RAM?
How anyone could blame Apple for Adobe's incompetence is beyond me.
insert usual comment
Not an apple fanboi by any measure but Jobs is hardly reaching calling Adobes software for the last 5+ years, shite. My girlfriend rails on the UI on photoshop these days so I am pushing for her to learn the GIMP. Doing whatever it takes to secure my boxes and this always starts by removing the bloated malware portal Adobe software has become regardless of platform.
Great article!
I guess that explains it. It's Apple's problem - they simply didn't give Flash the necessary permissions to access the API's Flash needs to help boost performance. The minority of Mac users are the only one's encountering the CPU hog issue. The majority of users on Windows run Flash perfectly fine.
If Apple doesn't want Flash on their iPhone or iPad even though it could run perfectly fine and stable, then it's their loss. Their users will not be happy to see Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile smartphones soon running Flash perfectly fine. Nothing but lies = Apple.
nooooooo
Kill flash - flash must die for the benefit of man kind
Re: kill flash
"...what will kill flash is every man and his dog installing stuff like ClicktoFlash ....."
Yes, that would work. However, this 'ere sense of proportion sez that actually only a percentage of tech site commentards are doing this.
....and even their dogs ain't bothered.
The massive and silently deafening "meh" from the great unwashed is probably why the Great Stampede Away From Flash amongst web monkeys has a slight problem. Nobody bothered to turn up for it.
stuff em
If I were mr flash then I would not bother with any mac product. Stuff em. Then watch all the mac fanbois cry when the interwebz divvnt work. And what with the ban on flash on the iphone / ipad etc shouldnt this apply to java as well?....
Hypocritical? Mute flash audio per tab, stop button for animations, please.
Jobs should sharpen his critcism of Flash: it is a bolt-on technology into a webpage that is not completely aware of the host page it is enbedded within nor is the host page totally aware of what the flash element is doing.
To have such awareness would improve efficiency and user experience, where the flash content could react to what the user is doing with other regions of the page for example. (Well, please correct me Flash-developers if I'm wrong, but I think my general point about bolt-on holds).
It is not possible to stop Flash animations that irritate (unless someone knows of a 3rd party browser plug-in).
It is not possible to mute the sound coming from Flash content, per browser tab. Annoying if you are browsing multiple sites while listening to your favourite music only to find that an auto-start-on-loading Flash component on a page crashes over this with its own music.
There you go, Steve, give them that.
As for the comment "closed and proprietary" about Flash. Perhaps true, perhaps nothing wrong with that, but doesn't the iPhone platform have elements of closed-and-proprietary-ness given that every app has to be approved, apps can only be developed on Apple platforms, and that the platform is a commercial product and not an open-source one.
Haven't got an issue with closed/proprietary; business is business. But when one company calls another that, when both are then that's simply hypocritical.
use FlashBlock
The first thing I install on Firefox is "FlashBlock" that, well, blocks all Flash in Webpages. No nasty ads, everything cool. When I *do* need flash (for a menu, video, game or whatever) I click on that *particular* flash and have it all well.
So what's the big problem with flash ? Once a friend wanted to post a video on his webpage, and with Flash we could do that in 10 minutes.
When was that, again?
"A company spokesman says that Mac hardware acceleration will arrive with an incarnation of the Flash Player due "shortly after" version 10.1, which is now on its second release candidate."
Just a brief reminder here - There is currently NO reliable Flash application for ANY mobile phone currently on the market. [read again]
Adobe has be promising for over 10 years to get Flash working correctly on the Mac. We're still waiting. Flash 10.x is still vaporware. Flash for mobile phones is still a long ways off...even with Google's Android help.
Just walk way...
My compliments to the hundreds of thousands of developers who are currently creating software for the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad without ever using Flash. With over 4 billion downloads of your products, it seams that the buying public is voicing their opinion about the need for Flash in a mobile environment.
And my compliments to the hundreds of thousands of developers who are currently creating software in the Flash environment and are, it seems, more than willing to forgo a market of 100 million users instead of rising to the call of learning how to properly develop an application for Apple's products. My friends, you have stones of steel and more power to you.
I know I would have a difficult time walking away from that size of a market (and one that is growing every quarter). But these diehard individualists, these buggy whip manufacturers in a time of automobile supremacy, these Greyhound Bus travelers in a time of wide-bodies super jet, in a time of Manchester United they stand for Birmingham, these mavericks are toeing the line and sticking to their principles of holding the flame of antiquity and proclaiming loudly, "WE WILL NOT CHANGE. THEY REST OF YOU CAN SOD OFF!"
Anti flash stance will prove to be a mistake for Apple
Let's remember that Steve Jobs' main goal is to make money for Apple and his holier than thou attitude with regard to open standards is a joke.
It's amazing how many people equate Flash with annoying banners or advertisements. So tell me something, when amazing new HTML 5 comes along (whenever that happens - years before most people are using a browser that fully supports it), are you telling me that HTML5 won't be used to create the same annoying banners - or will HTML 5 developers be far more restrained with this stuff?
It's seems obvious to me that Android will be by far the most popular smartphone OS in a couple of years and will also rule the waves on tablets. Steve Jobs realises he's made a mistake with the whole anti flash stance and is now deparately trying to trash it before every other smartphone supports it over the next few months.
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