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Thoughts on Flash

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Re: Thoughts on Flash

#221

Post by qeorge »

marknutter wrote: post #47
qeorge wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little tired of the "IE6 is holding back the web" meme. Lots of hand-waving, no examples.

As a developer who has many times decided not to implement a killer feature that works in a modern browser because I will have to come up with some graceful degradation or alternative implementation in IE6, I can say that it isn't hand waving.

I don't mean to be rude, but could you expound upon this a bit? What was the feature, and why was supporting IE6 critical to moving forward with it?

I'm not in any way arguing that IE6 isn't a PITA. I suppose its the "holding back" part of it that I don't understand.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#222

Post by cninja »

danudey wrote: post #164
cninja wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My head started to spin when trying to reconcile points 1 and 5. Point 1 states Adobe Flash has proprietary features and the standardized open feature sets of HTML5, CSS, and JS should be used instead. Point 5 states 3rd party layers limits development to the standardized features and leaves out the proprietary features that makes Apple unique.

Point 1 is talking about websites / web applications. Point 5 is talking about native apps. Two different domains entirely. With point 1, if developers are going to make a website, and they ditch flash, their work would work everywhere well (iPhone/iPad/iPod, Android, WebOS, Symbian, and Blackberry OS 6, as well as on the desktop). They wouldn't be limited to the platforms Adobe decides to support (or decides to supp…

I do understand your point about using the right tool for the right job, however Apple is arguing both sides. Either cross platform standards are a good thing, or platform specific features are a good thing.

While web applications and native applications are different domains, they are not different enough to mean different reasoning can be used. An end user doesn't really care if something is built using HTML5, flash, or compiled natively. They just care that it looks cool and does cool things.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#223

Post by bobbyi »

not_an_alien wrote: post #124
illumin8 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute, how is comparing H.264 hardware support for decoding (I think you meant decoding, not decompression) vs. software bullshit? Shipping versions of Flash still use software for video decoding. The only versions that use hardware are unreleased beta versions of 10.1. Your post sounds like an Adobe apologist making stuff up.

Hardware decoding of video content has been available since FP version 10, released in October 2008. I'm not making stuff up. I actually have my history of gripes with Adobe, as if I've been working with their software for more than a decade. If anything, I'm just enraged that this article is making stuff up, and I don't like people taking ideology and fundamentalism into a discussion that should be tech-based only.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/gala/

'Welcome to the Flash Player preview release, code-named “Gala,” which introduces support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3, the most recent release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard... The hardware acceleration functionality in the Gala preview release of Flash Player is expected to be included in an update following the release of Flash Player 10.1.'

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#224

Post by Timothee »

treblig wrote: post #191
gstar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered if Gruber's reliable contact at Apple was some guy with turtlenecks and no numberplates.

He did throw up this little Tweet a couple nights ago: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/12988151829

And he did it at 9:42pm, iPhone's preferred (evening) time. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250125)

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#225

Post by tvon »

ThomPete wrote: post #5
yan wrote: post #2

I wonder why Jobs felt he had to explain this situation, which (in my opinion) was fairly clear to anyone involved in technology. Perhaps the criticism was getting to him? Also, I found this to be a brilliant snipe: > If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

It's called control over the experience something that really shouldn't be a surprise for Jobs. There are literally millions of experiences out there that can't be done with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. if you want proof, go to theFWA.com and have a look around. For every bad flash solution out there, there are some quite fantastic ones. Flash gives you control of the experience in ways that by any metrics outcompete H…

theFWA.com is a perfect example of Flash being a disaster. The entire site is Flash (completely unnecessarily).

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#226

Post by tomlin »

Zev wrote: post #188
tomlin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble swallowing some of this. A few of these theories have been debunked successfully. I have a small problem with this "don't look at the man behind the curtain" routine. Proprietary is proprietary. Don't try and swing it. Battery Life: http://vimeo.com/9705969 , http://vimeo.com/9724682 Delays: http://www.neowin.net/news/adobe-quotapple-hurts-customers-f... Touch/Scroll: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2…

Delays Your link makes it seem like an evangelist is playing loosely with words; "available for download" could simply mean beta/RC status, not ready for release everywhere. Battery Life From your link: The results are amazing: I can watch a 4 hours and a half flash movie, without interruption, with a bright screen (no sleep mode) and sound !!! From Steve Jobs post: The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for examp…

It is true that some of these links are from evangelists. But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we?

Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours.

Touch/Scroll: Another sidestep. A Flash issue? With that I answer: a:hover {}

I just don't get this argument from Apple. Steve Jobs pioneered high usability mobile UI because Apple took the reigns. Now we have Android UI taking a cue from Apple and "unlocking the mobile market"

Flash and HTML5 have a similar relationship. HTML5 opens it up a bit. That's great. But what about HTML6? Flash is Area51 for implementation study.

We don't need to implement a marquee tag and then take it away once we realize it sucks. How could we market test video conf. or canvas-based visuals if we had no way to benchmark them? Flash is good. The VS. argument is a misnomer.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#227

Post by tjogin »

thought_alarm wrote: post #214
tjogin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Gruber has been making these exact points. This could basically be ghost written by Gruber and we wouldn't know the difference.

Because they're obvious points to make. Apple's competitors have been clamoring to put Flash on their mobile devices because it's one more bullet point they can use in their marketing against the iPhone. Yet it's 2010 and mobile Flash is still nowhere to be found. How is that not Adobe's fault?

I agree, but a hell of a lot of people are missing these obvious points, though. Most people with an opinion on Apple are.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#229

Post by alex_c »

meroliph wrote: post #145

I've jumped to the conclusions on the article and this puzzled me: "The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content." Because media outlets are forced to make their videos available to the iPhone without being able to use Flash, this means that Flash is no longer needed?

From Apple's point of view - yes.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#230

Post by MartinCron »

pilif wrote: post #64

> For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. right. And the Finder - a piece of Software central to OSX was using Carbon until... when exactly? At most 6 months prior to when CS5 came out. iTunes - a corner stone of the iPhone software world? Still on Carbon. If I hate one thing, it's hypocrisy. Aside of that, nice…

"Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator."

Hell yeah! Let's pray. I'm not interested in using MonoTouch because I want to make a cross-platform App that also runs on iPhone/iPad. I'm interested in using MonoTouch because I prefer C# to Objective-C, if only because that's where the bulk of my experience is.

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