401–410 of 522 posts
P.S. I am very tankful to Apple for taking this fight (whatever their reasons maybe).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Don't lose sight of the issue. 3.3.1 is the issue, not "Flash on the iPhone". By reframing the argument as "Flash on the iPhone", you are succumbing to misdirection.
I think one of the main reasons they published this was so they could respond to “iPhone doesn’t even have Flash.”
Watch him as he goes
Seriously, how much does this letter need a soundtrack? Flash anyone? Music with the text scrolling. Different text effects...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sad thing: CS5 Flash could also export to native iPhone apps. A native exported app would run faster, consume less power, and potentially have better integration with the underlying platform, all with exactly the same interface as an HTML5 web app... In other words, a native app exported from Flash would be better than an exported HTML5 web app in all the same ways Steve describes HTML5 video as being better than…
Actually, the native-exported apps are mentioned by Jobs in point 6. Of note: these apps were slower than native apps, consumed far more power than native apps, used more memory than native apps, and had little to no integration with the underlying platform, other than running in the first place. Jobs' point talks about this; the issue is that if Flash CS5 supported what the iPhone can do today, who's to say when it…
I think this is a red herring, though. Apple doesn't reject apps for not taking full advantage of the system. People can and will make Objective C apps that don't use GameCenter (or iAds, or the accelerometer/camera). If Apple was most concerned about GameCenter adoption, why not leave out the 3.3.1 change and instead mandate that all games must use GameCenter? That would guarantee Adobe would include it in Flash and then nobody -- not even the native developers -- could produce a "substandard" app.
But even if Adobe made a version of Flash that could target every aspect of the iPhone platform perfectly (maybe by open-sourcing the compiler and allowing Objective C extensions), Apple would find a way to reject it. It's not just a matter of making it easy to port things to the iPhone... it's also a matter of making it hard to port away from the iPhone. Apple currently has the majority platform, and they want to make the choice between platforms expensive, so that developers choose the iPhone first and -- as much as possible -- exclusively.
We techies are guilty of always wanting everything. I see projects a lot of time, that won't move forward because the developers will not have the balls to stand up and draw the line between things the software will to, and the software will not do. It's just more comfortable to avoid confrontation. When I read this, I felt that Steve really knows what he wants, and in order to get it, he is willing to eliminate thin…
So this is all about Steve trying earnestly and selflessly to create the best platform possible, and not about trying to eliminate competition to his dominant platform by disallowing portable application environments? I swear, I used to think the reality distortion field was a dumb metaphor...
As an example, I refuse to use Tweetdeck on the Mac, because even though it does exactly what I want from a Twitter client, it doesn't behave at all like a Mac app should. It uses too much memory, it's slow, it's crashy, and the keyboard shortcuts for moving around text fields, that I use in every other app, don't work. Instead I use Tweetie, which does almost none of what I want (except showing and making tweets), but behaves the way an app should, so it's less jarring to use.
For example: Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
This is fantastic news, direct from Steve Jobs himself, Apple is going to go completely open on their products! This means that I can go and buy a copy of iWorks from Oracle now, and get a Mac Clone from Dell and an HTC built iPhone! I wonder how long it'll be until OSX is available from Canonical? so excited, so excited
Other that this, the point is almost entirely incorrect. There are plenty of authoring and playback tools for flash not made by Adobe. It isn't exactly an "open standard", yes, but Adobe is not the sole source of flash stuff these days. Even a cursory search on google for flash creation tools brings back a bunch. Mr. Jobs, please follow this link http://lmgtfy.com/?q=flash+authoring+tools
Other points are better made, but some are still bad: 1) HTML5 is better 2) Webkit is neato 3) Apple never said they support the full web anyways 4) Most places have HTML5 video support nowadays, except for Hulu 5) Who needs flash for games anyway, i* devices have tons. 6) Flash = bad security 7) Flash = poor performance 8) Flash = eats batteries 9) Flash doesn't work great with touch 10) Third party content development tools suck! The people who use them suck! The crap that comes out of them sucks too! Anybody who think differently was born wrong! 11) Adobe should be making HTML5 authoring tools anyways.
What Apple should do is put Flash through the exact same approval process it puts other apps through. Make Adobe work for it, but don't just simply cut it off like a tantrum throwing child that can't share. If these are the problems with Flash, kick it back with comments and force Adobe to fix brokeness to get approval through the store. Adobe being open or not being open is a garbage point as I noted above. Apple doesn't require any of the apps in the app store to be open standards compliant. The mechanism for dealing with all of these problems is already there and it's simple -- the app store. There's no need to "work with Adobe", just reject it from the store the same way lots of apps are rejected after the screening process. Lots of apps eat batteries. Is that a new rejection criteria, "apps may not consume battery life."? If I want to run down my device in 5 hours instead of 10, that seems to be my problem.
1) HTML5 is still very very immature technology with almost no good toolchain support for authoring HTML apps. It's still a pile of languages glued together in a browser that sometimes makes something useful or interesting, but also really really processor intensive and slow. We all ooh and aah, everytime we see a canvas demo that eats up 100% CPU time on a quad core system displaying something that we all saw in 1996! By just this simple test, points 7-8 are almost completely invalid. Does flash perform worse than native apps and use more battery? Sure! So does playing an intensive game!
2) Webkit is neato, but webkit is a different thing than Flash. It makes no sense to compare the two. It's like comparing webkit and iworks for the iPad. By this logic, Apple should also not sell iWorks for those devices but just point everybody to Google Docs.
3) That's okay, that's why there are 3rd parties who can build stuff to support it for you.
4) Good point. This is definitely the wave of the future, Hulu needs to catch up. The point about hardware decoding is also fair I think.
5) i* devices do have tons of games true (Steve, I hope you now see the connection between entertainment software and platform sales, it's eluded you on the Mac for years). But those games are not flash games. I want to play flash games on my i* device. Period. I am the consumer, and I get to demand what I want to purchase. The only fair point I think is that most flash games don't work well via a touch interface. I have to agree with this. But there are also plenty of flash apps that are not games that would be amazing on an iPad. I want to use those. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295052 And no bit of HTML5 will replace these kinds of things for at least 12-24 months. Flash is not just about video and games.
The i* platforms also do not have the most pieces of entertainment software of any platform. Apple needs to simply stop exaggerating their claims to the point of absurdity.
6,7,8) see point about app store rejection above.
9) Agreed, though some flash apps might work well. Or apps could be written to work well with it exactly the same as making an HTML5 canvas app work well with the i* devices. This BS about mouseover events, and device features is also true of the web, yet that doesn't seem to be a reason to yank Safari mobile off of the devices.
10) This is the most noticeable pile of utter garbage in this entire thing. Somebody here did a survey of the top i* device apps and many of them were made with third party tools or contained elements that are now in violation of the new terms. Most of those apps were of superior quality. Just because the tool chain is made by somebody else does not mean the output will suck. Conversely, just because the toolchain is Apple approved, does not mean that all apps that use that toolcahin are going to be free of suckage. There are lots of shitty apps in the app store, lots, and I'd bet the vast majority of them were written with the approved toolchain.
11) I think we can all agree that HTML5 is immature as a technology. Adobe makes great authoring tools. Therefore, Adobe should make great HTML5 authoring tools. I think we can all agree on this. Flash is eventually going to go away. But in the meantime it's still a useful piece of technology. Just because quartz timing devices will all eventually go away doesn't mean that we should just stop using quartz timing devices. But even if Adobe started today, flash would be a predominant force on the web for 3-5 years.
Finally, this is all a giant pile of misdirection. Point 10 is the key one not flash.
If Jobs had provided this type of specific detail before releasing 3.3.1, we could have saved ourselves lots of blogspam.
In what sense? This only addressed 3.3.1 indirectly. It made it clear that Flash was a target, but said absolutely nothing about other targets. Assuming everyone is in the clear from this would be a mistake, I think.
For example, EA who uses Lua for scripting wouldn't be worried as they likely were due to this two weeks late press release.
This is where he loses me: "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Adobe can just as easily say: "Though Flash products are proprietary, we strongly believe that standards pertaining to what software is allowed to run on your computer should be open." It's doublespeak either way, and it's crazy to think th…
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 5 states that ubiquitous Flash co-opts the rate of advancement of the mobile platforms it runs on. E.g. you can't effectively differentiate your device by adding a new sensor, API or capability, because Flash won't bother to support it until the hardware is standard.
It's the same basic argument: Flash becomes the platform, it's not a particularly good one and it's not a particularly good situation for developers.
Would you rather Apple compete with Google, RIM, Microsoft and HP/Palm for developers, or have them compete with interchangeable Flash-playing-boxes, leaving developers to Adobe's whims?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What did we exchange for this cheese and gimmicky design? Everything. I agree that if you don't follow the proper protocol you will end up with an undesirable site. I can't argue that Flash == HTML in terms of accessibility. There are ways within Flash to harness some accessibility but it is up to the developer to implement these. An informational site in Flash is a bad choice. I would never suggest the use of Flas…
"Selectable text" is an option in any Flash text field. Is copying/pasting it to the OS (or app) pasteboard an option? If so, will it use the same UI as native apps have? Or will it force a funky widget of its own in the middle of an app that otherwise looks like the rest of the OS?