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Thoughts on Flash

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Re: Thoughts on Flash

#481

Post by GHFigs »

pyre wrote: post #470
davidedicillo wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs never said that Cocoa is an open standard. He just state that Flash is as proprietary as Cocoa Touch. Market share =! Open. His point is that on the mobile web, HTML5 is open, not Flash.

So "Flash on the Web == Bad" because it's not open, but "Flash cross-compiled apps on iPhone == Bad" because it's not... open... ? The logic doesn't match up. As has been stated, it's a misdirection. Steve Jobs is setting fire to a house on the west side of town so that no one will notice that he's robbing the bank on the east side. He's trying to come off as an 'open crusader for the web against Adobe' because 'Adob…

"Flash cross-compiled apps on iPhone == Bad" because it's not... open...

Neither stated nor implied. The logic doesn't "match up" because it's a separate issue, addressed with different arguments:

"We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices."

He then goes on about third-party middleware, e.g.:

"We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

Jobs does not make the openness argument in reference to Apple's proprietary platform at all. It seems to me that you have to ignore the last third of the article to think that he was.

He's trying to come off as an 'open crusader for the web against Adobe'

Is Jobs lying when he says Apple supports open web standards?

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#482

Post by ericb »

megablast wrote: post #468
ericb wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the real Steve Jobs is Bill Gates, lately. Maybe Monopolies (essentially) do that to people.

Apple do not have a Monopoly, unless you use a diseased meaning of the word Monopoly to mean devices produced by Apple. In that case, almost every company has a monopoly.

At a certain point, if you execute so much better than the competition and set yourself up differently (controlling and innovating in hardware too) and you maintain total control of your platform, you can dominate in the market to such an extent that you have a virtual monopoly.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#483

Post by GHFigs »

Qz wrote: post #476
rimantas wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not about keeping users stupid, it's about not making them worry about stuff they should not worry about. The user may be the world's best neurosurgeon, does that mean that they have to learn about filesystems? most computer software is generally poorly designed You are right about this one. But the thing is that Apple does exactly that: offering well designed software. It's not about buying fish, it's about h…

"The user may be the world's best neurosurgeon, does that mean that they have to learn about filesystems?" There's a bit of a divide as to what 'personal' computers are being used for. The original mainstream use was to create/edit files using programs. The modern use is to interact with other people via the internet. So no, the neurosurgeon doesn't have to learn about filesystems because filesystems are mostly becom…

Apple's method (re: iPhone/iPad) seems to be to design software that doesn't invite learning

Could you clarify this, perhaps by comparison to something else? Everything in my experience strongly supports the notion that Apple's general approach leads to much greater levels of competency and independence than anything else out there right now.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#484

Post by PDoF »

revorad wrote: post #61
patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overestimate the degree to which non-technical users await, with bated breath, a pronouncement about programming languages from high officials at Apple. I love non-technical users. I was trying to explain to one of them yesterday that they can still use my website even after their school wipes their hard disk, and separately, even though the email address (login) is their home email address and not their…

Patrick, you should totally write a book of quotes from your encounters with users. It will be really insightful and such a good laugh.

http://clientsfromhell.net/

Is this what you're looking for?

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#485

Post by ericd »

Qz wrote: post #474
ericd wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no issue with him shutting out something that really sucks today at the cost of potentially missing out on something awesome to do with it tomorrow. The awesome scenario just doesn't seem likely to come to pass. If tomorrow there's a completely great thing on the web that can only be done with flash, then I think Jobs is pragmatic enough to reevaluate. But the fact that the main use for Flash on the web these…

What flash ads? Just use AdBlock.

My point was that that is one of the main uses of Flash, and that an extremely simple/common flash implementation is enough to burn a huge number of CPU cycles for no benefit.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#486

Post by philwelch »

dcurtis wrote: post #153
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…

Apple purposefully wrote Finder in clean Carbon as an example to developers, to prove that it was possible to make good cross-platform software. iTunes was also written very carefully -- and very cleanly -- in Carbon to be cross-platform. Adobe, however, hacked Creative Suite into Carbon with buggy, inefficient code and then took 10 years -- ten years -- to schedule the time to fix it.

iTunes wasn't written in Carbon to be cross-platform with Windows--if anything, it would be easier to make a Cocoa app cross platform because you just need to port Cocoa, which is basically just OpenStep.

It was written in Carbon to be cross-platform with Mac OS 9. And because it was just SoundJam MP, which was written for Mac OS pre-X. (Though, to be fair, so was Photoshop.)

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#487

Post by statictype »

tptacek wrote: post #259
anatoly wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my argument is that your argument is misleading because it ignores the fact that Apple doesn't have a choice in keeping Webkit open. It's possible that they would want to and possible they would not want to, if they had a choice. When they originally chose KHTML to base Webkit on, in 2002, years before the first iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone OS, etc., their attitute towards being open may have been different t…

Apple has been a (or, THE) driving force behind Webkit for some time now. They weren't forced to start with LGPL code. They did because they were comfortable working under the GPL. I object to the subtext here, of "Apple only does open source when they're dragged into it". No, in fact, Apple has been a vocal and active open source contributor for many years now, to a far far greater extent than Microsoft. I started w…

They weren't forced to start with LGPL code. They did because they were comfortable working under the GPL.

They did it because the alternative - writing an HTML rendering engine from scratch - was not an economical option for them at that time.

On the whole though, I agree with your point that no other company has released and actively maintained an open source project that is directly benefitting it's competitors.

Though I would tend to believe that's more of an accident of history than any sort of belief in the open source movement.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#488

Post by jmatt »

pg wrote: post #252

What he describes as the "most important reason" is also the big mistake here. If using certain libraries or cross-platform development tools truly did result in worse apps, then the market would take care of that. He also doesn't seem to understand that such tools do not all totally hide the underlying APIs. They fall along a continuum in that respect. And in trying to ban extreme cases like Flash, Apple has also ba…

Every programmer I've talked to about this thought it was some combination of stupid and evil (there ought to be a word for that; stevil?) to insist that apps be written only in C, C++, and Objective-C.

Ya it's insane. I have no idea how they can be this out of touch with the development community.

Even the Microsoft developers that I know think it's evil and restrictive. Microsoft has failed in a lot of ways in the past but one thing they've gotten right is .NET. It's relatively open and they are beginning to actively support other languages. So instead of .NET and the CLR dieing off people can innovate on top of the runtime and continue to compete at some level with other dynamic languages. The same goes for java and the JVM.

My biggest fear now is Apple will decide to slowly but surely drop OS X support and begin the transition of moving the majority of users over to a new locked down stevil new Operating System.

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#489

Post by jmatt »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #292
pg wrote: post #252

What he describes as the "most important reason" is also the big mistake here. If using certain libraries or cross-platform development tools truly did result in worse apps, then the market would take care of that. He also doesn't seem to understand that such tools do not all totally hide the underlying APIs. They fall along a continuum in that respect. And in trying to ban extreme cases like Flash, Apple has also ba…

I'm starting to suspect that Apple really requires proprietary APIs and decrepit languages for the same reasons Spolsky[1] once said Microsoft used proprietary and huge and ever-changing APIs. It's cover fire to make everyone else's projects soak up more hours, increasing the fraction of captive developers and shops who are only experienced in iPhone OS work, rather than being prepared for work on iPhone OS and other…

I'm starting to suspect that Apple really requires proprietary APIs and decrepit languages for the same reasons Spolsky[1] once said Microsoft used proprietary and huge and ever-changing APIs.

Microsoft finally addressed this and stabilized their APIs but they were somewhere between 5 and 10 years too late. Circa .NET 2.0 + in my opinion as an ex-.NET programmer.

Apple could easily end up in the same situation if they continue down this road.

EDIT: Detail

Re: Thoughts on Flash

#490

Post by dejavidor »

slantyyz wrote: post #460
kevinh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very moment flash was not included in the iPhone, Steve Jobs had a vested interest in seeing Flash fail. If Flash expands, user satisfaction with the iPhone goes down. If Flash fails completely, one of the strongest negative components of the iPhone disappears.

I would argue that it was even sooner that that. The Steve has probably hated Flash for a long, long time.

Yes, this goes back to 1989 fight over fonts, and the 1993 fight about Display Postscript and the 1999 fight about Photoshop on Windows, and the 2007 withdrawal of 64-bit Carbon toolkit at the last minute.
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