While I don't appreciate much of what Apple is doing these days, surely one has to also appreciate the draconian, closed nature of Flash? At least HTML5 is some kind of standard. Now, if we could just get Apple on the Ogg train...
You know what is draconian? removing a programming environment for children from the App store.
Yeah.. not to pick nits.. but the removal of Scratch was the removal of a Scratch player, not an actual programming environment itself..
.. I for one would love to see a Scratch development env on the current/next gen of mobile devices, though.
I'm glad that Adobe decided to take the mature route. Further lashing out against Apple would have only exacerbated the situation. In the end, Jobs provided a very rational argument and the brevity of Adobe's response lends itself well to that conclusion.
> In the end, Jobs provided a very hypocritical argument FTFY
I can't really see how apple is hypocritical with this issue. I quote the text below from my last comment.
"Apple is not telling Adobe, Microsoft or any other corporation to open up their platform. They are only stating that they believe web standards should be open and not controlled by a single party."
If someone got a different impression from Steve's letter I think you should read it again. If you think I got the wrong impression I beg you to point me towards the parts of Steve's letter that will help me see my error.
Can you send a little of that smooth-and-nice my way? You say there's no lock-in outside of the iPhone, but what do you call Flash? Yes, the spec is technically open, but there still haven't been any players that work as "well" as Adobe's. Which, by the way, is many people's problem, as Flash Player has been nothing but a pain to me. The Linux and OS X versions are horrible and Adobe's done very little to fix them. A…
> Yes, the spec is technically open, but there still haven't been any players that work as "well" as Adobe's. It's a valid point, but a lack of good competition doesn't make the standard any less open; published is published. Consider 2002-2004, when Internet Explorer had nearly 95% market share [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ]. HTML was an open standard, but no viable competitor existed u…
I had originally made a comment about rtmpdump, but I realized that my logic was a bit silly, so I replaced it with something slightly less silly.
My point (that I didn't really make) is that Adobe and Apple are both equally proprietary. Trying to argue either side will be a loser's game.
It's going to be very interesting to see how Adobe handles Flash on all these different platforms. There's a lot to consider: Various screen resolutions, CPU/GPU speeds, memory capacities, browsers, touch vs. non-touch devices, etc. This covers about half a dozen major platforms and probably hundreds of different handset models. It seems like a monumental task to take on. Can they keep up with frequent platform updat…
Devil's advocate, I'm not a big fan of Flash, but: with the exception of touch, this is exactly the diverse situation Flash has dealt with -- and partially derived its popularity from -- on the desktop.
Go back through the history of Apple's (and its many, many sycophantic fans) proclamations - such as apps on the phone, push notifications, multitasking - and there is a disturbing trend of Apple (and its followeres) making moral pontifications, stamping their feet, and then quietly and shamelessly backtracking when proven wrong. Jobs is trying to undermine the competition because he fears that he made the wrong choi…
true -- but this time he seems to have gone too far to turn back. then again, remember when PowerPC was better than Intel? Jobs is a master of the Big Lie.
What was he supposed to say? Get up on stage and tell everyone PowerPC chips were crap? During the PPC days, there were many times where PPC had a significant lead on Intel, especially early on, but towards the end, most notably the G5 days, Intel's lead just widened so far and PPC's got so expensive, that it made the best business sense to switch.
The topic was Flash running in a mobile browser. Like Android, which Adobe originally said would ship Flash for over a year ago. I think Adobe's utter engineering incompetence is one of the obvious points everyone seems too polite to make.
To be fair, it's technologically nearly impossible. The incompetence is coming from whomever is promising it. The engineers are fucked...
Why? There's no qualitative computational difference between a smartphone and a desktop computer; further, the quantitative difference between today's smartphones and older Flash-capable machines of a decade ago is probably not that huge.
Go back through the history of Apple's (and its many, many sycophantic fans) proclamations - such as apps on the phone, push notifications, multitasking - and there is a disturbing trend of Apple (and its followeres) making moral pontifications, stamping their feet, and then quietly and shamelessly backtracking when proven wrong. Jobs is trying to undermine the competition because he fears that he made the wrong choi…
> Jobs is trying to undermine the competition because he fears that he made the wrong choice. You think so? Smart-phones have been around a long time. The iPhone was announced over three years ago, yet here we are in the middle of 2010 and mobile Flash is still nowhere to be found on any mobile device. How is that not Adobe's fault? Is Adobe just not very interested in mobile Flash, or are there very serious technica…
The default browser in Sprint's HTC Hero has Flash 9.1.
It works well enough, but frankly I don't like the default browser and it isn't portable because it's custom built... not to mention downloading large flash files is not something you want to do on Sprint's network.
Always with the mouse hover. You know that the DOM/HTML(5) includes mouse hover, right? I guess the web just doesn't work.
There's a huge difference though. With HTML/CSS/JavaScript, hover events (both the :hover and "onmouseover" event in JavaScript) are typically used for visual feedback (the :hover event being strictly presentation...) There's a reason for this: Users can disable JavaScript. A core fundamental of web development (graceful degradation or progressive enhancements) is the result of this. As a developer, you can't assume…
"Web developers write functional pages first."
You're confusing best practices with common practices. The vast majority of sites are developed with the assumption that javascript will be enabled in the viewer's browser.
true -- but this time he seems to have gone too far to turn back. then again, remember when PowerPC was better than Intel? Jobs is a master of the Big Lie.
What was he supposed to say? Get up on stage and tell everyone PowerPC chips were crap? During the PPC days, there were many times where PPC had a significant lead on Intel, especially early on, but towards the end, most notably the G5 days, Intel's lead just widened so far and PPC's got so expensive, that it made the best business sense to switch.
The Power architecture is still pretty awesome for raw power. But it's not designed for low energy consumption (ie: laptops). So while a desktop with some P6/P7 chips* would be an awesome beast - a laptop might be a toaster.
The G5 was a Power4 chip of some sort from memory.
Jobs read the market well. The move is definately to Laptops / portable devices - and Intels chips were much better at that.
Adobe is basically saying that Flash will be available on competitor's phones and the market will decide; which is exactly the right response. I wish most tech bloggers would take this view and just shut up with the endless "analysis" of Flash and Apple. Flamewars don't decide anything, the market does.
No, sadly, i think marketing does.
It's not flamewars, it's not "the market", aka the consumer.
It's what Apple can make the world believe. Especially in the case of Apple, my believe is that 90% of their sales are accomplished by excellent marketing. This Blogpost is just another move. I think we can agree that, when looking at hard facts, Steve is plainly lying to his customers in a lot of points.
Me, as the nerd i am, can look at some facts and behind the words of that letter.
The most sad and disappointing fact on the hand is, that most users will take the letter for granted. Steve writes as if all the things are facts, true and _many_ people will just believe him! He will sell even more units and from today on Apple customers will looks at me, disturbed, why i have Flash on my Phone/Tablet, that it will only drain the batteries, bla bla bla.
This is basically what really makes me angry about this.
He could have just written "we are not allowing Flash because we want to protect the Appstore". Everyone would understand, that's the fact, ok. But no. He wrote together a big pile of lies.