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Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

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Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#101

Post by cryptoz »

wmf wrote: post #72
cryptoz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are plenty of things Flash does that HTML5 does not. Really? Can you mention any specifics? I do not think there are any things that Flash can do that HTML5 cannot. Have you seen Or So They Say? http://xplsv.com/prods/demos/xplsv_orsotheysay/

Webcams, P2P, advanced audio stuff, DRM (you probably consider this a bug), etc.

Webcams? No, HTML5 will probably have support for that. "Advanced audio stuff"?! What do you mean? JavaScript (with HTML5) is a full programming language totally capable of "advanced audio stuff", whatever that means.

What do you mean Flash has DRM but HTML5 doesn't? And yes, I do consider DRM a bad thing.

Edit: Source for webcam comment: http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam-suppor...

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#102

Post by bosch »

wtallis wrote: post #55
IdeaHamster wrote: post #4

I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?

Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that's not how Adobe likes to do business. Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software: CS5 (…

I'm wondering if development method this explains why there's STILL no freaking x64 version of Flash!#@%@%

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#103

Post by pak »

cryptoz wrote: post #101
wmf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webcams, P2P, advanced audio stuff, DRM (you probably consider this a bug), etc.

Webcams? No, HTML5 will probably have support for that. "Advanced audio stuff"?! What do you mean? JavaScript (with HTML5) is a full programming language totally capable of "advanced audio stuff", whatever that means. What do you mean Flash has DRM but HTML5 doesn't? And yes, I do consider DRM a bad thing. Edit: Source for webcam comment: http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam-suppor...

How do you synthesize/analyze audio on the waveform level with HTML5? AFAIK this is only possible with an alpha version of Firefox implementing an experimental API, not part of HTML5. Flash can do full waveform synthesis as of v10, audiotool wouldn't work without it. The only way I can imagine doing this is creating data: URI's for in Javascript containing raw OGG/WAV data, which is write-only, half-baked and seems impractical.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#104

Post by rimantas »

tensafefrogs wrote: post #84

"But much worse was that, even when these titles loaded, there was no way to control most of the action. Most games required keyboard or mouse actions I simply could not perform on my phone, even with its QWERTY slider. One shooter wanted me to hit the CTRL key to fire; another asked for the left mouse button." Is this guy serious? He goes to play a game that was clearly built for a computer and blames Flash because…

Well, the usual argument of those crying about the lack of Flash on iPhone/iPod touch/iPad was that there are millions of Flash games which are unplayable. Nobody bothered to mention, what portion of those millions would actually work with touch interface.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#106

Post by justsee »

asolove wrote: post #92
jcl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the only thing preventing Flash from working on mobile is that it hasn't been "optimized" enough -- that opening the source to Google and Apple will unlock performance otherwise unattainable by Adobe. But suppose Adobe's programmers are not completely incompetent? Perhaps Flash's execution model is genuinely unable to be optimized further. Or perhaps most Flash content in the wild runs at the li…

We're talking about Google, a company who wrote their own cleanroom Java implementation and reverse-engineered ActiveX to create a ChromeFrame implementation still compatible with anything that ever worked in IE. I think they could speed things up a bit. ActionScript is just JS plus some extra sugar. JS implementations have gotten hundreds of times faster in the last three years, while Flash has gotten slower. Slap a…

The Flash player has been getting faster over the years - dramatically so, afaik.

Could you provide links to back up your statement that it has gotten slower? I've never heard that before.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#107

Post by ergo98 »

RK wrote: post #45
catch23 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have flash on my N1 too (froyo), but it's definitely noticeable when the webpage has flash on it -- even when it's a tiny flash ad somewhere. Scrolling the webpage becomes really choppy -- sometimes I wish I could disable all flash except for when it's used for video.

Check the browser settings. Set "Enable plug-ins" to "On demand". It's basically the same as Flashblock.

The one annoyance of it is to enable a single flash element on a page, it enables all flash elements on the page. Wish it was more granular.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#108

Post by sethg »

commandar wrote: post #81
sethg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. If Adobe has spent years growing the Flash player code on the principle “make it work well on Windows, and then hack it as necessary to make it work tolerably on other platforms”, then even after it is open-sourced, developing a Linux- or iOS-compatible Flash player may be…

>Remember the long gap between Netscape open-sourcing its browser and Mozilla becoming a usable platform. Not sure this is the best comparison. Netscape open sourced Communicator 4.0, yes, but what we know as Mozilla was a total rewrite after they decided to scrap 5.0. EDIT: Unless your point is that the Flash codebase may be similarly bloated. :)

Unless your point is that the Flash codebase may be similarly bloated.

Yeah, that was kind of what I had in mind.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#110

Post by zmmmmm »

daleharvey wrote: post #58
cookiecaper wrote: post #23

Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it. Open-sourcing would open so many doors.…

its already far far too late for adobe, if they had open sourced 10 years ago, there wouldnt be a html5 video and canvas, flash would be the standard. open sourcing it now will help them stay relevant for longer but it will be a band aid, proprietary tools will be replaced by web standards on the internet thats more obvious now than it ever was. flash can innovate by raising the limit on what you can do, but there is…

I think the window is closing but if they can pull it off (a BIG if), they have a chance at being the only cross platform runtime that works across a majority of phone platforms (I'm assuming they will get on WP7, and that they get Air onto all the existing platforms that already support flash via updates). If they do, its hard for me to see how a lot of developers won't be doing Flash + iPhone versions of their apps first and only then native implementations. I'm not particularly looking forward to this, but it just seems obvious.
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