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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

#131

Post by wtallis »

orangecat wrote: post #78
wtallis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). By that standard, iTunes still isn't native. Apple always positioned Carbon as a fully supported and native framework. They even promised 64-bit Carbon support in Leopard before yanking the rug out right before it shipped, which no doubt rendered a lot of work by Adobe useless. I would have…

Apple said Carbon was a fully supported framework because that's what their developers needed to hear in order to switch to OS X. In reality, even Adobe was smart enough to not use Carbon for any big new projects (Lightroom uses Cocoa on OS X). By the time Apple pulled the plug on 64-bit Carbon, it was clear that the only reasons for its continued existence were Microsoft Office and Adobe CS. Apple was well on their way to having a suitable replacement for Office, and their Pro Apps suite was missing only the hole that CS fills. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe was paying Apple to keep Carbon alive, and Adobe in particular was setting new records for unimportance to Apple because Apple was too busy taking over the consumer market with their Intel machines to really care much about pro tools. (Apple would have had to worry about Microsoft not following them to new APIs if not for the facts that Office doesn't need to go 64-bit, and Microsoft needs to keep Office on the Mac in order to prevent open file formats from catching on.) Adobe wouldn't let Carbon go quietly, so they forced Apple to play the bad guy in killing Carbon.

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

#132

Post by mgcross »

illumin8 wrote: post #115
bruceboughton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish! Most moderately advanced HTML5 demos run hideously, if at all, on mobile hardware. The difference will be if HTML5 can replace 80% of Flash uses in a performant manner. The video tag makes up a huge block of that 80%. The other 20% will always run like a dog on mobile hardware, no matter the technology.

Have you watched the Apple HTML5 demos on an iPad? It's actually revolutionary to see what they can do with the limited hardware. Being able to touch and drag a 3d model around at 30 fps without stuttering? I can't even do that on a lot of PCs with Flash.

This page: http://www.apple.com/html5/ ? The 360 there is a simple pre-rendered jpg sequence.

But I'm hoping you're referring to a real-time 3D execution. If, please share a link.

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

#133

Post by diego_moita »

Daishiman wrote: post #126
diego_moita wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing with Silverlight and am very well impressed. It is much faster than Flash (my tests where the RSA encryption algorithm), has a way more comprehensive library (specially for data manipulation) and "looks" way more secure than Flash (please take this last one with a grain of salt). Its acceptance is still lagging (I estimate something like 50%-60%), but growing fast. MS promised the new Windows 7 phon…

Are you insane? I've had to develop a CRUD application in Silverlight, and it was dauntingly slow in comparison to Ruby and Python frameworks, and the tooling is still behind the rest of the C# frameworks. I made a blog post a few weeks ago on the matter: http://www.andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry/?id=6

Well, 3 points:

1) in most of your post you argue against the performance of VS2010 and how slow it is to edit XAML, not the performance of your Silverlight code/application. I take that it was as good as mine. And I think that this is what is being discussed here.

2) I agree that VS2010 is indeed much slower than previous versions, although I didn't experience something as terrible as you. But I am running it in a 3GHz quad-core with 4Gb of RAM, so...

3) Silverlight is a WEB client solution and that's the scope of this discussion and the post I answered. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think frameworks like Django and Rails are server-side technologies and, as such, don't compare to Flash and HTML5, and are out of scope for this discussion, right?

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

#134

Post by mishmash »

elblanco wrote: post #124
illumin8 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you watched the Apple HTML5 demos on an iPad? It's actually revolutionary to see what they can do with the limited hardware. Being able to touch and drag a 3d model around at 30 fps without stuttering? I can't even do that on a lot of PCs with Flash.

Here ya go. Give this a try and let us know how it runs. http://xplsv.com/prods/demos/xplsv_orsotheysay/

I ran two three minute tests, one in Safari and the other Firefox on a 2.8GHz C2D w/ 4GB RAM and nothing else really open.

In Safari 5.0.1 your link didn't render a single frame in three minutes.

Firefox 4b3 did render, but the animation would not normally be watchable. The opening scene ran the best, probably around 15fps while during second and third scenes the galaxies would jump about an inch with each frame. I don't know what the fps were, but it was updating the screen less than one time per second with a single core maxed out.

Also, on launch, FF was using 76MB of RAM yet after the three minute test it was using 168MB of RAM.

So your link didn't function in one browser, used 2.8GHz of processing power and ~90MB of RAM in another yet was completely unwatchable.

Was I supposed to be impressed?

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

#135

Post by leviathant »

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...

The audio capabilities of HTML5 suck. They're not going to get better for a while, and in the time it takes them to catch up, Flash will have continued to build on their well established foundations.

Okay, looking at HTML5 drum machines via Google. Here. Here's an one, http://www.randomthink.net/labs/html5drums/ - it's got all the basic trimmings, but the playback has tempo fluctuations, and the whole thing is slow. And this is a drum machine running all by itself. Compare that to audiotool.com, and tell me that HTML5 can do what AudioTool does.

Here's another one - http://pattern86.com/sequencer-in-html5/ - also laggy, and it only consists of four channels.

Keep in mind, I'm not trashing the efforts of the folks who made these, kudos to them! But compare that to something like this http://audiotool.com/app/dubtexno/1 -- HTML5 cannot do that. Sure, it will be able to in a few years. And surely, Flash will be able to do new things in a few years, too.

This doesn't even address the lack of a (for want of a better term) unified developing environment for HTML/JS/Canvas/Audio a la Flash CSwhatever.

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

#136

Post by est »

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…

> reverse-engineered ActiveX to create a ChromeFrame

Can you elaborate?

> while Flash has gotten slower. Slap a modern JIT on there and we should get some improvement.

Adobe actually contributed to Tracemonkey's JIT as one of their effort towards ECMAScript engine unification, they even planned to write a engine for WSH Active Script, but failed. IMHO Flash is laggy because of the drawing part, but in this case HTML5 is also laggy as hell. Try set font to 100 in this demo:

http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/

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

#137

Post by wmf »

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...

I don't think it's fair to compare Flash 10.1 to a future revision of HTML5, because by that time Flash 11 will probably have more features that HTML5 doesn't.

"Media protected using the upcoming Adobe Flash Access 2.0 SDK can be played back securely in Flash Player 10.1 to support a wide range of business models, including video-on-demand, rental, and electronic sell-through, for streaming as well as download." http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/838/cpsid_83808.html (There's also RTMPE and SWF verification, but AFAIK those have already been broken.)

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

#138

Post by est »

illumin8 wrote: post #115
bruceboughton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish! Most moderately advanced HTML5 demos run hideously, if at all, on mobile hardware. The difference will be if HTML5 can replace 80% of Flash uses in a performant manner. The video tag makes up a huge block of that 80%. The other 20% will always run like a dog on mobile hardware, no matter the technology.

Have you watched the Apple HTML5 demos on an iPad? It's actually revolutionary to see what they can do with the limited hardware. Being able to touch and drag a 3d model around at 30 fps without stuttering? I can't even do that on a lot of PCs with Flash.

> Being able to touch and drag a 3d model around at 30 fps without stuttering? I can't even do that on a lot of PCs with Flash.

Then can you explain why setting font size to 200 on this HTML5 demo http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/

then my browser is slowing down to unusable?

I've seen burning words demo in Flash 4 from 2000 and it's very smooth even on a PIII machine.

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

#139

Post by est »

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…

> proprietary tools will be replaced by web standards on the internet thats more obvious now than it ever was

There are millions of third party Flash authoring tools, both proprietary and free ones.

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

#140

Post by leviathant »

elblanco wrote: post #124
illumin8 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you watched the Apple HTML5 demos on an iPad? It's actually revolutionary to see what they can do with the limited hardware. Being able to touch and drag a 3d model around at 30 fps without stuttering? I can't even do that on a lot of PCs with Flash.

Here ya go. Give this a try and let us know how it runs. http://xplsv.com/prods/demos/xplsv_orsotheysay/

I've got a quad core Win7 box with 4gb of RAM and a video card that runs Fallout3 at max settings on my 23" monitor without even noticing.

Or So They Say only advanced frames in Firefox when I moved my mouse. It actually ran for me in Chrome, but was pixelated (2x?), and still laggy (I'm guessing While it's cooler than anything I've ever done with javascript, I was watching more impressive demos on a Pentium 75 over a decade ago.

HTML5/Javascript/etc. appear to have a long way to go, performance-wise, before they catch up to Flash. And by the time it catches up to Flash 10, where will Flash be?

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