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Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

aprilzero.com

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Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...Jobs chose to eliminate Flash from the iPhone specifically so that casual games would have to be written natively and sold in the App store, and couldn't be played on the open web.... This is such an important point. And very illustrative of the attitude of Apple. If any other company did this, they would be villified far and wide. But because we like apples products - it is overlooked. It is a cunning business m…

This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements. Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third par…

And this clock isn't demanding?

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements. Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third par…

Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.

As far as Flash mobile performance is concerned, the main issue at the time was constrained to video playback. I am not debating that Canvas is slow, as is the Flash 10 software-blitted graphics Stage.

Both Flash and Canvas are moving towards GPU accelerated rendering pipelines, and Adobe is also making proposals on the HTML5 side, like CSS Shaders, but that's a separate discussion.

My beef was the idea that Apple knew that third party games would be one of the most popular draws to their iOS products. Nobody did (except perhaps game developers themselves).

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements. Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third par…

Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.

Well, with Flash they were also beholden to Adobe to fix bugs and optimize it for whatever GPU they wanted to use.

I'm not sure it does take 5x as much processing power, especially when you can ship things off to the GPU. You have to remember that these decisions were made a few years ago, and Adobe Flash video on mobile (where available) has always lacked the performance of native apps/HTML5 video.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#74

Apple actually has an embarrassingly straightforward implementation of a CSS3 clock on their ipod nano page: http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/

Except it's not just CSS; It uses Javascript to update a CSS transform element -moz-transform: rotate(%ddeg) whereas the OP uses CSS animations. .hand { -moz-animation-direction: normal; -moz-animation-duration: 60000ms; -moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite; -moz-animation-name: spin; -moz-animation-timing-function: linear; } .hour.hand { -moz-animation: 0s ease 0s normal none 1 none; } .minutes.hand { -moz-anima…

Good catch, though for what it's worth Apple's actually has the correct time on it. Hers appears to be doing some initial date/time setup via JS, but it doesn't appear to show the correct time, at least for me.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements. Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third par…

Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.

@doomlaser - it's interesting to hear the argument put that way, because nothing I use flash for involves video delivery (or very little of it). Video delivery is to flash what hot topic was to...whatever my favorite bands were in 1995. It's the generic mass market application of something arguably meaningful, useful, appealing and capable of changing the world. Below that are the banner ads. But in the middle, it's true, there's this wide audience for streamed video that should have been served by browser technologies long ago, and that Flash really should never have been a part of, except that it filled a void as the only plugin widely enough adopted to support cross-platform video.

The loss of video to native browser technologies takes nothing away from the things Flash has to recommend it as a method for blitting graphics to the screen. It's one thing to try and do it with canvas and divs in Safari -- it's a joke getting things to line up, but it's not impossible. But if you want it to look the same in IE? A guy's supposed to run a startup and worry about Firefox reversioning every 4 weeks at the same time? Realistically, if I wasn't running my app in Flex I wouldn't have a company; I'd have a giant pile of IF IE statements and a bigger list of complaints.

So this clock is where the rubber meets the road, in a funny experimental way. It's got "no flash" in the title, so we can assume this is where an HTML5/JS proponent with some coding savvy thinks the line should be drawn; this is what can be achieved with the technology available cross-browser given the state of the DOM art. And I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying that it's nonsensical to throw out good tools to prove you can do something with bad ones.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.

@doomlaser - it's interesting to hear the argument put that way, because nothing I use flash for involves video delivery (or very little of it). Video delivery is to flash what hot topic was to...whatever my favorite bands were in 1995. It's the generic mass market application of something arguably meaningful, useful, appealing and capable of changing the world. Below that are the banner ads. But in the middle, it's…

Oh, I'm pretty much totally with you about the silliness of HTML5/JS/Canvas animations that keep popping up on HN. I agree that they all tend to run slow, use too much CPU, and take too much code to produce.

E.G. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899782

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not just CSS; It uses Javascript to update a CSS transform element -moz-transform: rotate(%ddeg) whereas the OP uses CSS animations. .hand { -moz-animation-direction: normal; -moz-animation-duration: 60000ms; -moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite; -moz-animation-name: spin; -moz-animation-timing-function: linear; } .hour.hand { -moz-animation: 0s ease 0s normal none 1 none; } .minutes.hand { -moz-anima…

Good catch, though for what it's worth Apple's actually has the correct time on it. Hers appears to be doing some initial date/time setup via JS, but it doesn't appear to show the correct time, at least for me.

i could be wrong, but isn't anand a man's name? http://dribbble.com/charm https://twitter.com/#!/aprilzero it's not showing me the correct time either, but it is still amazing.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#78
This was super cool on my laptop. But there was mention of HTML5/CSS3, so I just had to check it out on every mobile device I had handy. Uh oh...

Doesn't work on Android phone (3.2.6, Nexus One). Pendulum only runs a half cycle, hour/minute hands don't move at all and point to incorrect time. Low frame rate overall. Loads in different places on the screen, including half-way off the right edge, depending some factor I haven't yet deduced (zoom level, perhaps?). Doesn't allow any panning or zooming once loaded.

Doesn't work on Windows phone (Mango, LG Optimus Quantum). Pendulum animation doesn't run at all.

Works beautifully on iPad 1 in landscape. In portrait, background shows a visible seam around the clock.

I really like the design, and appreciate the effort. I just find it a little bit kooky that the OP promotes the non-use of Flash, touting instead technologies that are supposed to work much better (or at all) on mobile devices. It's Alanis Morissette Irony.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#79

It's cool. But let's admit it wouldn't be impressive if it were written in Flash...because Flash makes it relatively trivial to write something like this. So is it only impressive because it doesn't use Flash? And if so, what does that say about how wise a decision it is to start trying to replicate complex animation in Javascript, CSS3 and Canvas, just to keep Steve Jobs happy? Arguably, Jobs chose to eliminate Flas…

Good point. Off topic: Do people really write games for iOS fully in Objective-C? Why not just stick to C++ for everything except the graphics (which would use the regular C OpenGLES API) and the bare minimum of Obj-C to interface with iOS (main game loop, etc)? You get a better language (IMO) and much easier portability.

Nope, games are written in C++ just like you described it.

Re: Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.

#80

It's cool. But let's admit it wouldn't be impressive if it were written in Flash...because Flash makes it relatively trivial to write something like this. So is it only impressive because it doesn't use Flash? And if so, what does that say about how wise a decision it is to start trying to replicate complex animation in Javascript, CSS3 and Canvas, just to keep Steve Jobs happy? Arguably, Jobs chose to eliminate Flas…

this argument, seriously?

have you ever seen flash run well on ARM? are you really comparing casual flash games that you have to pay for to casual obj-C sold through the appstore, a store that basically pays for itself and doesn't make much money?

and i love how you can just quash anything that demonstrates how HTML5, a nascent technology, is moving toward par with flash while not sending fans into overdrive and draining my battery. all to keep an ailing steve jobs happy.

so tell me, what's the point your post?

get over your uppity, unimpressed self.

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