131–140 of 165 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash Lite was a hack-n-slashed fork off the venerable (and briefly open-source!) Flash Player 4. The portability and modularization of the Flash code has improved since 1999.
Well, that certainly explains a lot. The sad part is that a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to get that code to work on mobile devices in the early 2000s.
Disappointing as it may be, it's realistic. I could never see mobile devices being capable of loading and running flash based games or web environments consistently or seamlessly. It just requires too much power the device doesn't have. Even the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 dual core technology aren't up to the task, and I believe that's the closest mobile ever came to supporting flash. But even mini laptops can just barely…
I run flash in a decent way in my Nexus S. It is not the best experience in the world (as usual when dealing with Flash) but it works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that Adobe acquired Macromedia was quite unfortunate for the web. Had Google acquired it, they would have probably opensourced the player code, and maybe contributed the AS3 rendering engine into WebKit as an alternative to javaScript, making Flash native for WebKit browsers. Maybe it's not too late for this step even now.
Was Macromedia openly on the market? Did Google ever seriously consider buying them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While these things are true, developing in the Flash environment was a lot of fun and very gratifying. I believe if the Flash development environment was available for JS/HTML5 today, Flash hackers would be much more excited about it. It's not the fact that Flash is going away that causes sadness. Rather, it's the gap between that and having an equally powerful environment for JS/HTML5.
Well that was partly my point. Another thing I forgot to mention ... Adobe already has an AS3 to Javascript compiler that produces Google Closure compliant code (or this is the plan anyway) and they are using it internally for their own projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. Flash is just a dying tech. Were someone to seamlessly roll its functionality into an easy to use package, I'm sure you'd see it die out for games as well, which is the only remaining use-case there isn't a ready replacement for.
> They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. I gotta call BS on that. I've personally played hundreds if not thousands of flash games on an under-powered $500 laptop purchased in 2009. The article itself mentioned the success of flash on Blackberry devices, due largely to the fact…
Why does an entry titled "Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash" link to an article that starts "Our future work with Flash on mobile..."?
Because you didn't read the rest of the sentence? "...devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores."
"ceasing development" and shifting focus are not the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're complaining about the development environment, which is considered to be better than JS/HTML5 by many people. However, the Flash runtime is the reason people complain about Flash. It is slow, it leaks memory, it crashes like crazy and has been a second-class citizen on every platform other than Windows since forever. JS/HTML5 on the other hand is a mess in terms of development tools. But it is getting more and…
Sadly, the development environment matters quite a bit. - I will miss being able to declare classes using a sane syntax (Coffeescript helps in this regard) - I will miss the optional type annotations, which caught many a bug for me (you can use JSDoc annotations + closure compiler, but only if you like placing a verbose comment in front of every single variable declaration ) - I will miss having an IDE that can actua…
Agree. An example is graph visualization. Fire up your CPU monitor and go to http://arborjs.org/atlas/ and view this very cool physics-driven mesh visualization written in Javascript. You'll see the needle jump to 95% or more. On my relatively modern laptop, if I run this for more than a few minutes, it shuts off due to overheating. Also, this app does not work on IE.
By contrast, I can run an similar Flash-based visualization and CPU usage ratchets up to 60 or 70% but not more, and it works on IE.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, which half was true and which wasn't?
Bullshit: "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary." Well, except for the SWF format, the mxmlc SWF compiler, the Tamarind interpreter, most of the popular video codecs, the FLV container format, AMF, RTMP... And I could go on. Huh. Okay, I guess the only things that are "proprietary" are the authoring tool (although you're welcome to make your own) and some very important parts of the actual Flash Player (if Ado…
Where can I download a full Flash plugin made by another company? Not the partial open-source implementations that only do a small part of everything that is 'Flash'. It's like saying Mac OS X isn't proprietary because it uses a lot of open-source pieces.
"(if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation)"
But they didn't, that's the whole point.
Did you read 'the full web' part? Jobs says that most of the videos Adobe argues one won't be able to see are also available without the Flash container and other things like games just won't be available, but there are nice games in the app store to make up for it. He's admitting not 100% will be available, but it's not as bad as Adobe is making it sound. As someone who removed Flash from my desktop browser about a year ago, I agree.
"But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store."
Why do people keep repeating this? Do they think if they repeat it enough, it will actually be true? How much does apple make if the app is free? Why is iOS Safari consistently the most standards compliant mobile browser? What percentage of Apple's profit was contributed by the App Store? So allowing Flash would have killed the app store? No way because Flash performs so badly on mobile devices, which is why it isn't on iOS devices.
""Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications."
Well, then that does nothing to help the 'full web' argument now, does it. That's great if the APIs work pretty well, but what about the thousands (millions?) of flash apps that probably won't be upgraded to those pretty nice APIs. Not much of a 'full web' experience then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're complaining about the development environment, which is considered to be better than JS/HTML5 by many people. However, the Flash runtime is the reason people complain about Flash. It is slow, it leaks memory, it crashes like crazy and has been a second-class citizen on every platform other than Windows since forever. JS/HTML5 on the other hand is a mess in terms of development tools. But it is getting more and…
Sadly, the development environment matters quite a bit. - I will miss being able to declare classes using a sane syntax (Coffeescript helps in this regard) - I will miss the optional type annotations, which caught many a bug for me (you can use JSDoc annotations + closure compiler, but only if you like placing a verbose comment in front of every single variable declaration ) - I will miss having an IDE that can actua…
If it's vector, it can be done with SVG/CSS3
…drop shadow filters…
box-shadow?
…and blur filters
Canvas?
http://www.quasimondo.com/StackBlurForCanvas/StackBlurDemo.h...
I will miss masks (of any arbitrary shape)
PNG with alpha?
…rather than having to worry about preloading all of my UI images
Something like this may work:
$("#blob").bind("load", function () {});
body { display: none; }
Not on a Mac. Even a freaking side banner will make the CPU spike. There are a few cases where it is slower, but it's rare and we can all help optimize.
HTML5 is particularly not ready on mobile. For example...don't use gradients, since they kill performance. Oh, and don't use opacity either, since that also kills performance. Seriously? I need to build a UI that doesn't use opacity animations? FFFfffuuuu--
Android or iOS? I'm actually pretty impressed with the hardware accelerated effects I can get in iOS if I don't do much stuff at the same time.
Check this link:
http://mir.aculo.us/2010/06/04/making-an-ipad-html5-app-maki...
Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? It seems they were more interested in blaming Apple for the lack of mobile Flash than actually doing the work required to make Flash a remotely viable option for mobile devices. I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? Perhaps they saw the 5 year anniversary of the iPhone on horizon and figured enough…
Yes. The Adobe Flash Player team, believe it or not, is easily over 100 engineers working on a variety of core and related projects (but not including the Flash Authoring, Flex Builder, and Adobe AIR teams). Of those, about 10-30 engineers are dedicated to Android depending on management edict of the week.
The entire Flash Runtime org (including QA, managers, and the AIR team) is over 400 people.