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Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

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Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#61

Post by kreek »

cletus wrote: post #46

Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience . One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature . Flash isn't horrible per se . It's horrible because Adobe is com…

I agree that the majority of the blame for Flash dying is Adobe's fault but not for the reasons you outlined. Outside of security concerns everything bad about Flash can be accomplished with 'HTML5', , SVG, and JavaScript if you throw the wrong developer at it.

Adobe's biggest mistake was not open sourcing Flash as HTML5's canvas and audio in one. It could have been rewritten to use JavaScript. Converting a game/app from AS3 to JS on 'Flash Canvas' would have been trivial.

I can live with Flash going away but there's a lot of good we're throwing out with the bath water. ActionScript 3 is a pretty nice language. It's basically a mix of Java or C# and JavaScript (it has events and callbacks but not scope issues). There was no need for an ActionScript the Good Parts book.

HTML5's canvas is very primitive compared to Flash's display list. With the display list you have a hierarchy of visual objects (Sprites) so objects can added as children of other objects and if the child dispatches an event it can bubble all the way up the list to the root parent.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#63

Post by noduerme »

nkohari wrote: post #49
alister wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with Flash? 1. Ceaselessly the biggest security hole on desktop computers. 2. Proprietary. 3. The need to install it in the first place and keep updating it. (And, no, I don't want it to auto-update.) 4. Can't cut and paste text from it. It's ridiculous to have to manually write down an address or phone number from a Flash-based site. 5. Search engines don't properly index it. 6. A Flash developer…

You should leave #6 out of your list. Your argument would be much more compelling for it. (Compilation/obfuscation is the norm, not the exception.)

I was about to say that. Rights to source is determined by the contract. To my ear, someone who hates Flash because their devs won't cough up source is someone who (1) doesn't code (2) doesn't understand the law, and (3) made a bad contract and blamed the flash dev, and now is taking out his bitterness about the experience on Flash as a platform. Which is ridiculous.

As a coder who doesn't, and never will, sign works-for-hire agreements, I'm the model of a dev who won't give you the source if you fire me or treat me like shit. In one incident, a customer who paid $100k for me to develop a flash app, then sold it to News Corp without mentioning to them that they didn't actually own the source for it. News Corp had, legally, every right to reverse-engineer that app; moreover I actually gave them the source because I'm a nice guy, but I stipulated that they couldn't repackage it without my assent, and that the classes which had been developed outside the project at hand (some of which had been coded on other customers' dime) were not for resale at all; and that in no way could they claim ownership and try to prevent me from reusing any of it for my own purposes. News Corp then hired a team of coders, paid them in excess of $300k to try and reverse-engineer my code. When that failed, they called me and offered me $50 an hour, half my regular wage, to help them, if I would just sign their NDA, which happened to include handing them eternal rights to everything I'd ever done. I told them to fuck off, and the project died a week later.

But more importantly, anyone who knew what they were talking about and who wasn't just a frat boy shilling for HTML5 because that'as what douchebags talk about at Q's on Fridays would know that technically, there are 101 decompilers for Flash, and legally, you can decompile code you paid for and have someone else edit it as long as you aren't reselling it, even if you didn't have the coder under a works-for-hire agreement; and morally, if your coder is telling you to piss off and not giving you the source then you're probably an asshole who deserves it.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#64

Post by molmalo »

ori_b wrote: post #55
cletus wrote: post #46

Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience . One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature . Flash isn't horrible per se . It's horrible because Adobe is com…

I have one concern with flash dying: It means that annoying, crappy ads will migrate to HTML5. Annoying HTML5 ads will not be as easy to selectively block. I suspect that the low quality UX will simply migrate and crash a bit less. Flashblock was a great method of filtering annoying content.

I suspect that this problem will be resolved by using black lists to sites serving the js to create those ads. Just bocking those sites (the way we can black porn at work) would serve the purpose.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#65

Post by zmmmmm »

mkaltenecker wrote: post #44
zmmmmm wrote: post #11

It's interesting how hard they are pushing this; there is still quite a lot of Flash on the web ... at least most smaller sites hosting / streaming video seem to still rely on it. I actually would have thought they could make a decent bit of revenue just by offering it to OEMs as a selling point. Perhaps they see even more revenue by forcing all the recalcitrant sites still using Flash to buy Adobe's tools as the eas…

If things go like they did in the past, 4.1 being widely adopted is years away. I don’t see this having much if any impact on anything right now.

Well, if they are pulling it from the market then it will have an impact much sooner than that. I suppose device manufacturers might ship it bundled.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#66

Post by prioris »

If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it.

As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible.

Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5.

The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary.

As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous.

So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#67

Post by xiaoma »

27182818284 wrote: post #57
talmand wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Is it a matter of a Flash app that's badly designed? Because that's not Adobe's fault. If one were to duplicate the app's horrible user experience over to iOS does that mean the user experience for iOS apps can be considered as horrible? If I write some bad javascript that causes the browser to consistently crash does that mean that java…

>But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Can't speak for them, but yeah, I mean, in the end it is all subjective right? You can try to measure it, but sometimes Shit Just Doesn't Feel Right™. That's how I've ALWAYS felt about Flash. Before Steve Jobs said it, before Google was a company and I was little, and after I anxiously installed it on Android only to once again be sad b…

It felt great the first time I saw stick fight, and playing Desktop Tower Defense felt right as rain.

Re: Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

#68

Post by erichocean »

kreek wrote: post #61
cletus wrote: post #46

Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience . One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature . Flash isn't horrible per se . It's horrible because Adobe is com…

I agree that the majority of the blame for Flash dying is Adobe's fault but not for the reasons you outlined. Outside of security concerns everything bad about Flash can be accomplished with 'HTML5', , SVG, and JavaScript if you throw the wrong developer at it. Adobe's biggest mistake was not open sourcing Flash as HTML5's canvas and audio in one. It could have been rewritten to use JavaScript. Converting a game/app…

FWIW, Blossom does that kind of thing for applications (I'm the author).

https://github.com/fohr/blossom

I'll be giving a talk later this month at Throne of JS in Toronto.

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