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IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

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Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#21

Post by yurisagalov »

veemjeem wrote: post #6
kwantam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone? A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.

Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform. Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone... Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on…

My macbook goes absolutely nuts when I watch even a 2 minute flash video -- CPU usage spikes to close to 100% as the fans try to compensate by ramping up to a speed that makes watching the presentation without headphones unbearable. Adobe definitely has a lot of work to do on Flash on OSX :(

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#22

Post by viraptor »

ajg1977 wrote: post #20
timdorr wrote: post #13

No offense, but something you read on Reddit that some random dude heard from "a good friend" is probably complete bullshit. Nonetheless, it's still totally believable. But it probably represents almost no optimization on their end. If I can play a 3d multiplayer game over 3G for an hour without the phone crapping out, a think some vector graphics are surmountable. There just has to be a desire there. And clearly App…

I call bullshit. Some of the most intensive games out there are using about 100% of the iPhones power and still get several hours of battery life. Even if the app used some pathological combination of CPU/GPU/Disk/Network resources you wouldn't get it down to 30 minutes,

How do you know it uses 100%? If it has smooth animation, it most probably doesn't. It's easy to check if you're really interested - just run a typical busy loop in your app and measure the time until it the battery runs out.

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#23

Post by slig »

yurisagalov wrote: post #21
veemjeem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform. Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone... Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on…

My macbook goes absolutely nuts when I watch even a 2 minute flash video -- CPU usage spikes to close to 100% as the fans try to compensate by ramping up to a speed that makes watching the presentation without headphones unbearable. Adobe definitely has a lot of work to do on Flash on OSX :(

I saw sometime ago a video that a guy opened up a flash video on the os x and then the same on a virtual machine, running windows, on top of os x. The cpu use on the latter was negligible.

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#24

Post by [deleted] »

daeken wrote: post #14
timdorr wrote: post #13

No offense, but something you read on Reddit that some random dude heard from "a good friend" is probably complete bullshit. Nonetheless, it's still totally believable. But it probably represents almost no optimization on their end. If I can play a 3d multiplayer game over 3G for an hour without the phone crapping out, a think some vector graphics are surmountable. There just has to be a desire there. And clearly App…

> Now, we just need a Flash (the big desktop creation app) equivalent that spits out HTML5 code. Anyone working on that? I was just discussing this exact idea with a friend yesterday (although it's something I personally wouldn't be interested in). If done correctly, you could backend to HTML5+JS+CSS and still emit SWF for legacy support. Would certainly be interesting.

[deleted]

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#25

Post by kwantam »

kwantam wrote: post #5
yumraj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- I guess since it's on the Internet it must be true. - All the other smartphones which have Flash must have 30 min battery life. - Apple is saint and Adobe is evil. - iPhone is such an open platform.

Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone? A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.

Wow, I'm being downvoted into oblivion for observing that other mobile devices can run flash apps and pointing out that Apple keeps tight control over their platform. Neither of these are particularly controversial, as I see it.

I realize that Flash is annoying, and of course I'd expect to be able to turn it off on any reasonable platform---most of the time, I really don't want it. But when I do, let me make a big-boy decision about battery life versus usefulness all by myself.

Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#26

Post by kwantam »

veemjeem wrote: post #6
kwantam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone? A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.

Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform. Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone... Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on…

Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...

Do you believe that this opinion both motivates and justifies Apple's refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone?

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#27

Post by joezydeco »

All I'm seeing here are comments about video performance on Flash on various systems. Nothing about games or website navigation or etc.

So why can't we just admit that what we really want is a way to play those other video formats (especially ON2, you porn lovers) on the iPhone?

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#28

Post by kwantam »

easp wrote: post #17
kwantam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone? A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.

Any code? You mean any code other than JavaScript?

You make a good point.

While it is useful for web apps, JavaScript in Mobile Safari is not sufficient for creating the vast majority of standalone applications.

Flash, while hardly a world-class systems programming language, is a step beyond JavaScript in several respects.

Most importantly, it is more consistently cross-platform compatible, meaning that I could actually take advantage of preexisting Flash applets on the iPhone, whereas oftimes when designing a JS app one must consider a far wider range of discrepancies between platforms. In other words, given a randomly-selected JS applet and a randomly-selected Flash applet from all available to me, the probability is greater that the Flash applet will be correct in an officially-supported Flash VM than that the JS applet will be correct in Mobile Safari.

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#29

Post by jsf »

timdorr wrote: post #13

No offense, but something you read on Reddit that some random dude heard from "a good friend" is probably complete bullshit. Nonetheless, it's still totally believable. But it probably represents almost no optimization on their end. If I can play a 3d multiplayer game over 3G for an hour without the phone crapping out, a think some vector graphics are surmountable. There just has to be a desire there. And clearly App…

Check out Atlas: http://280north.com/blog/2009/02/announcing-atlas/

Re: IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

#30

Post by jrockway »

veemjeem wrote: post #6
kwantam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone? A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.

Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform. Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone... Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on…

On my machine, it likes to kill my whole webbrowser whenever I use the Youtube quicklist too many times. Then I can't relaunch the browser because it doesn't actually kill the browser cleanly; it's zombied. A few kill-9s later, and I can finally watch a cat flushing a toilet.

Not optimal.

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