151–160 of 165 posts
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> How much does apple make if the app is free? $99/year from iOS Developer Program. Even free native apps reinforce Apple's platform lock-in. Cross-platform web apps lessen users' dependence on iOS.
Doubt that would even cover the bandwidth.
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Oh yeah, I've seen it coming. There's a reason my day-to-day at my job doesn't involve much Flash anymore. It doesn't make me any less sad about it becoming more 'official' though. It's more of a nostalgic sad than an upset sad. I can certainly hope that HTML/JS evolves more in the direction of AS3, though I fear that Adobe will either push in the direction of Canvas-manipulating tools (where now you have a crappier…
I still used Grooveshark when you guys moved from Flash to HTML5, despite it being a less enjoyable experience. But, when the AIR app became just a wrapper for the HTML5 site, I cancelled my subscription. It seems like a lot of work went into switching, considering the functionality is still the same as the Flash version. Did any good come out of switching to HTML5?
Upsides:
It's easier to integrate ads and other third-party content like Facebook like buttons/comments, Youtube videos, etc. Unless you want to destroy Flash's performance by using a wmode other than window, there is no way to mix flash and html/iframe content. I'm pretty sure most people's hatred of Flash comes from ads that are not only annoying and poorly coded, but embedded with opaque or transparent. Then they will melt your laptop, yes.
It's easier to hire for, HTML/CSS/JS are more common skills than AS, especially when you're not hiring to do 'push movieclip around' Flash, but working inside a huge Flex app with 90% custom in-house components. It's also easier to find people who might not have a lot of development experience but are good at pushing around html and css to finetune the interface to our designers' desires. Maybe that got easier in Flex in Flex 4 with the Spark components, but we weren't allowed to drop support for Flash 9 despite it being less than 1% of visitors, so we were still on Flex 3.
Downsides:
Performance. Holy crap performance. The flash site still ran well in ancient browsers like IE6 and IE7. The new site struggles in IE7 and we had to drop support for IE6 entirely (performance was not the only reason there but, you know). And on the subject of mobile, the flash site was sluggish but technically worked on my Nokia N800 tablet running Maemo. New site doesn't. We're working on making this better, of course, but the new site was written pretty quickly and accumulated a ton of technical debt, mostly in the form of poor performance tradeoffs.
Stability. Ditto what I just said about IE6 and IE7. And now throw Opera in there too. jQuery eases a lot of cross-browser pain, but not all of it. The edge cases in which Flash behaves differently on different platforms are just that, edge cases, and usually occur when you have to cross the boundary into JS. So now instead of basically one platform to test your code on you have...well all the major browsers * all the major OSs.
Maintainability. When your application is pushing the 100k LOC mark, strict typing is a godsend. So are real namespaces, and interfaces. It is very very easy to write stupid code in JS. You can write stupid code in any language, of course, but at least in Flash the compiler will yell at you if it's blatantly incorrect, and exceptions throw useful stack traces on all platforms. I don't know what it is about JS and swallowing errors, but sometimes it's a battle just to figure out where in the code you need to even start looking for the error. Or that an exception even occurred.
I guess I should make a blog post about the switch someday...
Potato, Potatoe.
If browsers are the new Universal Interface to conquer and standardize, there's a new problem. We now have variety in implementation of standards, making those standards tough to use.
Where Flash was when it was 2-3 years old isn't much different than where HTML5 is for those of us who have been around long enough... except there's a lot more browsers out there than there were Operating systems.
Flash could control how efficient it was, or wasn't.. but who will make sure all the browsers process HTML5 efficiently?
Are we really aware of how much we're going to get ahead, and how soon?
How much time will I spend recreating what Flash, or something else could do for me already today, so I'm not just trading some great HTML5 features for spending my time coding stuff Flash has?
I don't use a ton of Flash or HTML5 right now and don't foresee it. When it's the best tool, I use it. Where it's not a complete tool, I'll think twice.
This is one area though, where Adobe's expertise might be second to none -- making it work identically everywhere as best as possible with gracefully degrading libraries.
I hope their recent acquisitions serve as fuel for solving a problem really needing solving.. by them or someone.
Should be interesting to see what happens when we get what we wished for, the devil we don't know vs the devil we kind of did.. :)
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Hmm... 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…
"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." I don't actually hear that many people repeating this, but to expand a little bit on this, it's not just apps, it's also media content. The Flash ecosystem provides one of the few forms of DRM that the big movie studios have deemed acceptable. With Flash off of the iOS we…
For streaming? Netflix uses Silverlight for their DRM on PC's, and uses their own homegrown DRM schemes for iOS and Android.
For mobile devices, companies like Crunchyroll, Hulu, Comcast and AT&T all have native apps for iOS and Android. Those don't use flash either, and perform easily as well as Flash.
So no, it's not the only solution that the studios find acceptable. Plenty of other solutions exist.
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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…
How much more awesome will HTML, JavaScript, and CSS get when Flash finally goes away?
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"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." I don't actually hear that many people repeating this, but to expand a little bit on this, it's not just apps, it's also media content. The Flash ecosystem provides one of the few forms of DRM that the big movie studios have deemed acceptable. With Flash off of the iOS we…
>The Flash ecosystem provides one of the few forms of DRM that the big movie studios have deemed acceptable. With Flash off of the iOS web platform it makes it just a little bit harder for users to buy content from someone other than Apple. For streaming? Netflix uses Silverlight for their DRM on PC's, and uses their own homegrown DRM schemes for iOS and Android. For mobile devices, companies like Crunchyroll, Hulu,…
The idea of Adobe focusing on using Flash to create native apps is a great idea -- and I'll think they'll do well with it. There's an army of folks who know ActionScript who don't want to learn Objective-C, and there are tons of apps which are created for ad agnecies where development speed matters.
There's an army of folks who know ActionScript who don't want to learn Objective-C, and there are tons of apps which are created for ad agnecies where development speed matters. Those apps tend to overlap with the tons of apps that nobody wants.