Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right • Hacker News Board

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#161

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 9:51 AM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #90

nanairo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but I think Adobe 10 years ago was pushing for things like html5 video and canvas... because Flash was Macromedia's. It was a case of: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (They were also one of the first big companies to push SVG from what I remember).

heh not the first time I have made that mistake, when I say "they" I mean macromedia / whoever happened to be in charge of flash at the time of whatever incidence we are talking about.

But I am not sure Flash was really comparable to what it is today back in the days of Macromedia. Did we have Youtube and company back then? My gut feeling is that Adobe there went from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to "hey, wait a minute: we could actually BUY it, and CONTROL it".

Adobe bought Macromedia and suddenly Flash was great and amazing and they integrated it with the rest of the their portfolio.

The question I am trying to put is: back in the days of Macromedia, do you think they would have clanged on Flash on mobile like they life depended on it?

(this is not a rhetorical question, btw, I am really wondering: I didn't follow Adobe and Macromedia much in those days)

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#162

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 9:58 AM UTC

orangecat wrote: post #78

wtallis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that's not how Adobe likes to do business. Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software: CS5 (…

CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). By that standard, iTunes still isn't native. Apple always positioned Carbon as a fully supported and native framework. They even promised 64-bit Carbon support in Leopard before yanking the rug out right before it shipped, which no doubt rendered a lot of work by Adobe useless. I would have…

The sad story is that Apple could deprecate Carbon all they want, but if Adobe, Microsoft, Quark and friends kept using it, Apple would need to oblige. Apple had no power, and these companies were basically "too big to fail" so to speak.

It's also not the first time Apple got bitten by this problem (although to be honest given the number of massive changes they carried in the last 10 years or so, they kind of were asking for it ^_^).

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#163

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:00 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #75

gamble wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog It makes me feel old to remember a time when Adobe reader didn't suck. The great PDF support in OSX is one of the things that's most jarring to lose when I use a Windows machine. It's incredible that you have to download a third-party utility just to view PDF files on Windows properly, and none of the options even comes close to Preview on the Mac. In fa…

I remember Acrobat Reader not sucking up to about version 5 (PDF 1.4, circa 2001). Perhaps not too coincidentally, this is about the level of feature support that most non-Adobe readers have. Only twice in the past year have I encountered a PDF that didn't work in Preview.app. The first was a PDF of my own creation: I was using LaTeX Beamer as an alternative to PowerPoint, and I embedded a 3d model in the presentatio…

Imho the moral with Adobe/Acrobat and other such cases (eg. Microsoft/IE) is that when a company starts piling up features on their winning horse to take over _other_ fields, they may very well win that battle, but in the long run they'll have such a bloated messy piece of software that they will lose the war.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#164

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:05 AM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #19

cookiecaper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 is cool but it's not the end-all. You have a whole set of new issues to deal with when you use HTML5. You have to worry about cross-browser compatibility and specific rendering bugs, whereas Flash authors don't. You have to rely on the slow JavaScript VMs included in even the fastest browsers (even the "fast" JS VMs are still rather slow), and then you have IE, which is still used by > 50% of internet users, of…

This doesn't answer the question of why Adobe doesn't do that, it lists the things that Adobe could step up to do. Yes, we know there is no ready-made IDE like Adobe's Flash IDE: fixing this problem is something Adobe can do, by providing a ready made HTML5 IDE. Why isn't Adobe doing that and leading the charge? There are distinct problems with HTML5 replacing Flash, and Adobe is in a unique position to partner, cons…

I think the answer is a common one in free markets: cost.

Adobe would need to invest a _lot_ to make a good HTML5 IDE, and what would they get then? At best they'd be in the same situation as they were before just with HTML5 instead of Flash, and on top of that they would have lost control of the platform.

So the bean counters find this kind of proposition difficult to swallow. And if you say: but what if someone else did? Then they'll reply: well, then make sure Flash kills anything HTML5 related, and that's how they end up putting a lot of money to preserve the status quo, instead of using their baskets full of gold to make them run faster.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#165

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:08 AM UTC

loewenskind wrote: post #154

diego_moita wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing with Silverlight and am very well impressed. It is much faster than Flash (my tests where the RSA encryption algorithm), has a way more comprehensive library (specially for data manipulation) and "looks" way more secure than Flash (please take this last one with a grain of salt). Its acceptance is still lagging (I estimate something like 50%-60%), but growing fast. MS promised the new Windows 7 phon…

IMO the fact that Silverlight hasn't been canned is just another point that shows that MS doesn't get it. When they saw where HTML5 was going they should have jumped on board with both feet. It's too late to force everyone to use their OS at this point so they should have been focused on being compatible with everyone but simply running better. Silverlight will get a bit bigger but it's never going to matter in the l…

The cynic in me thinks that MS thought that rather than spending energy to "get it" and maybe failing, they could back all horses and see who would win. They usual strategy (and Google's current m.o. sadly).

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#166

Post by weego » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:12 AM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #153

mishmash wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran two three minute tests, one in Safari and the other Firefox on a 2.8GHz C2D w/ 4GB RAM and nothing else really open. In Safari 5.0.1 your link didn't render a single frame in three minutes. Firefox 4b3 did render, but the animation would not normally be watchable. The opening scene ran the best, probably around 15fps while during second and third scenes the galaxies would jump about an inch with each frame. I d…

It runs great in Chrome.

Flash content runs in every browser.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#167

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:13 AM UTC

loewenskind wrote: post #158

WilliamLP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The much glossed-over answer is that JavaScript and HTML just isn't a good environment for rich app development, for many reasons. One "elephant in the room" kind of issue is that JavaScript's object system is not acceptable to most programmers, and most programmers require classical OOP. Even prototype system fanatics probably would have to admit that the current state of JavaScript doesn't work very well, with its…

This is my biggest gripe about HTML5. They had the chance to really fix a lot of missteps but they made the (IMO) horrible mistake of using JavaScript as their "assembly language". Regardless of what anyone thinks about JavaScript, not everyone is going to want to program with it. Many of us will be programming in something else and compile to the base browser language. What should have happened is that they just def…

Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken them to come to a standard? I think HTML5 is already a bit on the side of being a step too wide, but I guess we've been stuck in HTML4 (and related technologies) for so long that it was necessary. XHTML 2 was an awesome language, imho... just another case of too much meat on the fire, and so never reaching a conclusion.

Let's get a good HTML5 system now, and then we can think of adding additional scripting languages. The best is the enemy of the good. :)

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#168

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:22 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #100

daten wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many phones support HTML5 with all of the features Flash provides for a direct comparison?

No. Straw man. The point is, Flash video doesn't currently work on Android unless you re-encode it. If you're going to re-encode video, you're going to move to HTML5. It's really this simple: Flash's bid for relevance on mobile phones is only going to work if they can make desktop Flash video work reliably. They don't even need to make the games and stuff work properly. Stipulate that they fix that. They still fail i…

Exactly. It's the "No porting necessary" bit that would be appealing and would let Flash swiftly be relevant on mobile. Little porting is fine too. But anything non trivial, like changing the user interface, puts Flash on mobile on much more equal footing with HTML5, which Flash should avoid.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#169

Post by nanairo » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 10:26 AM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #96

Have to strongly disagree here. Flash on my Nexus One works brilliantly. I use it to watch videos and play games frequently and without issue. It hasn’t crashed on me once. Flash is set to load on demand when I request it and otherwise it stays out of my way. In my opinion it proves Jobs dead wrong. Is Flash the FUTURE of the web? Of course not. But it is the here and now. And by not having it available you will miss…

Let's assume that you are just one case and not "the world". Sure, you could say the same about the original article, and I would totally agree with you.

But here it's the bottom line: if it works fine with 50% of the people, that's still not good for anyone who's not a geek (and maybe not for them either). Even 80% is not good enough. 95% is more like it, but probably it would still be too significant. I think you'd need something above 95% of cases to win your argument.

What I am trying to say, is that finding one guy for whom Flash doesn't work is a lot worse than how good it is to find one for whom it works.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#170

Post by nwinter » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 12:33 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #53

Well, I don't know about the content of this article, but I'm glad it alerted me to the availability of flash. I just installed it, and while it's not ideal, it's adequate for practicing Chinese on skritter, which is exciting.

We haven't optimized Skritter for Flash at all yet except to quickly scrunch down the layout. We just got a phone to play with, so we'll see how much better we can make it. I was blown away by the framerates one tester was getting--this is a Flash app that's too much for some netbooks, and here it is running fine on Android without any optimization.

The one thing that we'll have to figure out is how to improve the finger tracking, if we even can--its default state is too slow to start recognizing the strokes you're writing.

I can't speak to its video performance, but Flash 10.1 for mobile is even better than I expected for rich apps.