For the record, the article's comments are full of people saying that their experiences have been very different.
Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
21–30 of 194 posts
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#22I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?
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…
What are the typical gripes about this keyword behavior?
Once you understand how scope works and how to force scope, and what exactly constitutes an object.. it makes quite a bit of sense.
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#23Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it.
Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. The reason this hasn't happened so far is that Adobe is a bottleneck nobody wants to deal with; they just consider basically impossible to get Flash Player on mobile because Adobe doesn't have the structure or the talent to do it correctly, and there is no other option except to let Adobe do it. An open Flash would open many doors, awesome adaptations, deployments, and uses that we can't yet think up would come out of it, and all the while Adobe would keep selling its IDE (probably selling more, actually, because Flash will then do cool stuff that everyone wants).
I don't know why they don't do this. Flash Player is already basically free, all of the money from Flash comes from the IDE Adobe sells. Keep the IDE locked up if you want, Adobe, but every second you keep the Player locked up you are killing Flash that much more, and when nobody uses Flash nobody is going to buy your IDE.
I know there are free software Flash players out there, but it's not the same. It's like saying nobody needs cooperation from nvidia because of nouveau. While a noble effort with meaningful results, vendor support still gets you much, much farther ahead.
If Adobe knows what's good for them they will be opening the Flash Player as quickly as they possibly can. They are going to be very sorry that they didn't. They probably will eventually take this route as a last-ditch effort when Flash content has dipped like 80% and been replaced by HTML5/JS, but that will be too late. This is Adobe's last chance, they must open it now if they expect any kind of future from it.
Flash is too big for Adobe alone, and if they don't want the whole thing to crash and burn totally and have that revenue dry up, they need to open ASAP. This should be the number one priority at Adobe.
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#24I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?
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…
"even 'fast' JS VMs are still rather slow"
Compared to C, Java, OCaml, and so forth, perhaps.
Compared to Ruby, Python, and PHP - not so much. (take a look at the v8 entry. and this is from '09 - v8 has seen some performance improvements since then)
http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil...
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#25Earlier 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…
What are the typical gripes about this keyword behavior? Once you understand how scope works and how to force scope, and what exactly constitutes an object.. it makes quite a bit of sense.
From the Google style guide:
"The semantics of this can be tricky. At times it refers to the global object (in most places), the scope of the caller (in eval), a node in the DOM tree (when attached using an event handler HTML attribute), a newly created object (in a constructor), or some other object (if function was call()ed or apply()ed)."
The pragmatic answer is to limit its use except when absolutely required (as Google's guide suggests). The more problematic meta-problem, is that many people do think it's valuable and don't understand it and dig themselves into some subtle and insidious messes.
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#26For a blog called "the geek's geek" it sure sounds like the guy needs some technical support because many others report a completely better experience.
Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#27For the record, the article's comments are full of people saying that their experiences have been very different.
Flash works fine on my android phone. At least as far as I know. I almost never have a reason to use it.
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#28Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it. Open-sourcing would open so many doors.…
Could an alternate approach be to take the route that Dalvik did?
There's also a research paper about having a remote proxy to deal with Flash on mobile devices; it's something like a VNC viewer, but for Flash. That wouldn't violate any patents now, would it?
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/sys169-mos...
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#29I wasn't aware that the sole reason for flash was to playback high-def video.
It's just a runtime. Make stuff that runs on the platform for that runtime. JavaME will choke on most Desktop Java apps as well.
The moral of the story is, do mobile things on mobile devices and desktop things on desktops.
Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
#30I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?
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…