Thoughts on Flash

Apple's policy of banning Flash doesn't really bother me, but 3.3.1 really, really, does. Having Flash on the iPhone as a means of cross-developing apps is the most interesting way for Flash to be on the device, for me: it would mean a lot of creative and fun casual games would be more easily available for me to play.

Video, I think, is a red herring; it's easier for web sites to switch to a different, HTML5-compatible embedding scheme than it is to rewrite Flash games in Objective C.

Actually, the native-exported apps are mentioned by Jobs in point 6. Of note: these apps were slower than native apps, consumed far more power than native apps, used more memory than native apps, and had little to no integration with the underlying platform, other than running in the first place.

Jobs' point talks about this; the issue is that if Flash CS5 supported what the iPhone can do today, who's to say when it will support what iPhone OS 4 can do tomorrow? Will they update Flash on Apple's schedule, or their own? Or at all?

For one example, look at GameCenter, Apple's new XBox Live-type service. Would Flash support it? Would Adobe go to the trouble of adding full support for GameCenter to their Flash runtime, so that games written in Flash could make use of that feature?

That wouldn't make any sense, because then people would have to write a different Flash app for the iPhone than for Android; either developers use GameCenter on iPhone and nothing on Android, or GameCenter on iPhone and their own solution on Android.

My suspicion is that Adobe wouldn't implement it (because it's a lot of work to just support one platform) or wouldn't implement it well (because they just don't really care), and that if it were available developers wouldn't use it (because it would only work on one platform anyway). This leads to a worsening of the overall experience, as the flood of quickly and cheaply ported Flash apps into the App Store dilutes the value that's there.

Perhaps Adobe would add GameCenter support, but that might be a new feature for CS6, which might come out (for example) August 2011, after Apple's released iPhone OS 5, with more new features Adobe hasn't had time to implement.

Developers using Flash would have a substandard environment, and would produce substandard apps, assuming they even cared at all about doing things right. That's what Apple's trying to prevent.

[Edit: typo, point 6, not point 5]

> Well, one mobile phone that has Flash support period? No?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N900

> Is python really a 'standard'?

In an important sense I think it is. If I write a program in Python I can be reasonably sure it will run on someone else's system (obviously I have to take into account different Python versions, different underlying OS, etc). If I write a program in C++ or Scheme, what assurances of portability do I have if someone else's system is running a different implementation, with different libraries available, and different underlying behaviour in edge cases.

> rather, third-party implementations duplicate features and functionality from CPython based off the PEP they're defined in.

Yes; CPython is the standard. It's better if the standard is a program rather than a document, because you can run a program and find out what it does, but a document just sits there and does nothing (and may be hard to understand or ambiguous; the spec for Algol 68 comes to mind here).

> Python isn't used 'on the web', it's used on the backend to generate web pages

It is used as an http client as well as a server.

> Are you suggesting that Apple should include a Python interpreter in WebKit?

No, I'm suggesting that Apple should open up their platforms and allow people who have bought iPhones and iPads to run software of their own choosing on them; I'm sure someone would port Python fairly quickly.

> The simple answer would be 'because Python is not a language that is used in client-side scripting anywhere on the web'.

That's factually inaccurate; I personally have written code in Python that acts as a web client. As have some of my friends.

> No other browser supports it, and even if they did it wouldn't be widely used.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that client-side web programming must involve running inside a graphical web browser. This is not the case. Ever heard of wget? Or scraping?

> Python is used to send or receive documents over HTTP, so therefore I should be able to write a web app in Python to run on the iPhone? It doesn't make sense.

Yes it does. For example, I might want to write a program to cache certain web pages so I can read them even if I'm in an area with poor wifi and 3G access. And I might want to write that program in Python.

"No, my argument is that your argument is misleading because it ignores the fact that Apple doesn't have a choice in keeping Webkit open."

Well, not to be pedantic or anything, but WebKit didn't have to be open at all. WebCore and JavaScriptCore (based off KHTML and KJS respectively) needed to stay open-source, but the WebKit framework that unites the two is a from-scratch Apple project that was open-sourced in 2005.

It could be argued that all the work happens in WebCore and JSCore, but the WebKit framework on top of them makes dealing with the two far, far easier than it would be to use them alone.