Is Apple's Attack On Flash Really About Video? 595
jamiegau writes "Here we have a long and in-depth blog post analyzing the faults in Steve Jobs's Letter about Flash. The writer concludes with an interesting idea that it is all about online video."
It's about the App Store (Score:3, Informative)
Why develop an app with XCode for one platform when you could develop it in Flash and have it run on multiple devices. Flash represents a threat to the App Store. Jobs can say it's about the power and crashes, but he could have set expectations with Adobe when the iPhone first came out. It's all about money and controlling the market place.
Hard to Believe (Score:2, Informative)
Translation: Adobe, get your shit together. When half your market uses a Mac, you need to take them a lot more seriously than you currently do.
Re:Bad Grammar, Insightful Point (Score:3, Informative)
err, no, according to apple, it's the crazy licensing requirements.
Re:God save flash! (Score:5, Informative)
Which is?
And don't say html 5 - have you played with that? I doesn't really seem ready to deliver RIA's like Java and Flash have been delivering for years because its buggy (what do you know - its an unfinished standard). I think this video illustrates it best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4 [youtube.com]
My own experience with html 5 video btw was buggy at best - anytime you paused you couldn't resume and had to reload the entire clip. His experience in that video above was it didn't work - because the video he tried to view was Theora/OGG - which the iPad/iPhone don't support.
Re:Games too (Score:5, Informative)
But Adobe did find a way to make Flash work on Apple's devices - they added the ability to export Flash as native iPhone code.
Apple responded by changing their rules to require all iPhone apps to be orginally developed with Apple tools.
That's not about the constraints of the device - that's about artificial constraints created for business reasons.
Re:Why does it all have to be either pro or anti? (Score:5, Informative)
All this discussion about Flash vs HTML5 seems to miss the point that Flash isn't just video - there are tons of apps and interfaces out there written in Flash - not just slideshows and ads. There are games, presentations, demos etc.
There is not a SINGLE content creation tool for HTML5 which can hold a candle to Adobe's flash authoring environment.
Flash only has three uses (Score:5, Informative)
Flash only has three big uses on the web.
The first is video. Flash is not needed for video. It became the standard because it could do things the object tag couldn't, but it's not needed. The video tag does what most users need, and people will figure out ways to do the rest. For most users (who just want to see Hulu/Vimeo/YouTube/whatever), the video tag will be all they need. Flash isn't necessary here for most users (especially mobile).
The second is animations. There are some very impressive things done in HTML5 and JS, and most of the stuff I see on the web done with flash could be done in HTML5 (or really just needs a redesign). Very few sites do more than make objects show and hide and move around. iPhone users don't need a special plugin to use terrible interfaces, they should be made in HTML5 or have a simplified version available. So Flash isn't necessary here for most users, especially mobile.
Games are the best argument for flash, it's the standard and works well (when the programers know what they're doing and don't code an idle loop to use 100% CPU). Steve Jobs is right that a great many of these wouldn't work on the iPhone because of the keyboard and mouse expectations that can't be translated. Native code would work better, and being able to get to farmville but having a horrible time trying to play it would make iPhone users mad.
Games is the best reason Adobe has, I'd like to be able to play 'em on my iPhone some times. Steve is right that it's better for most users that the games get made for the device instead of trying to rejigger the interface.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
Problem is that you aren't going to develop your website for HTML 5, when the browsers accounting for about 60% - 70% of the market don't support it at all, and you have to support two different video codecs for the browers that do support it.
Remember the days when online video meant installing plugins from Real Player, Microsoft and Quicktime, and there were different types of Java plugin? HTML 5 at the moment seems to be a return to those days.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
"This argument makes no sense to me. HTML5 can already replicate pretty much anything these Flash games do and is also outside of Apple's control."
Not. Even. Close.
Adobe Flash is right now one of the fastest implementations of vector graphics animation. HTML5 has NOTHING close in capability to SWF format - canvas is a frigging joke.
Sure, you can run Quake2 with software rendering in JS drawing on canvas. But the same Quake2 in Flash would require many times less of CPU time per frame.
Re:video (Score:4, Informative)
That's a pretty dang good point.
No, it's not. [flickr.com].
Oh, that's right: VLC is developed by a megacorporation with close knowledge of Apple's secret internal APIs, and not a small team of Open Source developers [videolan.org]. That's why their software can play back the same MP4 stream with 1/3 the CPU of Adobe's.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
They can and they have - at least the technical constraints.
I am not seeing any phone that currently supports the whole flash experience: http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/ [adobe.com] Just the Flash Lite option.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
Consider that this is not a technical issue but an anti-competitive stance (and I want flash on my iPhone, bloat and all thankyouverymuchstevejobsyoumegalomaniac), along with no bash shell, no multitasking (funny, works very, very well on my jailbroken phone via backgrounder and sbsettings!), no ssh client, unable to use it as a mass storage device, the complications introduced in corporate deployments. Unfortunately, even Windows Mobile/WinCE, the OS from the king of anticompetitive tactics (Microsoft) is much more "open" and easier to deploy and manage, or even simply use.
Jobs comes across similar to one of those looney treehuggers who wants to stop all use of fossil fuels NOW because it's possible to build wind farms, solar farms, and in 20+ years, Mr. Fusion reactors. In the meantime, if we kill all fossil fuel use, we'll be limited to cars with a 200 mile range or less (so a cross-country drive, or even a cross-state drive in most states, would be a multi-day trip due to 8+hour charge times), the economy would collapse hard, and there would be little to no way to manufacture the "green" technologies. Jobs is putting the cart before the horse here. If HTML5 were fully supported by the major browsers TODAY and there were mainstream HTML5 sites TODAY he would have a legitimate point. But it isn't, there aren't, and he doesn't. It is purely an anti-competitive tactic.
I want to be able to use my iPhone as a mass storage device so I can manage the phone from Linux, and so I can carry one less device (no more jump drive or external drive to carry to a client site for examp;e).
I use crond, the bash shell and ssh for monitoring servers.
I use backgrounder and have had ZERO problems with performance, nor with apps "randomly" closing when memory gets low.
I jailbroke my phone, and figured out the method to "downgrade"[sic] from 3.1.3 to 3.1.2 to get my jailbreak back, and I do not have so much as a single pirated app on my iPhone. In fact I've probably spent $250 on apps via the apple store, and probably $15.00 on music (why do I need to buy music when I've ripped my entire CD collection to MP3? Be glad I bought ANY music from you Apple). All the other software I've installed (via cydia, or compiling/installing via bash, etc.) has been either open source or freeware. And yet, zero stability problems, and I keep sshd turned off when I am not actively using it.
Now, Flash may increase the memory footprint of some web sites, but I don't give a crap while watching videos via hulu or crackle; it's not like I'd want to run a game at the same time. Give me flash! Preaching HTML5 is fine and dandy, but right now 99% of sites that would run the more advanced HTML5 features are now running flash (or silverlight *gag*).
Re:Games too (Score:1, Informative)
Flash has so many APIs for accessing the GPU available to it under Linux that the developer made a whiney blog post about how it was so difficult for him to choose. Yet Flash still does not use the GPU properly, and still runs dog slow even on 3Ghz machine under Linux. And does Adobe get the blame for this? No, Linux developers do. Jobs doesn't want the same thing happening to the iPhone.
tl;dr Adobe writes shitty software, and the OS gets the blame.
Re:Games too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
it's a straw argument to not provide the APIs to let Flash use the GPU, and then complain that it doesn't use the GPU. That's the problem... Not that Flash is programmed bad
Sorry, but I don't think the issue of APIs is sufficient to explain why Flash crashes constantly. If the whole thing were merely an issue of Flash lacking H264 hardware acceleration support, then you might have a point here, but Flash has been crashing browsers for years and years and Adobe has never really fixed it.
Adobe never even pretended that they were going to fix it until Apple refused to support Flash on the iPhone, at which point they started pointing their fingers at Apple's APIs. One of their major complaints was, "We've been using Apple's legacy API and never bothered to move to the new API, and the old API isn't as well maintained as the new one." First, it's not really Apple's fault that Adobe stuck with Carbon for all these years. Second, using Carbon still doesn't quite explain why Flash hangs and crashes all the time.
Re:Games too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
Because its an iPhone? Adobe's flash blog says they get over 7 million hits in several months from iPhone users on their download flash page - where it displays a message says "sorry because of apple we cannot give this to you".
http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/06/iphone-stats-from-the-flash-player-download-center/ [flashmobileblog.com]
I don't think people in general have any clue really - flash works on their home pc, why not this magical phone I have?
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
I am not seeing any phone that currently supports the whole flash experience: http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/ [adobe.com] Just the Flash Lite option.
That list is a little out of date. The Nokia N900 [kongtechnology.com] runs the desktop version of Flash 9.
On the other hand, many flash games require more CPU than a mobile device can really provide at the moment.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
You could then easily argue that if they were to provide access to free content hosted by others then they would still get the device sales and not have to worry about hosting.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
If Apple really just wanted to ensure quality applications and user experience, then why not offer the best of both worlds? Again your argument doesn't hold up. There's no reason that they couldn't have the "sanctioned" Apple App Store and then the "unsanctioned" wild west.
What it really boils down to is control under the guise of security and quality, neither of which are to be found on the iPhone.
Re:Adobe Disinformation (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest one is claiming that Flash is a closed standard - Flash as a standard is open, $free, and Free. Anyone can implement a Flash compiler, and anyone can implement a Flash player, using specs provided by Adobe, without having to pay any royalties to Adobe. (Now, the video codecs are another story, but that's still not royalties to Adobe.)
Also, there was the whole, claiming things that are problems with Flash as unique to Flash, when they also apply to H.264 and HTML5, thing.
Re:Oh, Jamie, oh Jamie (Score:2, Informative)
Look douche bag Steve Job's letter was 100% correct, there's no FUD there as you state. And hey captain obvious, JOBS MENTIONED VIDEO. Wow you act like it's some kind of secret. It's not.
FYI MOST PEOPLE CAN'T STAND FLASH! We just deal with it because of the morons who can't build web sites or videos without flash.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh*. Can we please kill the myth that Apple makes tons of money off the App Store? I know it's hard to keep up with accurate info when Apple releases financials 4 times a year that show that the iTunes Store is purely a break even operation.
Apple makes their money ($$$$$) off the hardware. It would actually save Apple money if they allowed Flash, and didn't have to pay for the bandwidth and server hosting costs from delivering apps (including all those free ones) to people.
Apple is heavily pushing HTML5, and even allows it to be used for apps on the iPhone. Google Voice is a perfect example here. Apple hasn't put it on the app store, but that didn't stop Google from releasing it, oh, and it works on the Palm Pre too. Cross phone development. All using open standards that Apple can optimize for, instead of an Adobe proprietary environment.
Re:Games too (Score:2, Informative)
Practical reason 1) Use of AIR means developers can not benefit from adjustments to Apple's APIs until Adobe does, meaning non-native devs can't have the same feature/function head start as mnative devs, putting them at an instant disadvantage when taking oportinuties from new functions. (aka, native apps will corner the market and become popular before AIR cathes up so devs can write similar apps)
practical reason 2) If apple makes an update that alters an API cal for security reasons, any apps coded in AIR can not take advantage of that change, and will remain broken, until not only Apple and the Dev make a code change, but the Dev has to wait on Adobe, meaning again, native apps have a significant market advantage to interpreted code.
Practical reason 3) cross compiled code is more bloated, more difficult to inspect for code flaws, harder to read by a human, lacks significant commenting by the developer (since it was only present in the original AIR code set, not the C code set pre-compile), and the developers are completely removed from seeing the direct results of their code efforts and lack the ability to performance tweak their code directly (they can make all the tweaks they want, but Adobe can very easily undo that work).
these are BIG reasons for any developer to stay the hell clear of intermediary apps. Yes, selling an app across multiple platforms is a plus, and tools that make that process more efficient can, in some cases, lead to better profitability, however, proper code architecture, and a native understanding of the local APIs is STILL NECESSARY as even cross compiled code between platforms can only take advantage of very basic functions, and code efficiency and specific feature use still need to be cross-coded for each platform individually.
There are a lot more small reasons to avoid these interpreter or cross-compile platforms, these are just a few, and hopefully this leads to some insight for you and others on this matter.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think this is really true. Apple has specifically said tools that allow programming in other languages are allowed.
Um, yes it is true [daringfireball.net]. They have a very short list of 'approved' languages.
Specifically, this:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Emphasis mine. This bans anything not coded in Objective-C, C, or C++ (as far as native code goes -- and only JavaScript in WebKit for interpreted languages), as well as banning any third-party toolkits, frameworks, and most libraries (even if they're written in one of the 'approved' languages). About the only thing they haven't dictated (yet) is what text editors you can use to write the code.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Informative)
You're wrong. Core Video is for manipulating individual video frames, not for hardware accelerated video playback. Apple hadn't made available any hardware acceleration for video decoding until 10.6.3.
Read the doc if you don't believe me : Core Video Programming Guide [apple.com]
Re:Games too (Score:4, Informative)
No,
Tap and hold counts as hover, tap counts as click. Android has implemented this system from the start and is is quite easy to use. Amongst Android users it's known as "tap and hold" or the "long click" and is often used in lieu of a second mouse button (Android really is a phone sized computer, so it requires a "Windows XP" level of literacy to operate).
Is this level of sophistication beyond the Iphone?
But really, anyone who still claims the war on Flash is anything else then Apple maintaining dictatorial control over what runs on their Iphone is beyond deluded.