Apple's Developer Tools Turnaround 'Great News' For Adobe 234
cgriffin21 writes "Apple is being praised for loosening of some of the restrictions in its Application Developer Program license agreement that open the door for app developers to work in Flash for the Apple iPhone, iPad and other devices. And no one is happier about the change than Flash-maker Adobe itself. They wrote, 'This is great news for developers and we're hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. We do want to point out that Apple's restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.'"
Apple also received praise from Google over their reversal, which may have been prompted by an FTC probe. Reader Stoubalou adds that Apple shed more light on the app review process by publishing a list of guidelines (PDF) the violation of which may get an app rejected from the App Store.
Praise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that like praising a fundamentalist preacher for stopping his book burning?
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The other one forces all developers to learn Objective-C, which is arguably cruel and unusual punishment.
Re:Praise? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course that's not true about the book burning.
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how? Is the Koran not a book?
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Both involve an element of ridiculous, almost comical hypocrisy.
In one case where the some people who view burning a book as an outrage view anti-semitism and restricting churches from being built is socially acceptable, and in the other case where Cocoa developers are forced for 10 years to learn .NET, Java, PHP to make a living in the enterprise and then enterprise .NET/Java/PHP developers scream bloody murder when they're forced to learn Objective-C to write iPhone apps.
Re:Praise? (Score:4, Funny)
And the worst part is when he writes a crappy country song about it, your family won't even get a cut!
I feel bad for Wired too (Score:2)
They were an early casualty that had to redo their first issue magazine app because of Apple. In the end it was an underwhelming 500MB kludge, and I doubt they recouped the costs that they must have put into that.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/27/adobe-rewrites-wired-magazine-ipad-app-without-flash-gets-it-ap/ [downloadsquad.com]
Eerie (Score:2, Insightful)
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This is eerily similar to Microsoft being praised for Windows 7 after pushing Vista. Sure the situation is completely different, but praising a company for finally listening to consumers is the wrong way to go about it.
You could argue that they didn't listen to consumers, or developers, but did it because they were under investigation for anti-competitive behavior [cnet.com] on this, both in US and EU. A conviction on this would be tough on the image, even for Apple.
Re:Eerie (Score:5, Insightful)
What's eerie is that Apple does this with every single thing they have ever launched since time immemorial, and slashgeeks still love to think that Apple is evil, prone to making huge gaffes, and then quietly making good once they realize their colossal blunder. The "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame" mindset is so effing retarded it's now an Internet meme, and we *still* don't get that the joke is on us. Not Taco. Us.
This is what Apple does: (1) strip every half-baked feature/freedom out of a new product until it is boiled down to its most basic essence. (2) Release it. (3) Start adding the features/freedoms back in one at a time once they are fully baked. (4) Profit! (Notice the lack of a ...? step.) They do this. Every. Single. Time. iPod storage. iTunes on Windows. Virtually everything in OS X. Webkit. Macbooks and minis. iTunes DRM. iPhone cut and paste. iPhone devkits. iOS multitasking. Every single time the geekosphere gnashes its teeth and bemoans that Apple is pushing bullshit that is missing X, Y, and Z. And then Apple does X, Y, and Z, and the geekosphere congratulates itself for doing Apple's product development for them.
If we believed our own propaganda (and it is apparent that many of us do), Apple is the world's most incompetent company that barely survives thanks to nerd rage steering them back on track on a more or less continuous basis. But Occam's Razor suggests that a more likely explanation is merely that Apple polishes the consumer experience first, and the nerd experience second. I guess that angers us.
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No, that's not it. I don't care if Apple "gets" it. It's that I object to them being called "developer friendly" when they clearly aren't - to selected developers and some random ones. It does a disservice to companies who really are developer friendly for Apple to just claim it like a trademark.
I mind them saying they're open source friendly when they mean they're extremely not open-source friendly but have merely stopped forbidding applications with open source.
They sell themselves as the people's device,
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You make it seem like this was a carefully crafted strategy from Apple. But that is simply not the case.
It just so happened that Steve Jobs thought that everyone would be happy to play in his walled garden while he collected tax. However, with Android coming out with flash..and considering the speed at which android phones are selling, he figured that the best thing to do would be to eat his pride and his words and fix those features that are missing.
Apple was wrong to have placed all those restrictions on
Good news, everybody! (Score:5, Funny)
I think this is the first time I've heard "flash support" and "good news" in the same sentence. My, how the times they are a changin'.
Re:Good news, everybody! (Score:5, Insightful)
It will only last until people stop thinking that lack of Flash support is an effective talking point for criticizing Apple. Then everyone will go back to hating Flash.
Re:Good news, everybody! (Score:5, Insightful)
Please do not conflate the question of Flash sucking hard, and the question of freedom of choice. One can hate Flash with a passion, but still believe that one should have the choice to enjoy that suckiness in full.
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Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how everyone was pretty well in agreement that Flash sucks until Apple said they wouldn't allow it on iOS. Then suddenly it's like, "How could they do that?! Flash is awesome and efficient and never crashes and is an integral part of the web! It's a perfect little diamond of the application and is everything computer applications and frameworks should be!"
If it stops being a talking point against Apple, then most likely people will go back to a
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I'm talking about how everyone was pretty well in agreement that Flash sucks until Apple said they wouldn't allow it on iOS. Then suddenly it's like, "How could they do that?! Flash is awesome and efficient and never crashes and is an integral part of the web! It's a perfect little diamond of the application and is everything computer applications and frameworks should be!"
I'm not sure where you've got this line from, because it certainly wasn't that way on Slashdot. In pretty much every Flash-on-iOS discussion I've seen here, vast majority of arguments in favor of Flash started with "Flash sucks, but ...". A few people (myself included) then pointed out that a Flash application for something is preferable to no application. Others focused on the freedom of choice angle. Some on portability. But, come to think of it, I don't recall any post that would actually praise Flash fo
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If there are so many, it should be easy to link to a couple to prove your point.
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The warnings do not prevent me from doing whatever I want with them, though. They just warn me about possible consequences.
Re:Good news, everybody! (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't get why you need to have every possible choice available to you. You already have a choice here - don't buy iOS devices. Apparently nerds need to bitch until their every unrealistic whim is satisfied?
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No, those who know the industry get bitchy when someone leverages a monopoly in one area to destroy competition in another. The banning of Flash was political, not technological. (There were no tech metrics given, only PR ones)
It seems like just yesterday that the plucky fruit company was itself besieged by shithead monopolists, and whining about the injustice.
Re:Good news, everybody! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. I've always hated Flash, both because of its instability and its co-opting of standards.
But I still didn't want Apple to just ban it outright. I want to market to out-compete it. If Flash drains the battery, add battery-consumption tests to app approval and don't let in anything that does, Flash or not.
IBM became Microsoft became Apple? (Score:2)
Does anyone remember when "big blue" was the bad locked down company? And then, later, it was Microsoft (their former competitor)? And now it seems to be apple who has these crazy rules in place?
Maybe in the world of tech companies, there always has to be one to pull this kind of shit.
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correction:
IBM -> Microsoft -> Apple -> RIM
You heard it here first folks :)
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WiFi (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:WiFi (Score:5, Informative)
The WiFi API is private that's why those types of apps were rejected. Believe me I know, we had a game based on finding WiFi hotspots we wanted to port from the DS, but didn't because we knew it wouldn't be approved for use of private API's.
Private API rejections are one of the rejections that actually makes sense. In those cases, you need to argue for Apple to make the particular API public rather than for them accept apps that use private API's that the company has no obligation to maintain compatibility for, so could change at any time, breaking your application.
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Re:WiFi (Score:4, Interesting)
Wasn't private API calls from Office to Windows a big part of what got into trouble w/ anti-trust regulations?
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Even if that was the case (I honestly have no idea), why would the various factors of anti-trust actions have to do with the iPhone?
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You don't need to be a monopoly to have an anti-trust issue. You generally don't get much attention on them until you are close to monopoly level though. Apple and the iPhone/iPad (and really all software platforms) is a bit of an exception - nowhere near a monopoly as most people see it, but there is a monopoly on the platform, and that platform is popular enough to draw attention.
The reason private api calls between Office and Windows was anti-competitive is because such calls are unavailable to third p
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They're still verboten by the new rules:
2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected
The wireless framework is a non-public API under iOS.
The Rejection List... Long. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, damn that's a long list of rejection reasons.
Second, the subset of that list that is neither reasonable nor obvious is very short. There are only a couple that I would say are stupid, and they revolve around censorship (i.e. adult themes).
In the end, would I try to write an app that violated any of those rules? Probably not. One could argue that I might want to... and that's true. But if I want to do that, there's an Android market just over thataway. It's a walled garden, but there's a door right there.
Coincidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just recently got full and official Flash support on my Motorola Droid with Android 2.2. It seems oddly coincidental to me that as soon as Android has solid Flash support, Apple decides it's time to open the floodgates and be best buddies with Adobe.
What the fuck? Sure, it's natural that Apple would do that because they want to stay competitive with the Android segment of the market, but Apple was supposed to be the leader and "innovator", not the follower.
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Wait, "solid Flash support"? From all I have read, it is anything but solid. "Spotty, buggy, resource-hog" seems to be what is being said, even by people that aren't fans of Apple.
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I didn't read reviews, but I have it on my N1, and while not lightning-fast, it's fast enough to not be annoying. I haven't actually used it enough to find out if it's a battery hog or not.
Re:Coincidental? (Score:4, Interesting)
Read the marketplace comments for Flash - there's plenty of praise for it. While its not perfect - it does work, and it allows you to see a full website where there were holes before.
On my nexus one - battery life actually got better with 2.2 and Flash installed so I don't think its really a resource hog any more than any other app.
Re:Coincidental? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure this is coincidental. I'm fairly sure that Apple still wants Adobe to, well, fuck off, but that they hit too many apps as collateral damage with their policies that were designed to prevent Flash-based apps from being ported to the iPhone.
So they've relaxed the rules a bit, which happens to allow auto-ported Flash apps. But Flash still isn't supported in Mobile Safari and there's no sign that this will change.
Plus, this means that they've reopened the door for auto-ported apps from Android, so maybe this is a shot at Android, but not in the way you think.
Bottom line is that the flood gates are still firmly closed, they've just opened a sluice gate which allows some Flash to trickle through.
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Actually Apple made their point and now are getting kudos for returning to the original situation, Flash out but Flash compiled to compliant native code back in. Not bad if you ask me.
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I just recently got my ingrown toenail taken care of. It seems oddly coincidental to me that as soon as my ingrown nail is fixed, Apple decides it's time to open the floodgates and be best buddies with me. I guess they know that now that I don't have to worry about my aching toe, I am ready to hound them to death if they don't open up the floodgates. Ha ha! Cowards...
How about the entry fee? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess you still have to pay $99/yr for appstore developer ability, or $299/yr for corporate development.
But what about people that just want to do the coding for themselves or fun? I don't want to distribute my app. Why can't I register one device that I can load my code onto for free without paying either of these?
I have a Mac, iPhone and XCode. Why can't I compile my code and move it onto my device without paying (or jailbreaking).
Seems that would be a nice way to get some more developers in.
Re:How about the entry fee? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Value of Malware (Score:2)
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Unless you're arguing that coaxing a user to load malware is worth $99/victim?
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Seriously, $99 isn't much money. Even if you value your time at minimum wage, the amount of money it will take you to actually write software that does something for you will rapidly exceed $99. And, as you said yourself, they're giving you XCode for free without strings attached.
In any profession, tools that generate revenue cost money. In the world of software, it happens to be incredibly cheap. If you were a mechanic, a single ratchet would cost $99.
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If you aren't paying Apple to develop for their platform, they don't really care about your ability to develop for their platform.
Google has a different philosophy and business mo
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Apple is not open source, will not become open source so I'd get used to it.
Windows is not open source either, but I can still write programs for it for free.
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You can write programs for OS X for free too. That would be the correct comparison.
Nah. His analogy used two platforms that actually have some market share. :P
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The computer industry took off because home computers have always allowed hobbyists to get in an program them and share their programs easily. I think a strong case could be made that rules that disallow the sort of thing Apple is doing would benefit everyone. I'm a fan of Apple and have made a lot of money off their stock, but I fully supp
Publicity 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Impose unnecessary and draconian restrictions
2) Lots of anger in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: publicity)
3) Remove unnecessary and draconian restrictions
4) Lots of praise in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: more publicity)
5)
6) Profits!
context (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm pretty sure AT&T has nothing to say about Apps on the iPhone. However, I'm sure they have given some guidelines, which Apple have dutifully passed along.
ick (Score:2, Insightful)
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I don't want flash-based apps on my iOS device. They are slower and use more batteries than non-flash-based equivalent apps.
How would you know?? Did you actually load flash-based apps on your iDevice?? And what about Unity-based games? Unity has a plugin that generates Objective C code (just like the new Flash builder tool used to do before it got banned). Can you even tell the difference when a 3D/2D game was made with the Unity game engine, or when it was not?
Nothing bad about this (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it will be good for everyone involved that the rules are clearer and more app creation tools exist, as long as the approval process is both stringent and non-abusive.
Also glad that Flash applets are not allowed... those are 90% advertisements, and for those useful non-ad content, I'm happy using my desktop to view them.
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>Also glad that Flash applets are not allowed...
On Android you can set flash to run only when request, just like flashblock on Firefox. So, in other words, you don't need your phone provider to refuse to give you access to flash objects. You can simply not activate them. The difference between the iphone and my EVO is that I can watch embedded video that's not supported natively. They can't. Neither of us is viewing flash ads. Choice is good, not bad.
Re:Nothing bad about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Choice is good, not bad.
If I needed Flash I wouldn't have bought an iPhone. Choice made.
I'm not a choice fundamentalist (Score:3, Insightful)
There are extremes, and a hap
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I don't have an iPhone nor do I want one, but I'm thrilled at the potential effect for iPhones to have on the Flash-heavy web.
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How about this for a conjecture.
WP7 is going to be released by the end of the year, and Silverlight is a primary development platform for that. As a language and platform, it's noticeably higher-level than Obj-C, so the learning curve is less steep there, and tooling can be made better. It's also really good at doing bling with a few mouse clicks (or a few lines of XML, whichever you fancy).
And guess what? All of the above are something that Flash is also good at, or better (e.g. tools). Purely coincidental
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Why are those the only two options? Couldn't the threat from competitors have been an issue? Android is gaining ground rapidly, and the greater freedom developers face on that platform combined with its rapidly expanding reach makes developing apps for Android more and more attractive a choice of where to put resources compared to iOS development.
iOS development from GNU/Linux desktop? (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw that with libimobiledevice, it's possible to control your iOS device with your Ubuntu desktop, including doing things like installing apps: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone [ubuntu.com]
What I'm wondering is, would it now be possible to develop apps for the iPhone from your GNU/Linux desktop, using a free software stack? What I have in mind is something like this: you write the application in C (a strict subset of Objective C), compile it using GCC (targeting ARM architecture?), using hea
Apple's way or the Highway (ok fine, or your way) (Score:3, Funny)
So lets see.. first there was "Edge is fine.. 3G is overkill," then "WE HAVE 3G!!" Then it was "nobody needs tethering," "Stop the presses: WE HAVE TETHERING*!!!! (*except in the US)", then "Multitasking is ridonkulous," "Oh, one more thing... WE HAVE MULTITASKING!!!"
And now Flash.
Steve Jobs is such a visionary.
Re:Apple's way or the Highway (ok fine, or your wa (Score:4, Funny)
Well, you have to admit that it takes a visionary to make a product that's functionally inferior to everything else on the market, and yet outsell everyone by such a large margin. And then roll out new versions with all those missing features, and sell it to all those poor schmucks who had already bought the original phone again and again!
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That's not the hallmark of a visionary, but rather of a salesman.
Wonderful! (Score:2)
Now we get our native Google Voice app, right? Right?
Oh, this just overturns one previous bad rule, not all of them.
Ingenious (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually think supporting the addition of Flash in apps but, now this is key: continuing to not support Flash in Safari -- is actually rather ingenious of Apple.
First off, Apple was smart to ban Flash from App Store apps, initially. This has allowed Apple to build the thriving eco-system of apps, using their native graphics APIs, that exists today. Now, they have lifted said ban, one might be concerned that this means that suddenly a bunch of slow flash-based apps are going to dominate. But, here is th
Misinformation (Score:2)
I have a couple points that seem to be lost in this thread. First, this isn't the "Flash" that you know and hate. This is apps written in ActionScript 3 that are compiled into native iOS apps. They aren't necessarily going to be straddled with the same issues the community often complains about.
Second, there is one important aspect of this that no one seems to pay attention to. Adobe's Flash Packager for IPhone and MonoTouch are the only way for someone to develop IPhone software without buying a Apple
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I don't know what you're talking about. We've always loved Flash.
In other news, the ministry of truth was working overtime in the last few days for some reason..
Pragmatism. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible to both hate Flash and realize that a lot of things you want still require it.
(And, possibly, that there isn't a better alternative technology in some cases. I said some cases, HTML5-is-the-answer-to-all-things-video partisans.)
Re:Adobe's PR worked (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is a hammer that frequently gets used to nail in screws. But sometimes you actually need a hammer.
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Apple only makes decisions based on user happiness, don't 'cha know?
Last week users would have been unhappy if their apps could be developed in Flash, this week it would please them.
There's NOTHING political going on here. (Well, nothing more than the original ban...)
And yeah, now us Flash haters get our real fun - Adobe will get its chance and blow it because Flash really does suck! I'm going to go get popcorn.
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Pretty much exactly.
Well, that and the ban against Flash clearly wasn't just about an actual suck-metric reached, but Job's political decision to punish a troublesome partner.
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This is a troll. This is a troll on 4chan. And this is a troll on Slashdot.
Any questions?
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Can I get my troll scrambled with cheese?
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No...only spam.
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Specifically note the group that ASCAP is considering their enemies. Note, among others, Creative Commons. How will you feel when you no longer have the right to distribute stuff you make under the conditions and license you choose?
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Which feature of Flash is impossible to re-implement? Using the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 is the only one I can think of, and even that is being worked on and should be quickly resolved in the near future.
Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5 [techcrunch.com]. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps.
Re:Flash is not restricted in Safari (Score:5, Informative)
1) High-quality fast vector graphics with morphing and keyframe animation. Nothing in HTML5 is even close (sorry, Canvas is just a toy).
2) Video overlays and compositing.
3) Audio (nope, HTML5 doesn't have enough support).
4) Language with optional typing and fast VM. JS is not yet there.
"Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5 [techcrunch.com]. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps."
Nope, they haven't. They ported it to WebGL which is NOT a part of HTML5 draft standard.
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Video overlay is up to the browser, but compositing is certainly possible.
Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?
If you are talking about the development of the viewer, Javascript can run anything that LLVM can spit out. That includes Objective-C and even ActionScript in the optionally typed language category.
If you are talking about the Flash content itself,
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Not really. It's possible to have other items over the "video" tag, but effects like 'fade in' are going to be difficult.
"Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?"
Not really. There's no programmatic access to live audio stream. There are some proposed extensions: http://ajaxian.com/archives/amazing-audio-sampling-in-javascript-with-firefox but nothing standa
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Which is a total phail.
There's no real animation support for SVG and its renderers are dog-slow.
You see, vector model of SVG is not really suitable for morphing and keyframe animation. In SVG, pictures are composed of polygons, which are composed of vertices connected by edges.
Suppose that we have a picture of two adjacent triangles (a square with one diagonal).
Then in SVG it will be represented as 4 vertices and 2 triangles composed from these vertices. These triangles are separate and are not dependent on
Re:bad news... (Score:4, Funny)
Why would Flash take more battery than a normal app? Is there a suck_battery_life() function somewhere in the API nobody else is using but Adobe?
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No, it's a function Flash isn't using: usleep(). ;-)
Basically Flash has a tendency to spin its wheels while waiting a lot more than a normal application. Continually polling for stuff to do is heavy on the processor and consequently is detrimental to battery life.
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True. But the method of porting flash apps to the iphone may introduce differences from how flash is run as an applet. Do you have any evidence that the recompiled flash apps for iPhone have the same issues as flash applets? (Barring of course programmers using explicit busy waits.)
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As this is still a fairly new development, who knows if the Flash->iOS native inherits the same faults of the original runtime. I would tend to think it's likely that it will, for the following reason. It would be far easier and less prone for porting weirdness for Adobe to build a Flash as static link library and stub launcher that can bind against the data chunk from a source .fla than to completely transcode the .fla into native code.
Re:bad news... (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently. Firefox CPU utilization without Lexulous (a non-animated Flash-based Facebook game - shut up, my Mom likes to play it with us) is about 8%-10%. (This is with Twitter and Facebook open which presumably are doing AJAX polling in the background.)
Throw open Lexulous, and I discover that I'm losing again (bah), and the CPU usage shoots up to 90% as long as that tab is open. With a Flash app that is literally sitting there doing nothing. No animation, no AJAX polling, just showing a Scrabble board.
So, joke or not, yes, it would appear that somewhere Flash has found the equivalent of suck_battery_life() and has a rather liberal usage policy for it.
Disclaimer: the computer I'm trying this on is an old Mac Pro G5, so I'd hope modern computers wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, that's pretty horrible.
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Flash has a reputation for doing everything (video decoding, etc.) in software even when there is (more efficient) hardware available on the device.
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any app that has constant animation is processor intensive.
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what's your point? those non-animated flash web pages / fragments use zero CPU cycles.
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Well, good thing the code is converted to native iPhone code since the iPhone still does not run flash.
Running an app that has been ported from flash will be no different than running any other native app that runs with a native abstraction library. ie. Will not use any more battery power than a non-flash equivalent app.
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I doubt that. First of all excesive battery use by means of things like busy waits are grounds for rejection, as are failing to follow the HIG.
Assuming the cross compiling system does not use busy waits and polling as much as flash on other platforms do, then there is no battery life issue unless the programmer has added his only busy wait code, which would be indisputable grounds for rejection.
Regular apps would be a pain to implement with flash, since it would require simulating the standard widgets.
But t
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Not yet a suit, just an investigation. And now, not likely to become one.
I got this in a fortune cookie today: (Score:2)