As the story of flash on Apple devices has been developing many people have posted ideas, thoughts, flames and other stuff around the web on this topic.
Robert Scoble, happens to be a neighbor and a friend of mine and he waded into this pool with his Can Flash be saved? post as well as a few tweets yesterday afternoon. Being a member of the Flash community and a web developer I gave him a call to see if we could get together and talk about the current state of Flash and what it is used for beyond video and ads. We covered a lot of ground in both our thoughts of where flash is and what needs to change with the platform to answer some of the complaints out there about it.
Robert followed up with another post stating Google +will+ save Flash, a developer who uses it says I think its beyond just Google saving flash, I personally don’t think flash needs saving as its not loosing anywhere except in the walled garden of Apple’s narrow mobile world. Flash is used on all kinds of things and its the closest thing we have to a universal runtime. Yes, Flash isn’t perfect, and yes we are all hoping Flash 10.1 will fix these issues.
John Nack, Photoshop’s Senior Product Manager wrote a very balanced and objective blog post about flash “Sympathy For The Devil” which I encourage anyone who is going to post an Anti-Flash or Anti-Adobe comment to read first.
Adobe knows about the issues with Flash, I believe they are working very hard to fix them. The demos of Flash 10.1 on some of the devices are very impressive check it out here. I hope in 3-6 months time the story will be, Adobe listened to the community, fixed up the Flash player and is on the Palm Pre, all the Android phones and is about to come out on Symbian and RIM. Flash Player 10.1 in the beta has shown significant performance increases on the Mac and the PC so I think that issue will be solved as well.
Wired.com, who in my mind is one of the worst offenders with bad flash banner ads wrote up a very disturbing article yesterday quoting Steve jobs:
They [Adobe] are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Jobs neglects to mention that Apple had planned on releasing a 64-bit version of Carbon, only to cancel it and only provide 64-bit API’s in Cocoa . This is why Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 for Mac is only available in 32-bit. If Apple had not been lazy on Carbon and provided a 64-bit version, the 64 Bit versions of Creative Suite would have parity with their PC counter parts. Hopefully this will be fixed for the next version of Creative Suite, which has had to be re-written in Cocoa. Apple does this all the time. They change the way things are done, then force the rest of the Technology Industry to do double the work to make things work on their platform. Its sad that Adobe gets all the heat and the blame for Apple’s actions.
I like most web developers hate doing double or triple work to satisfy all of our customers. If we have to support HTML5 which is only available in webkit browsers that only are really a standard on mobile we end up doing double work for a small group of users of our sites. In fact webkit isn’t even a standard at all across mobile platforms! – Please see QuirksBlog showing that there is No webkit on Mobile Peter-Paul Koch, tested 19 different versions of webkits on many of the mobile phones, each one supported things differently! If your trying to do HTML5 how can you guarantee that it will work even just on the webkit version that your targeting? Flash is still a solution to this problem, you write it to target a specific version of the player, and it works. There is only a few versions of the player and they are backwards compatible, this is much easier right now than trying to do something with HTML5. HTML5 will be here in the future, but I don’t think its going to be the killer of flash that everyone is claiming. How many people are still using JPG’s and Gif’s on their sites instead of PNGs? its picking the right tool for the job with the broadest amount of support. This is how the world out of the reality distortion field works.
I want flash on my iPhone so I don’t have to worry about a site not working 100% for me, if a developer has not taken the time to build a lesser featured non-flash version of the site or did not want to loose the revenue that flash ads provide, then I don’t want to be prevented from using it because Apple doesn’t believe in Flash. Flash is not going to stop being part of the web, as long as we have more than 1 browser, Flash will be needed.
Take a listen to our conversation, the speculation of what Adobe is going to release in February is my own and is not inside knowledge. I do not know what exactly Adobe’s mobile plans are but these are educated guesses based on industry experience and the knowledge that if Adobe doesn’t do something soon about Flash on mobile and on the Mac it will be in a tougher spot than it is now.
For you folks without flash here is a direct link to the mp3 from cinch http://www.cinchcast.com/scobleizer/20299.mp3
I AM NOT AN ADOBE EMPLOYEE THESE THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ARE MY OWN.
January 31st, 2010 4:49 pm
Reading Robert’s “Can Flash be saved?” really struck me yesterday and not exactly positively. In regard to HTML5 being able to replace Flash Platform for even the easy stuff like a comprehensive video or audio player, this is not the case. Videos on YouTube and Vimeo that currently offer HTML5 video playback (which is absolutely great) deploy H.264 codec licenced by Apple, Google and Vimeo, but not Mozilla who is principally against using it. Given that we’re discussing around 25% of users who’s browser provider has an idea of Ogg’s open source codec instead. And that in respect to Open Standards is most reasonable. Plus, with IE’s ongoing dominance we’ve got some max 10% users capable of HTML5 on WebKit-based browsers. That pretty much puts an end to the hype.
All in all, Flash blackout on Apple’s devices have nothing to do with technology. Think of it reasonably, if Safari was loaded with casual game bookmarks, it would play itself out severely on App Store sales. 75% of casual games on the web are estimated to be based on Flash.
+ take a look at the poll: Do you prefer HTML5 or Flash on YouTube/Vimeo? http://twtpoll.com/rsuakk
January 31st, 2010 5:06 pm
When the Google Nexus One is released, the iPhone with its closed, locked down experience, is going to be looking very unappealing for so many users.
When companies like Lenovo and Asus start releasing their tablet netbooks, which will of course be Flash 10.1-compatible, the iPad with its lack of features and its locked-down architecture is going to look like a pathetic toy in comparison.
So no, it doesn’t need saving.
http://www.joeflash.ca/blog/2010/01/does-flash-need-saving-nahh.html
January 31st, 2010 5:19 pm
“Jobs neglects to mention that Apple had planned on releasing a 64-bit version of Carbon, only to cancel it and only provide 64-bit API’s in Cocoa”
Why is Adobe still doing its apps in Carbon? Apple has been phasing Carbon for a while now. Adobe didn’t see the writing on the wall with that and continued to do its apps with Carbon when clearly the best thing to do was a full rewrite in Cocoa. This is what irritates Mac users about Adobe a failure to truly adopt the Mac platform in the way that we like. That may be an arrogant attitude but the failure to do so is part of the reason why Apple is not putting Flash on the iPhone.
January 31st, 2010 6:09 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by lkilpatrick: New Blog post : http://bit.ly/94eUTb – About my talk with @scobleizer and thoughts on Flash, Apple and HTML5…
January 31st, 2010 8:22 pm
Adobe built CS3 and CS4 in Carbon, which were released in April 2007 and October 2008 respectively. It is doing a major push to bring the CS5 suite to Cocoa. However keep in mind anytime you are forced to re-write in a new API to maintain current functionality you can not add any cool new features that make it worth upgrading. Adobe has always truly adopted the Mac platform, it just has limited resources to change applications that so many people build there career’s on. If you can add feature x, y and z which will result in sales or do a whole bunch of work that the user will really never see or notice guess where the resources go?
Flash on the iPhone is a completely different argument, Flash is a content and application delivery system. Flash is used to display a large amount of content on the web. I personally would like to see that content on my iPhone.
February 1st, 2010 11:48 am
What conversation am I supposed to be listening to? Is there a link to an audio file somewhere?
February 1st, 2010 11:57 am
Here is a link to the audio file http://www.cinchcast.com/scobleizer/20299.mp3 sorry cinch doesn’t put it in its embed code.
February 1st, 2010 12:34 pm
I am unconditionally looking to purchase the Apple iPad, and I am enjoyed to see what kinds of games and apps will be programmed for it. I just don’t understand some of the nitpicky criticisms in this website. Size of the bezel?? OMG!
February 1st, 2010 2:15 pm
Most people are not complaining about the hardware or the rest of it. Most people that are visiting this site might be interested in buying the iPad, but they want Flash supported so they can see the whole internet. Many people including myself may buy the iPad even though it doesn’t have Flash. I just would prefer that it did.
February 5th, 2010 6:47 pm
This was really a great conversation regarding Flash and how Apple views the technology. At the end of the day those of us that use Flash just want everyone to be able to experience our work. When a company decides to lock out it’s users from experiencing a certain type of technology it tends to raise flags. I also like where Google and Android are headed. I think Google selecting XDA as their development team was a great choice and they’re making great progress with the Android platform. I feel theirs a future with Flash may not be on an iPhone or iPad but theirs a future for it.
May 22nd, 2010 12:53 am
Reading Robert’s “Can Flash be saved?” really struck me yesterday and not exactly positively. In regard to HTML5 being able to replace Flash Platform for even the easy stuff like a comprehensive video or audio player, this is not the case. Videos on YouTube and Vimeo that currently offer HTML5 video playback (which is absolutely great) deploy H.264 codec licenced by Apple, Google and Vimeo, but not Mozilla who is principally against using it. Given that we’re discussing around 25% of users who’s browser provider has an idea of Ogg’s open source codec instead. And that in respect to Open Standards is most reasonable. Plus, with IE’s ongoing dominance we’ve got some max 10% users capable of HTML5 on WebKit-based browsers. That pretty much puts an end to the hype.
All in all, Flash blackout on Apple’s devices have nothing to do with technology. Think of it reasonably, if Safari was loaded with casual game bookmarks, it would play itself out severely on App Store sales. 75% of casual games on the web are estimated to be based on Flash.
+ take a look at the poll: Do you prefer HTML5 or Flash on YouTube/Vimeo? http://twtpoll.com/rsuakk