iWantFlash!

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.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/#ixzz0eEN6Mujt

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.

When you sign a petition you are saying you support what the petition is about.  Some signers obviously don’t, so I don’t understand why they would put their signature on it.

Some of the comments are as follows:

So much for your on line petition. All positive comments eh?
That’s because you choose to remove any comments you deem anti flash. Put my previous comment back up. Show some guts.
Btw sent from my iPhone – one of 30 million sold worldwide. So far you have 336 signatures.  Doesn’t compute does it lol

Have you seen how Flash 10.1 is different than what you have used before? Check out somethings from the open screen project at http://www.openscreenproject.com not everything built with flash sucks. I have been on teams that have developed business applications with it as well as games that give an experience different than anything else on the web. Please check out http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/mobile_demos_fp10.1.html to see everything flash is already running on.

Others have written:

There will never be Flash on the iPad or iPhone.

Thank goodness.

Flash would destroy the app store ecosystem, which would ultimately be bad for developers (can’t make money selling apps), bad for consumers (if developers can’t make money, they stop making great apps), and bad for the platform (apps become junk made by 14 year olds and spammers, constantly crashing your device).

Apple made the right call, for the right reasons. I’m a Flash designer/developer, and I don’t regret for one second Apple’s decision.

I have worked as a Flash designer and developer and I made lots of money doing so. There is a very large community of professional flash and flex developers that make excellent livings building amazing applications. With Air Adobe has created a platform that lets you role your own web apps then charge for them.  You must have missed http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/services/ the Apple App store is not the only game in town to make money from. Since flash is a more mature platform than the iPhone it doesn’t take much to know that developers have made more money building flash applications and products over the past years than all the developers that have been building iPhone apps. With Flash you can achieve the build once, run anywhere dream that developers have had since the second computer operating system was built.

Why do you not even want the option to turn it off? Do you like companies telling you what you can and can’t run on the hardware you own? I personally think I should be in control of what goes on my hardware rather than the manufacture. If you drive a car and want to ad a different set of tires to it, do you have to ask permission from Toyota or GM? Why should you not be able to make your own choices?

I remove the negative signatures as they do not support the petition and are basically just spam. I will allow through some of the negative comments on the postings that make well reasoned arguments. Saying “HTML 5, Javascript and CSS 3 rule and Flash is dead LOL” is not going to be posted because it adds nothing to the discussion.

HTML5 is years away in standardization and support. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and most likely 9 will not support it, and unfortunately this is what over 60% of the web and almost all of the corporations  use. As developers we all hate Internet Explorer but Flash is the only way around it to build the rich experiences the web has to offer. Why would you want to have to develop your project in HTML5 for Safari and Chrome which have combined less than 10% of the market and then in Flash to support all of the rest of the browsers? I’m a developer, and I hate doing double work to support IE and the others in their different interpretations of  CSS2 why would I expect CSS3, HTML5 and each browsers implementation of Javascript to be the same? HTML5 just sounds like a ton more work in the future rather than what can be done with flash today.

I hope HTML5 succeeds, I really do, and guess who will make the tools to build for it? Adobe. Adobe is a tools company, the flash player is just a means to an end, the more flash content is out there that can be used to day the more tools they will sell to build it. Do you not think that if HTML5 becomes available in a big way Adobe wouldn’t support it in its tooling? HTML5 and Flash are not the same, if you think this you really do not know all of what flash can do.

The site has been live for less than 24 hours and only has been promoted by about 30 tweets, 300+ signatures in a few hours is nothing to be upset about. I am sure over the next few days their will be more.

I like my iPhone and I may get a iPad, but I have moved to palms webOS platform so that I can develop for the phone I use the most. Palms hardware is much more user controlable than any of apples mobile hardware at the moment and by the end of February it will be running flash. If Adobe can get flash running well without hurtting the battery life on the Pre which is almost the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS then the road block is Apple. All of these companies have joined the openscreen project to bring flash to their devices, only one big player is missing. http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/current_partners.html If Google, RIM, and Palm are all going to have flash on their products soon why shouldn’t Apple give us the choice?

If you don’t believe in what the petiton is for, don’t sign it. I care about intent more than numbers.

I AM NOT AN ADOBE EMPLOYEE AND THESE THOUGHTS ARE MY OWN.

Luke Kilpatrick
iWantFlash.com

There has been many others posting about not having flash on their iPhones, iPod Touch’s and that they are not interested in the iPad because of it. Here are some of the best.

• Lee Brimlow – The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?
• Antonio Holguin – Links from around the web - Great site may NSFW in some cases
• Liz Fredrick – I <3 Apple but some apples are rotten.
• Flash Platform Blog – iPad a Broken link
• Doc Searls Weblog – Up the creek without an iPaddle

If I missed a good one post it in the comments and I will add it.

Welcome,

This site will be about 1 main thing, getting Flash on to the technology that we love. I have been a user of the iPhone and the iPod Touch for many years and nothing bugs me more than hitting a site with a live video stream or some other flash item and getting the white box of doom telling me flash is not available for my browser. THIS MUST STOP!

There are really only 2 solutions to this problem:

1 – Get the 2+ million flash developers, the fortune 500 companies and the rest of the internet to stop using a technology that makes it easy for content providers to get animation, video, games, business interfaces and the 1000′s of different other uses people find for flash to just stop using it. Since over 94.7% of users of the web are in this group I don’t see it changing.

2 -  Apple, that does not allow flash on its devices, but claims to build things that “let you see web pages as they were meant to be seen” to do the whole web a favor and allow Flash to be run in the browser so we can see the web as the designer and developer of the content really meant for you to see it.

I don’t know about you, but I think option 2 is going to be much easier to make happen.

To do this we will blog, video, sign petitions and do what ever we can to have Apple and other companies that are not members of the Open Screen Project to put flash on their devices so we can see the web as it was meant to be seen.