Flash coming to most smartphones, but not Apple's iPhone - Page 4

Flash already inherently sucks on the mobile platform. There is no way for Adobe to magically take something that does not work well on the desktop and make it work well on phones.

Adobe would essentially have to rewrite flash from the ground up for the mobile platform. I doubt they are investing that much resource towards it.

I think the results of flash does not convince many of us that flash developers are all that great. They are good at making eye candy, but they aren't that great at making anything thats actually useful.

And like I said, I din't even realize that those sites still existed. I said flash was the dominant in the streaming world so if you are streaming, you are probably using flash and therefore the streaming problems could probably be associated with flash. To counter that, you are suggesting Real Player. A couple sites requiring real player doesn't change the fact that most streaming sites require flash, and the fact that real player sucks doesn't change the fact that flash on OSX also sucks.

In another thread, you said you have never owned a Windows PC. If you haven't owned a Windows PC, you can't really compare flash on OSX compared to flash on windows and actually see how bad it is (unless you use a PC at work and have the same surfing habits as at home). The difference between flash on windows and on mac is night and day.

No need to - you just did.

Flash is horribly unoptimized on OS X.

Anywhere from 50-90%+ cpu usage, on an '08 MBP with 4mb RAM, running SL. Was the same crap under Leopard. It's gonna wear out my fan soon.

I don't know why that is, but it's been like that for along time now. And, frankly I don't really care why that is. It sucks. Period. And I can't blame Apple for wanting to stay away from it. It's PC-only optimized garbage code that I want to avoid experiencing. Adobe clearly doesn't give a damn either way, and that's also evidenced by their now bloated, slow, increasingly un-Mac-like software suite.

Actually, I will give Flash one thing, and that's cartoons.

I enjoy the work of the Chapman brothers on Homestar Runner. They use Flash for absolutely everything, aside from stuff like the online merch store. It's a safe bet that if they had to use video to serve up their cartoons, their bandwidth bills would be many times what they are now, and it would be quite a bit more difficult to include the interactivity, such as "easter eggs", that they love to include (unless, perhaps, they used the proprietary! QuickTime format). And animating Strong Bad's capers using, say, CSS animation every week would be a jazzercise in futility. They did have a video podcast at one point, but subsequently discontinued it with only a partial catalog of (non-interactive versions of) their cartoons.

Even though the ease of creating animation in Flash has led to a flood of amateur-quality (and worse) content, and thus a perhaps well-deserved bad reputation for Flash animation in general, there are some seriously good animations out there as well. That's just about the only thing I'd miss about Flash.

Like I and others have said: We have no problems using Flas on our Macs. Maybe you're not using yours correctly.
Most sites offer a choice of either Flash or Real Player. Sometime I will choose Real layer if the Flash choice doesn't work.
BTW- Real Player makes a Mac version - haven't you heard?

Why is there no way? They are already working with ARM to optimize the player.


Why wouldn't they? Mobile computing is THE future of media consumption and EVERY company knows that, including Adobe. If Adobe needed to develop a completely new tool they would, in fact Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Sony, etc etc...will ALL do whatever they have to to be in the mobile world.


You probably don't realize it, but most of the websites you LIKE to visit are created by developers who are ALSO developing flash content for other sites. So the idea that the "flash developer" only knows how to make eye candy is inherently flawed because there are very few people who can actually make a living ONLY developing flash. Most developers create sites that use ALL of the available technologies including flash.

I think you might be having a problem understanding how CTF works. with CTF installed flash is not opened until you click on the flash banner, that's why you tube videos don't open automatically ... as far as full screen goes I don't know why you're having a problem ... works fine for me, same for play and pause.

Flash development tends to attract programmers who didn't have the attention span to learn proper programming practices in college/university or people who want to pretend they know how to do programming so that they can make a bit more money without actually taking the time to actually learn how to do it properly. That's part of the reason why most Flash applications suck so bad.

Really, if people just used Flash for what it's best at -- easily creating simple videos out of mixed media sources and then exporting them to a format which is good for web viewing -- rather than trying to create complex games and other large applications which would be much better if developed in programming languages which were designed for those tasks by people who have proper training in how to structure large applications like that, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Unfortunately, people have just gotten used to a substandard computer experience (ala Windows and bargain basement PCs), and so they don't even notice that Flash apps have horrible usability, non-standard user interfaces, leak memory, cause your computer to bog to a crawl and/or crash your web browser, etc, etc. It just blends in with how everything else looks and feels on their computer. And now, because those people are in the majority, they are demanding the same craptacular experience be replicated everywhere.

I'm sorry if I refuse to accept that experience, and I'm glad Apple hasn't either. I prefer to support proper software craftsmanship, usability, and design. In a world where people are starting to demand better quality food products and better designed, fuel-efficient automobiles, maybe people should also take a look at their computers and demand the same level of quality?

I think perhaps someone needs to launch a technology TV channel which promotes technology quality awareness (via people who are passionate and knowledgeable about it) the same way that FoodTV promotes food quality awareness via chefs who are passionate about good food.

That is one step, I'm essentially saying that everything within the chain of flash content would have to be reworked for it to work on mobile devices. I haven't seen that work being done.



Are you saying you know that Adobe is completely rewriting flash? Along with that flash developers would have to optimize content and video to be playable in the mobile space. I'm essentially saying I don't see all of this being done.

The only company really heavily pushing for industry wide software platform optimized for mobile is Apple.


I cannot say what the people who develop websites I visit do with their time. All I can say is that I cannot see very many examples where I find flash necessary in my everyday web usage.

Yes I looked it up and it can stream flash too, so who knows what you are getting when they give you the option to use real player. I lost interest in Real years ago and have never come across a situation where I've needed it since then.

PS. How could you not use flash correctly? It is a plugin, you install the plugin and you are done. I think the plugin actually comes preinstalled too. Maybe you haven't used flash in conjunction with other CPU intensive activities. It will work fine by itself (most of the time). Unless you are suggesting that doing other CPU intensive activities while watching flash video is using it improperly...

What portion of the internet are you browsing? For the most part, sites use Flash for various types of online games and advertising. Amateur sites and some portfolio pages use Flash for more, such as navigation, but using Flash for navigation or important information is one of the web design industry's biggest no-nos. Maybe I'm browsing a more boring internet (I doubt it) but in having used the iPhone since its initial release, I've only encountered one or two scenarios where Flash prevented me from seeing what I wanted to see, and I worked around it easily enough.

More than a fair trade to keep the advertising off my phone.

And I have as much faith in Adobe to deliver a lean CPU and battery-friendly mobile version of Flash as I do for them to deliver a Mac version that just works. I depend on Adobe programs to do my job, but at the same time, damn this company really struggles to make lean versions of its software. This is wonderful news to me.

If Flash is ever enabled, let it be in a form that allows us to activate Flash content by selecting it only. Or something that gives us that choice.

True. Silverlight does work better. Downside? No linux support. Oh sure, there is Moonlight, but no site ever wants to admit that it works for their content, so it fails.

Look, I like stuff like Homestarrunner.com, and stuff like that can live on in Flash. Video however? No way.

Real player?

I haven't downloaded Real player in years, and have never found a need to use it.

Of course I don't know what Adobe is doing, I don't work there. By the same token neither do you. Just because you haven't "seen that work being done" doesn't mean it isn't. Unless you work at Adobe? I am just stating what I believe is the logical conclusion. Adobe and every other company with a vested interest in mobile content will do whatever it takes to get their content on mobile platforms. If that necessitates a rewrite of any technology than they will do it. But whatever, you don't have to believe me.

As for seeing examples of website where Flash was necessary,...I'm not even going to go there, obviously what is necessary is a completely relative experience.

Why does Apple needs Flash on iPhone when the Tablet is gonna be the ultimate Safari Machine?

I understand how it works, but they can setup special cases, especially for YouTube.

As for click to play/pause I mean clicking the actual video, not the play/pause button.

I only found out about these 'super-cookies' recently and share your opinion on them. If you use FireFox there is an add-on called BetterPrivacy which deletes them. First time I ran the browser with it installed, it deleted 450 of them!

[QUOTE=Xian Zhu Xuande;1493431]For the most part, sites use Flash for various types of online games and advertising.

Actually, the biggest use of flash that I see (outside of banner ads) is in site home page banner/ headers. But in truth there is an enormous amount of flash content out there. If you google almost any recently released movie, console or pc video game or popular musician you will likely find a site built in flash. These types of promotional sites are a staple of the entertainment industry.


It is now possible to deep link and bookmark sites using flash navigation to facilitate SEO.


How do you "work around" viewing a site like the one for Assassins Creed 2? http://assassinscreed.uk.ubi.com/

Maybe you have no interest in such content and that's your prerogative obviously. But that doesn't mean other people don't and I think it's pretty easily assumed that this is popular content for a large demographic of users.



Advertising will be on your phone regardless of flash, it will animate, it will blink and it will not go away. Advertising dollars are the fundamental economic principle facilitating commercial development on the web.

ditto.

In order for Flash to be replaced by a non-propriety solution several things need to happen:
- a powerful and easy to use tool for creating non-Flash content needs to exist
- the resultant content needs to appear the same across browsers

These are both solvable problems, but someone has to be willing to provide the solution.

In many ways the big issue is IE and ironically the only work around I can see at this point is for a plug-in that embeds another HTML rendering engine that support SVG, faster JS and HTLM5 in the frame where the Flash-like content would be.

totally agree. I do see the evolution of Javascript as a possible solution to this however, don't you? It is already ubiquitous, it doesn't require a plug-in and if they can ever get JS2 and someday JS3 out the door it will offer an amazing amount of functionality. Also the proliferation of JS libraries like JQuery, MooTools and Scriptaculous make developing it easier than ever....maybe I'm just dreaming.

Well it exists if ever you need it. Optimized for OS10.4 and is 10.5 compatible. Obviously somebody uses it. Just because you don't I guess you think invalidates it or something?

It would behoove Adobe to be as open as possible about what they are doing with Flash. they depend on their developer community to use flash, and the community will make choices on what platform they will use based on what they feel will offer them the what they want into the near future.

The supporters of HTML/CSS/javascript make no secret of what they are doing with the technology. MS makes no secret of Silverlight. Adobe has to be open about flash. I wager we don't have anymore information is because it does not exist.

Flash is 10 years old and is widely used. Its very difficult (impossible) to effectively turn a ship that large in a different direction, without abandoning the old and bringing something entirely new. MS has been trying to improve Windows in increments and has been having trouble with getting people to adopt the newer versions. Apple got around this problem by completely abandoning its old OS and outdated technology.

If Adobe were doing something radically different with Flash they would say so, because they would need to let developers know.

All of which can be built just as well in HTML 5. It will just take time for these big entertainment companies to adjust their work flows to incorporate people and tools that are geared towards content creation in HTML 5. However, the more people demand it, the quicker it will happen.

You also have to consider that the iPhone dominates the world mobile web usage and is number four web OS behind Linux. Accomplished this without the ability to see flash based splash pages.

You have to ask how important or valuable is it to most people to see such content.

Actually, thats not true. They CAN however be built with HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript. Or at least close enough, which would actually be fine by me, if IE supported all this as well. But then, it doesn't really, so the only way to do this kind of stuff in ALL browsers is flash.

from a flash developer point of view, it does not make any difference if it's on the iphone or not.

Definitely, Java really has a lot of potential and Apple did a great job incorporating it into the iPhone. I would like to see what else Java can do because I am pretty sure that they have barely scratched the surface with it.

Its incredibly valuable, as evidenced by the huge amount of money poured into it every year.

You have to remember that the mobile browser market is in a relative sense, very new and you're talking about current market conditions, not future market conditions.

Mobile web usage, and "smart phone" usage are nothing compared to cell phone usage overall and PC web usage as a whole. Right now Apple is a big fish in a relatively small pond. The size of that pond is going to change and grow ever larger.

Smart Phones will be the norm in the next few years. As processor speeds and battery life increase the demographic for phones will become the same as the entire web user base right now. Those users will be looking for the same types of content on their phones/portable computers that they see on their computers today.

Yeah...they are

The problem with Java however is that it is also plug-in based and proprietary, not to mention that developing it is typically outside of the standard web developers toolkit. At least that's my understanding, I am not entirely familiar with it so correct me if I am wrong.

Java and JavaScript are two different technologies. The former has had about as much presence on the iPhone platform as Flash. I assume you meant the latter.

We are talking about the mobile market. Webkit overwhelmingly dominates mobile web use IE plays no part in what is adopted.

Yes I agree with you totally. Smartphone on the web is new frontier and the groundwork is currently being laid for its future. And is the reason why Apple is pushing HTML/CSS/javascript and is not supporting flash.

Addendum, Windows Mobile 7 will come out and will be adopted by many users, it doesn't use webkit and it will matter. Microsft isn't just going to rollover and play dead, although I'm sure many of of wish they would.

Anyway I'm off to get my flu shot.....interesting conversation however, take care guys.

Smartphones will be the next thing that almost everyone will have. the mobile web market is in a young state like Alk said, but the market will only grow big in a short amount of time, given that there are now well over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users in the three years that the iPhone and the iPod touch have been in the game. Handhelds will definitely be the next wave and Apple will surely be a big contender in that.

That doesn't necessarily mean that Flash will still be popular or widely used at that time. Apple's goal in that respect is to set a precedent, on the mobile side, for using open standards as opposed to Flash, so that by the time smartphones do become the dominant Web-browsing platform, they'll be on the right track and "used to" doing things using those standards. (Naturally, whether it'll pan out like that remains to be seen.)

I agree, I also think the reason Apple is pushing it is because they don't want a free Flash based app store. But Adobe and Microsoft are both pushing incredibly hard for their own proprietary solutions to be in the mobile world as well, and the likely reality is that just as the web is divided today so to will the mobile web be. Which is unfortunate.

it's not the lack of flash that is making the iphone look old, it's what Moto and some of the other Android developers are doing. they are writing software to merge all your work, facebook and other contacts into one stream. Apple can't even write an iphone sync app without checking for duplicates. some of the other functiionality exists as separate apps, but since they are sandboxed they can't run and talk to each other