Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash as unfit for modern era - Page 7

Yeah, and isn't Apple's own Final Cut still Carbon?

Steve articulated very well why Apple needs to become the sole provider of the SDKs (i.e. the development tools) for the iPhone platform (and OS X too, for that matter). I gave a particular example of it. If that's not enough to sink in, then I don't know what will.

That's all I'll say on this aspect of the topic.

Thompson

Did you actually read the link you supplied. I tried but I didn't see anyone that was actually ever a Mac developer. Well there was one who was upset that his 3-day effort was turned down. Most weren't even developers, were PCrs, didn't have the hardware necessary to even start or just plain ignorant of what was involved or required.

And do-it-yourself home gardens fall short of the mass production of today's chemically altered farms, but that doesn't mean that a few of us still like to do things the old fashioned way and grow our own fresh produce. If it works, don't fix it. Just because something is "NEW" or "POPULAR" doesn't make it right for everyone.

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting." E.E. Cummings

Steve Jobs talking about "Open Standards" is just a load of rhetoric. Neither Apple nor Adobe is an "open" company, but both have elements of an open platform in their closed business model - Adobe in the fact that it's not platform specific, and there's no "big brother" watching what you do with their product a la Apple, while Apple supports a few open standards (but not in the realm of Audio. In that area, they only support their own proprietary format + mp3s.)

Incidentally, Flash isn't competing with HTML5, since that's just a markup language. It's actually competing with h264. But, since that's an "old" codec, Steve is highlighting HTML5, since that's the "future", at least that's what he wants us to believe. I remember when XHTML2.0 was the future?

By denying Flash, Apple is eliminating the possibility of people writing apps in flash, and then porting them to both the iPhone and Android. Jobs knows that the strongest selling point of the iPhone is the app store, and he wants to protect it's exclusivity. Instead, he strategically makes it more difficult to write for both platforms at the same time.

I think the real kicker in Steve's essay is that he's implying the PC era is in the past, while the mobile era is the future... I guess that's why Apple has been shafting the professional end of the market with slow and toned down MacbookPro and MacPro updates... Slowly fazing out of computers and putting the emphasis on consumer electronics, I guess...

While on the other hand, this is factual prose? Seriously?

Almost everything you say here is either wrong or wildly exaggerated and you are taking Steve Jobs to task for his "rhetoric"???? Yikes!

He's made no secret of where he thinks the market is going, both before and after he rejoined Apple. It is, after all, Apple inc. now and instead of Apple Computers.

Yeah, have you ever heard of Now Playing? Pocket Flicks?

The developer is Metasyntactic. He posted numerous times in the thread.

Shamyl Zakariya, Brad Oliver, fitten, Ian Wood are all developers as well (or claim to be and I have no reason to believe otherwise).

Did you read the thread?

"Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open"

If you accept Steve's word as the gospel then fine.

I think there is room for other reasonable opinions on this matter.

I think everything you stated is incorrect.

• Mp3 isn't open
• You didn't mention AAC, WAV, WMA or AIFF that are in iTunes and not owned by Apple. Only ALAC is.
• H.264 is not "old" is the best codec available and still ramping up in usage
• Flash isn't competing with H.264 because Flash also can use H.264. Flash for video is competing with HTML5's video tag.
• Apple isn't denying Flash as noted by Macs being shipped with Flash and even creating an API that seems specifically geared for Adobe to make use of with H.264 decoding in Flash v10.1
• Apple is also not allowing Flash apps turned iPhone app using CS5, which does make these Flash apps and therefore does make Apple money so the App Store strangelhold argument doesn't make sense.
• Apple has created JS frameworks to make webpages look and feel like an iPhone app so, again, the argument that it's all about the App Store strangelhold argument doesn't make sense.
• Writing for both platforms has never worked out and Jobs arguments against it are mirrored by the many comments stated well before this letter.
• Because one arm of a business is more sucessful does not mean that the other arms are being cut off. Mac sales are at an all time high and Apple has made many innovations to make the Mac the best choice for my needs.
• Even the idea that Macs are being fazed out is beyond silly when Apple reportedly makes more profit from PC sales than any other PC vendor by far.

How about because Adobe and most of the rest of the tech world has been criticizing Apple with no reply or defense (until now)?

I might be a bit late to the party in this thread, but allow me to succinctly summarize this love letter to Adobe:

Steve: "Flash, not so magical."

Where did he say Apple is an open company. He said he wants the internet to be open.


Flash isn't competing with H.264, Flash uses H.264. Flash is competing with HTML5, which also uses H.264.

How do you figure H.264 is old, its only been in wide use for the past five years or so.


He clearly explained why he did not like cross platform ports. It had nothing to do with protecting App Store dominance. Apple has done nothing to stop developers from developing apps for both iPhone and Android.


Sales of mobile devices dwarf sales of PC's. When a new market is growing and an old market is shrinking. You generally would say the new market is the future.

Can someone please tell Stevie that h.264 is just as proprietary as flash?

"nearly as well"

Weak!

Oops, couldn't pass up a response on this one...


As I said, I have lived it through experience with third party development tools (CodeWarrior) getting in the way of smooth platform transitions. I'm not blindly accepting anything, especially as gospel. Now you are just being snarky.


You have yet to demonstrate that you even understand the actual issue with third party SDKs and how paralyzing they can be to platform momentum. So your opinion is of questionable authority.

Thompson

You make it sound like the everyone's position was formed because of this letter when the Steve's comments are just reinforcing what most of us have been saying about Flash since 2007.

Currently release date appears to be June, so it is most likely already being produced in advance of release. I'd say it is out of the prototype phase. Specs have been previously leaked from a presentation HP gave internally.

http://www.devicemag.com/2010/04/06/...e-date-leaked/

I never said it could be used in a present tense, I was just trying to correct your statement about it's expected battery life. Given that a lot of devices seem to give 80% of the rated lifetime, that would mean 4-5 hours.



How are MBPs not "mobile"? The laptop market has been exploding for a few years now, the notebook market has been slowing down, smartphone sales continue to climb, the iPad and a bunch of other new tablet devices are all out this year. I don't see how anyone could not agree that we're moving toward more mobility in our computing.



Only 2007? Flash has been awful for a lot longer than that Directly related to the iPhone sure 2007 works.

I would like everyone to read Adobe's CEO response to this:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/...ith-adobe-ceo/

While Steve is confident in his company, this guy just sounds arrogant. There is a difference.

In regards to it being a resource hog and crash prone, sure, but I was focusing on why it shouldn't be on a pocketable ARM-based device with very limited performance and battery life, which seems to be the focus on Steve's letter.

What if Adobe rewrote Flash to use hardware acceleration, doubled the battery life and added touch support. Would Apple approve of Flash then?

In all of that, there is no indication of a mass migration to other platforms. You want to play hardball, why the hell should anybody have to use softball rules just because you can't run the extra distance between bases.

Zero hope for some people.

Spell reality out in black and white and they still prefer to believe tosh.

I've had ClickToFlash installed for quite a while now, and I see that most of the time the only thing I seem to be missing are the numerous ads on the majority of sites.

As to the Adobe CEO's response, I find some of his comments disingenuous - finding Job's comments "amusing" and not really addressing Steve's comments. How, exactly, is Flash not closed? I have to buy a program for hundreds of dollars from Adobe to work with it. I can use any text editor for HTML. Remember we are discussing issues/languages with the web.

This was my favorite comment:


I'd like to hear him explain the logic behind that reply

Nice straw man.

Do you remember what I said in post 178?

Let me refresh your memory: ":Now developers aren't vowing to leave in mass but its pretty obvious that there's a lot of discomfort associated with the new SDK agreement."

The discomfort and ill feelings that the new SDK agreement is real. It may amount to nothing. But it is unnecessary, IMO. It doesn't ensure that iPhone apps are 'good'. It only makes it difficult for developers to port apps to other platforms and takes a tools away from them.

I think most of the "discomfort" is with developers who planned to avoid developing in Objective-C. They're uncomfortable because their plans to ride the iPhone gravy train are in confusion.

I've no gripe with keeping Flash off the iPhone.

I simply contend that the new SDK agreement, limiting the way apps are developed, is wrong. Some tools which are used to develop good iPhone apps are excluded which may lead to some good apps being rejected.

As far as I'm concerned, if a ship date hasn't been at least publicly confirmed, then it's still in the realm of "speculation" and "could be". Heck, even your first paragraph above was caveated with "appears to be", "most likely", and "I'd say". These qualitative assertions of probability may be good enough for YOU, but I've seen too many slipping ship dates in the tech world - not to mention unexpected plug pulls - to put much credence in this kind of data. FWIW, I'm similarly skeptical of "leaks", "rumors", and "specs" related to unannounced Apple products as well. That even includes the Gizmodo "iPhone prototype"... although I must confess that the circumstances surrounding that particular story are far more compelling than your standard Apple scoop. :-)

Bottom line: whatever scarce info you can currently point to about the HP Slate doesn't really go very far in terms of proving the point that I was responding to, namely that Flash works just fine on the HP Slate without draining its battery. We really don't know that. There are plenty of existing devices that we can test on though. So why bother appealing to a "leak"?

Thompson

The reasons for not requiring devs to use Xcode makes sense. Apple has been done this road before and has lost considerably because of it. While it short term it may seem bad the long term is good for consumers.

With a device that doesn't exist you can make whatever claim you like and no one can refute it.

This is a really poorly written title.

The letter published by Steve Jobs looked fine to me. He laid out some decent arguments for not using flash.

I did not see him "slam: Adobe.

Maybe you should publish this article under a different title?

JDS

I am a web designer, emphasis on "designer" not programmer. I have used Flash, but not any more. it is a pain to keep up with the Flash Player changes and support people on older computers that don't have the latest Flash Player and/or can't even run it. I have been hired many times to convert Flash websites to html/CSS sites (and well before this all came to a head, before the iPhone was even released) This is because Flash embedded content cannot be searched by search engines and all of my clients want good SEO results.

The little bit of Flash I had left in my sites that were videos and slideshows have all been replaced using Javascript and html5, my video is either embedded YouTube or html5 with a Flash fallback for browsers not ready for html5.

It took a little time, but it was pretty painless and I don't have to mess with the Flash Player which I think is complete junk, ALWAYS have hated it and now I am pretty much free of it!! (BTW I still use the Flash program for animation but export as a .mov file not a .swf file) So, if I can do it and I am not even a programmer, it can't be that hard to switch if needed. All of the big media sites have and I am sure this trend will continue. It is not going to take five years for html5 to catch on as some people say, Microsoft even said they will support it, so it will be faster than you think.

My clients don't care what technology I use to make their sites, they want them to work period. They want them to work with SEO techniques AND on the iPad et all. Html5 and javascript (which BTW, works already in current html standards) addresses both issues with no problem, the ONLY thing that IS a problem IS FLASH. Well, not on my websites, not any more.

And I do agree it is Adobe's Flash that is proprietary! How can it not be? I have heard there are other programs to make Flash files, but I personally don't know what they are (at least not for the Mac platform) or how well they run. How much is the upgrade for the current CS5??? Quite a bit, and they put more Flash into Indesign of all things! No thanks, I just finally started using CS4, not going to pay any more right now thank you very much.

Damn right Steve.

Frankly, I don't give a shit about flash one way or the other, I just want functional, streamlined and less crash happy versions of the Creative Suite. I know we are all upset about having to switch over video players, but come on Adobe! Use your head!

Throw a great and intuitive HTML5 building section into dreamweaver OR 'flash' and market the shit outta it. The 'improvements' in photoshop, indesign and illustrator have been so modest over the last three iterations that you MUST have some time on your hands. Speaking of which, why not give me full 64 bit support across the line while you are at it? Turns out that InDesign slows down a bit when you have a 100+ page document, text formatting STILL can't be simply copied and pasted from Illustrator to InDesign, etc. There is SO MUCH WORK to be done on your flagship products, so its not like there's nothing for you to do when flash exits the picture. Don't worry, you won't be bored! Thanks Adoples!

What I do understand is that fine iPhone apps will no longer be in compliance with Apple's SDK.

Then they may not exist on the iPhone platform.

But I guess we can count on you to write new ones to replace them. Right?

After all you're rilly, rilly knowledgeable and your 'opinion' is the one that matters most. Right?

I'm not a fan. It sucks. It just sucks less than anything else out there, including your attempt at posting flame bait.

my iphone gets horrible battery life. Whatever you're attempting to imply, it's failing.

According to Adobe's CEO, about 100 out of 200,000. You are being overly dramatic.


If they really are that good, they'll be back. The AppStore is the biggest game in town. Now you are being naive.


If the apps are really that good, then there is a market for them, and the developer will rewrite them using the Apple supported SDK. Because it really is that simple to use. Suggesting that I write them is just you being snarky again.


More than YOURS, apparently. You still aren't speaking from any knowledge. Look at the three first sentences I responded to:

(1) overly dramatic
(2) naive
(3) snarky

When you really want to score in this debate, bring your "A" game.

Thompson