Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash as unfit for modern era - Page 9

The hardest most costly solution is always better? No pain no gain? Why do you think an app is automatically crappy because it may have been written via compiler? I don't think users give a rat's a-- about the code. All they care about is whether or not what it does is useful, fun, or both, and if it works. The apps "written by hand" in native code from scratch are not immune to breaking. There are a ton of bad reviews for buggy apps on the app store right now, I doubt all of those apps were written via 3rd party compiler. Besides, the phrase "so what" comes to mind. Any company with an investment in a popular money making app will promptly update their product by whatever means (further motivated by an opportunity to sell it again to existing customers maybe throw in a feature or two and call it an upgrade). If they choose not to update their apps, again, so what. The user has the use of the original app until it's broken by an OS change. On average they paid all of a few bucks, vs never having the opportunity to use the app at all because it was excluded in the first place. If the app is on the expensive side, again, more incentive for the developer to update their product if it is selling well. If not enough people are buying it to make it worth keeping it running, again, so what if it dies. Do you think users's feel grateful to Jobs if their favorite app disappears from the store because Jobs chose to yank it at his discretion (as can happen no matter what) vs. it dying away because it was broken by an OS update? What's the difference from the users' point of view?

Frankly, I think you're letting yourself be suckered into buying Jobs' BS on this one. I don't believe this is about managing tightly controlled hardware specs tuned to their OS to maintain an optimal "user experience" as is the legitimate model Apple applies to it's computer business. I don't think it's about protecting the user by keeping them safe from sub-par apps or ensuring they won't break in the future (which can't done, no matter how the code was generated). It's about Jobs proclivity towards exclusion to a degree that goes a bit beyond rationality. It's about competition through trying to force developers to create products exclusive to the Apple mobile platform, betting on Apple as the 800 pound gorilla in the mobile market making developers who can't afford the investment in developing separately for multiple platforms chose Apple. It may be an approach that is better for Apple, but it's not an approach that's better for their customers, or developers who want to support their platform. Ironically in the long run, what is not in the best interest of the latter two is probably not the best for Apple either.

yeah, Steve Jobs didn't mention anything about his $50 AV cable for the iPhone being the ONLY one that works - thanks to his software updates, my $7 cable no longer does, as the software now looks for a CHIP in apples cable before sending video out.
That's a big F-YOU to 3rd party support.

I completely agree and think this is a shot across the bow of Android.

Apple would like developers to choose one or the other. At this point in time they believe most will choose iPhone.

Unity clearly does not think that. They have state that, at best, they are uncertain.

Keyword being 'uncertainty'.

To be clear, you are probably correct in your belief that unity will be allowed, even if it means a exception to the rules. Just that if you are going to argue one way or the other, make sure that what you are stating is actually true.



Again, you are generally correct. Adobe has had access to APIs, as others have, that should have allowed them to build a better Flash. But what Adobe was specifically talking about in this case was access to hardware acceleration for h.264. This is not asking for direct access to the hardware, but for access to an Apple API for hardware acceleration through the NVIDIA GPU for H.264. This was not available for Mac developers until recently, except for apps that were simply Quicktime wrappers.

However, Adobe is being intentionally misleading here, as they make it sound like access to this would magically make Flash better all around. It would not. It would definitely make H.264 playback perform better, but that is part of what Flash offers. Even if access to this API made their H.264 playback as good as possible, it doesn't make the rest of Flash any better. It won't make it less buggy, it won't make Flash crash my browser less and it won't help any video type other than H.264. They are also being disingenuous in overstating the scope of how access to this API will improve the Flash experience for Mac users in general. It will only benefit those Macs with the newer NVIDIA cards, so the majority of Mac users will see absolutely no benefit.

But they were being honest when they claimed that did not have access to this specific API. Now they do and it is up to them to show everyone that can actually make a useable Flash. They won't.

No worries man. I figured there was some sort of mixup

AMusingly enough, look what we see this morning regarding the Slate: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18269

Click the links in my signature.

Click the links in my signature.

You're buying a lie. Try doing research.

Take them shoes off your teeth and stop runnin your mouth -- Lil Wayne

Physics? Really? Guy, you're grabbing at straws. iPhone wouldn't run Flash Lite, it would run Flash 10-10.1 and those are proven to outperform HTML5 implementations and 10.1 is optimized for mobile use.

10 is GPU optimized. 10.1 is even more so. 10 has a 97.0% adoption rate. HTML5 has a 0% adoption rate. If you want to talk betas, consider that HTML5 is just a draft spec. Don't talk about what you don't know.

Yes, physics. Get yourself an education and maybe you'll understand it.

It's very simple. My laptop doesn't get hot when I'm not running Flash. As soon as I run Flash, the computer gets very hot and the fans come on. Ergo, Flash is generating much more heat than the non-Flash activities.

Physics says that the heat can't appear from nowhere. There must be energy used somewhere. The only energy source is the battery. Proof positive that Flash has excess battery consumption.

None of your Adobe shill web sites refute that simple fact. In fact, none of them address battery life at all. So please stop with the lies. Until you can find a way to break the laws of physics, you're wrong.


I'm also curious why it is that you can't even read Adobe's specs? Flash 10.0 is completely incapable of running on iPhone-like devices. Flash 10.1 (even if it ever comes out) requires an 800 MHz A8 - which doesn't exist on any current iPhone. So where do you get that the iPhone would run Flash 10.1?

(Not to mention, of course, that early reports are that 10.1 isn't all that good even on a 1 GHz Snapdragon).


You Adobe shills aren't very good at what they're doing.

@ jragosta,

He's just trolling. Each post filled with more and more lies. He stated that "HTML5 has a 0% adoption rate" when it's the basis of WebOS and in Android and iPhone OS' browser for years now. He also claims that the Cortex-A8 @ 800MHz system that is needed to run Flash 10.1 is more efficient than the ARM11 @ 400MHz system that can stream video just fine. He's obviously invested somehow or paid by Adobe to troll here. I've reported him to the mods.

The only people who are this rabid about supporting Flash are the deluded script kiddies who only know how to do connect-the-dots "development" and insist on calling themselves "programmers".

Fair enough, too.

Well, I do believe that it's going to create some turmoil in "developer land", that much is certain. I have no idea how much. I haven't even tried to estimate it, so your statement that I "underestimate" is basically true by default. I guess we'll find out just how many developers and/or SDK creators pitch a fit like that Adobe employee did. That may be our only measure going forward. The two tools that you mentioned (i.e. MonoTouch and Unity) seem to be OK with it... as far as we know at this point. So perhaps it's much ado about nothing.

With regard to the end user in this case, it seems that the "turmoil" is limited since the precedent of control has been set in the early stages. (Of course, other colorful words have been proposed to describe the closed ecosystem, but "turmoil" is not one of the main ones. The other adjectives are best left to another thread!) And likewise this control will minimize "turmoil" to Apple when they need to move the platform forward. Minimizing turmoil to Apple and the end user seems like something that Apple is historically interested in. As for the developer...

What I have been talking about here, and what Steve means too, is something I learned from experience: starting fresh with a useful third-party API to create an application can be very fruitful. Kind of like a marriage in the beginning. And then the honeymoon ends and the maintenance soon begins. (Back talking only about code, lest I piss someone off...) It's the maintenance that becomes a nightmare, and not just for the developer. I'm talking about the end user, the developer, and Apple too (if enough applications used the third-party SDK). When a whole slew of applications either break or get left behind when platform transitions occur, the end user gets mad. And they blame the developer or Apple. The SDK creator gets a free pass, at least in the public eye. The developer can rant and rave all she wants (begging for an updated SDK) but she is at the mercy of the SDK creator. And if she has millions of lines of source built around that SDK, there is lock-in, and there's not much she can do about it but wait, and wait, and wait some more. Meanwhile, the customers are waiting, many of them angry at everyone except the creator of the SDK (whom they know virtually nothing about... nor do they care). It's a bloody nightmare, and if you've never lived it, then I can see why YOU might underestimate or not even appreciate that.

Also, whereas it may seem like I'm talking about something that *might* occur, it's not like that. As a rule, with any application that depends on a third-party SDK, this maintenance issue will happen eventually. That is especially true now that we are in the middle of a technology shift. Who knows what processor the next iPhone will have? Perhaps it will have a different byte-order, and some of these SDKs will break. (This is only an example. There is always something that trips up an SDK if the underlying change is non-trivial.) With XCode, you will only have to flip a switch to compile for the new processor. If you also use something else, you may have to wait a year. Literally. With pissed customers. And if there is another significant change in the meantime... ugh! ... the configuration management becomes very sticky (for everybody, including the end user who doesn't understand why there are so many complicated versions)!

I agree that Apple is interested in maintaining App market space advantage, by forcing developers to choose. But lest you think that is the only, or even the primary, reason, you should know that they made a similar move to control the development tools for Mac OS X when they introduced XCode and froze out Metrowerks. And this was done as an underdog, where it was decidedly NOT in their interest to wall themselves off if all they desired was business dominance. By the way, in case you go there, in order to accomplish this control all they had to do was stop helping Metrowerks and others. (The Mac OS system APIs are far more rich than the iPhone OS at this point in time.) So they didn't have to introduce this language in the developer's agreements. But I figure they would have if it were necessary to accomplish the goal. We all switched over to XCode in fairly short order, and the transition to Intel went much more smoothly than it otherwise would have. (Sure, the emulator helped, but I'm talking about the development of Universal code.)

My conclusion: yes, Apple is interested in maintaining their App Store advantage. But my experience and evidence is enough to convince me that they would have made this move even if it would not have been immediately beneficial to their market share position. (As with Mac OS X in the past.) Two birds with one stone, here.

Thompson

Well, you put a hell of a lot of words in my mouth right there. I didn't say any of that. Using a third-party API can be very useful at first, and the applications can be great. Then the maintenance starts, and it is always an issue, not just sometimes and not just for Apple or the developer. Please look at my response to backtomac just above.

Then you say some things that are true, and I agree with...


... exactly, and that's where the trouble comes in. What if there is great demand for an updated application, and the developer absolutely wants to sell an update, but the SDK developer in the middle is slow to update the tools that the developer is now reliant upon? Screwed. What if the SDK is finally updated, but in order to maintain continuity across multiple platforms, some of the new capabilities of one particular platform are not exposed to the developer? Then your app starts to become stale and crappy relative to your competition. You might think that these issues give the tool maker sufficient incentive to update their tools, so they can charge the developer again, but that doesn't mean they will be able to do so in a timely fashion. There would essentially be an uncontrollable mechanism smack dab in the middle of the development chain, and in a dynamic environment that is absolutely a serious issue. Show me someone who says otherwise and I'll show you someone that hasn't been there, done that.


Well the difference is a matter of scale. The seemingly arbitrary pulling of apps is bound to be maddening to an affected user. In my mind, there is a valid debate that could be had regarding that.

The difference here is that instead of a relatively small fraction of apps going bye-bye (presumably for a reason, which is debatable on a case-by-case basis) we have potential for a significant number of apps going bye-bye for no good reason at all other than the complicated development chain.


It's clear to me that you haven't lived the development nightmare that I've described above. It's also fairly common behavior that if someone hasn't experienced something firsthand, then they tend to question the value of the lessons learned. Add this to a fairly common opinion of Steve Jobs as a manipulative prick, and *POOF* of course you aren't going to believe him. That's your prerogative.

But that doesn't give you the right to assume ANYTHING about me, least of all that I am a sucker. I don't suck up to Steve Jobs. I'm going by my experience, and it just so happens to match his explanation in this case.


And I believe that BOTH reasons are true. For my reasoning, see my response to "backtomac" above. In particular, I believe that Apple would have made this same move even if they DIDN'T have the market share advantage right now. They've displayed similar behavior before, when they were the underdogs.


I disagree. Given the tectonic shifts that are about to hit, developers and users will be much better off if the development system is streamlined. It looks like there are still going to be useful 3rd party tools out there (backtomac pointed me to MonoTouch).

Thompson

I had a hunch that was going to happen after HP bought Palm and provided their reasoning. It just didn't make sense to me that HP would try to march down two different tablet roads at once. And while a HP/Palm tablet has an uphill battle because it will arrive late to the Apple and Google tablet party, success with Windows 7 in the near term is even more unlikely. So that's the one I figured would get punted.

Thompson

Ah. I see we've entered the tl;dnr portion of our program.

Good post(s).

Probably my fault.

BTW what does tl;dnr mean?

Too long; did not read. IIRC

duplicate post. Damn laggy forum db.

I didn't say you said anything. I offered a sardonic response, while taking your statements to implied possible conclusions in question form inviting clarification (notice the question marks). You offered clarification, thanks.



Lot of "what ifs" there. What if the SDK developer in the middle is quick to offer an update because they want to remain a viable, reputable player on the Apple mobile platform? Not screwed. What if a particular OS update has no impact at all on existing apps? Not screwed. Apple releases regular updates for OSX, I can't remember when it resulted in a broken application that hobbled me. Most applications running on Apple computers, except ones developed by Apple for Macs, are cross-platform. For the most part there is parity between platform versions for major software, but certainly not always. As someone who does 3D work I can tell you there is often great disparity between platform versions of 3D apps. If Apple applied the same rationale to their computers, Macs would disappear for lack of software. Why does it makes sense to ham-string their mobile platform developers using that logic? You run the same risk using a computer (like switching from PPC to Intel) of software usability being substantially lessened or outright broken within a platform as you would with a mobile device. Code, native or compiled, can be broken by any update. With regard to iPhone/iPad if the app is selling will enough, the developer can rewrite it from scratch or should be able to use whatever tool they want to use if it suites their bottom line. It should be their choice. In reality, we're talking about $3 to $5 dollar apps that usually no user will find brings their life to a grinding halt if an update breaks it. If it's worth while for the developer to find a way to fix it, they will, if not, they won't. Same as any app, no matter the code. You could argue that any 3rd party SDK has a very high incentive to stay up to date and release timely fixes to allow their customers to fix their products in turn.



Er, uh, talk about rather arrogant assumptions. You have know idea the nature of what I do for a living or the projects with which I've been involved. I can tell you from experience that I know full well the headaches of broken products due to bugs in authoring apps. However, I'm not going to declare being involved in said process at whatever coding level something to abandon because no authoring ap (or programming language for that matter) is full-proof or guaranteed free of trials and tribulations. Every developer is the one assuming the risks of their capital, and their resources to develop for any platform. They should be allowed to decide what risks they want to take as far as which tools they want to use, not Jobs, unless he is going to get into the app development business to keep his mobile products worth buying. I think Jobs' declaration that he doesn't want to be bothered in any way with considering what he does to his OS and hardware doesn't break apps that are written for it, so he will dictate what tools developers use is too one-sided. He might as well say he doesn't want to be bothered with developing products based on what users want, instead of what he wants them to want. Oh, wait...

If I can't access them with an iPhone or iPad they are irrelevant, your clients message is irrelevant.

Thanks.

Yes I did contribute to that.

In my experience, when a slew of sardonic questions come out in rapid fire, the intent is usually to score points via rhetoric rather than invite clarification. Given that you were actually inviting clarification and that you thanked me for my (clearly valuable) clarification, I can only say "you're welcome".



Yes, there are a lot of "what ifs", and there are a whole bunch more that I left out. The point to realize is that it only takes ONE of these "what ifs" to bite you, as opposed to requiring all of them to happen simultaneously. And as I said earlier, given the pace of technological transition these days (which puts the 1980's computer revolution to shame) each of these "what ifs" have a nontrivial probability of occurring, especially as multiple companies jockey for domination of the huge emerging mobile market.

So here's a thought experiment for you:

Premises:

* The next big technology market is the mobile market, and it is enormous.
* The technological landscape of this market is highly dynamic.
* The bigwigs at Apple have forward strategy meetings on a regular basis.

Conclusions:

* At their regular strategy meetings, the Apple leaders strongly consider "what ifs".
* Because of the dynamics involved, the Apple leaders realize that they must stay nimble.
* The Apple leaders realize that they can't have a third party in their development chain, else their ability to stay nimble is compromised.



You are comparing a relatively steady state situation (in computer OS's) to an unbelievably complicated and competitive one right now (in mobile devices). In the early days such as this, there is always jockeying for position. You can't apply the same rules and expectations.



Apple goes to extreme efforts to ensure that whenever they make a major change that requires recompile of applications, they simultaneously (if not a bit in advance) release a development system that makes it easy on the developer to make the transition. (You just saw it with the developer's release of iPhone OS 4.0) But they can't force a third party to stay in lock step. Time and time again, the third party lags and/or underwhelms. You may be inclined to simply dismiss that argument because I can't offer any better proof than my own experience (and you want to discount it). These are FACTS from a developer's experience. That's what you're not getting.


I already DID argue that in the very message that you are responding to. But for whatever reason (manpower, perhaps?) I am telling you that timeliness is the exception, not the rule. I am speaking from experience here, not idealistic philosophy (as you clearly are).

This is a freaking mobile gold rush, from the very bottom (vendor hardware specs and software operating systems) to the middle (developers doing battle, services doing battle, file formats doing battle, etc) to the top (users looking for best capabilities). Delays due to circumstances beyond your control are harmful right now.


If you are making the analogy to "authoring apps" then you just proved my point. Your level is about 4 layers up from the platform, and by the time the changes propagate up to you, we're a year or two down the road from the fundamental change. In the mobile devices world, things are changing too quickly for that. You won't see 3rd party authoring tools on this platform for a very long time (if ever, since the screen is too small anyway). The "coding levels" that you admit to not "being involved" with are one level above the platform, which is far more relevant to this discussion.

Thompson

I read the Steve Jobs 'Open Letter.'

Outstanding.

He's given his reasons. Adobe and 'Flash' fans may not like them. But that's that. And there is no way Adobe are going to extend their desktop of monopoly onto the 'true' portable revolution that is going to hit them and Microsoft like a Tsunami.

He's offered them an olive branch, such as it is. 'Get back to creating 'creative' tools...and support open standards and you won't get yourself in this sort of mess in the future. Or get off your lazy ass and create lean, innovative programs.' Their design and programming model are going to have to change as the enter the 3rd Great Age or they will die. Or certainly be significantly diminished as a force. Adobe, a 'creative software' company who think they are a 'standards company'. They've lost sight of who they are because they spent a few billion on a company to take out all competition. Now their ten year complacency ride on the desktop is coming to an end (just like Microsoft...) as we enter a new age where 'monopolies' in one area don't guarantee success in another area. Create and innovate. Apple are. Apple nailed the 'eco system' and the rest of their competitors to the cross. In Adobe's case? Upside down on that cross. In short, they've had it coming for a long, long time. For ten years we've had to put up with their laggardly, grudging support, lack of feature parity and the shabby treatment of Mac users as 2nd class citizens and charging us exorbitant prices for that privilege of being Adobe customers and insulting us with 'Windows' interfaces with buggy ports. And to add insult to injury, the shoddy port of flash to the Mac. Buggy, insecure crash bait...with crap video quality...a complete cpu hog running on ancient tech'. Jobs must be rubbing his hands that his competitors are rushing to implement flash on their ultra portable devices. See how they'll do in battery comparison tests... And even if Flash gets GPU support for video, I doubt that acceleration will work across the board...

I'm looking forward to what Apple do next. 10.7 is going to be...very intriguing. I'm guessing a U.I makeover and some more 'killer' features. The candy floss will return. I suspect a '7 inch' iPad possibly at some point. Maybe even a hybrid 15 inch iPad/iMac touch crossover. Signalling a future without the traditional 1984 desktop metaphor..?

Apple are well placed.

Applauds Job's 2nd Era at Apple. A masterclass in execution of products and the competition.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Seems to me that Flash is about doomed. H.264 has been on the rise, while Flash has been declining, according to Encoding.com. There's a whole chart about it here

Flash is far from doomed and has many, many years ahead of it as the de facto method for interactive animated content. . It's been pushing H.264 video for quite awhile now.

What is on the way out is Flash being the ideal way to push H.264 video across the web. On the desktop, it will take awhile for the majority of browsers in use to accommodate the HTML5 video tag so Flash as a fallback option will still be an option well after it's not the most commonly used option, something that may happen sooner than people think considering the growth of devices running mobile OSes over growth of devices using desktop OSes.

Taking out the competition and creating a 'creative' monopoly..?

If the current price hikes and glacial feature innovation are anything to go by then Adobe is indeed a monopoly.

The fate of 'Freehand' is an interesting story in the context of Adobe's public bleating.

Lemon Bon Bon.