Adobe CEO dismisses Steve Jobs' comments on Flash as a 'smokescreen' - Page 2

i couldn't agree more...he sounds exactly like a website troll

bye bye flash
bye bye narayen

Like the way the Mac OS Finder needs hardware acceleration to resize windows?

No, he was responding to SJ's original assertion that if they had allowed Flash on the iPad the battery would have gone from 10 hours to about 1.5 hours.

I think Adobe doesn't take into account UI integrity. They could care less that 20 Adobe cross-platform apps across multiple platforms all have different UI guidelines, none of them adhering to Apple's HIG.

Why would I not care about that?

In one app I could get a Windows UI; Amiga in yet another; BeOS in another, and so on. The only common thread would be the Flash runtime on the iPhone. In fact, you could eschew the App Store altogether; all one would need is one Flash app to run thousands of apps not available on the App Store. Even though Apple claims technology, that right there is an indisputable claim to protect the bottom line. (Doesn't every business? People seem to think that Apple should be "nice" first, profitable second.)

Actually, he failed to provide a rational response to ANY of Steve's comments. His only response boils down to 'Liar, liar, pants on fire" and "Neener, Neener".

I would have expected a lot more from someone in his position.

Flash doesn't only crash Safari, but also Firefox on Linux. Almost every crash related to Firefox is due to Flash. You can see this by running dmesg command:

npviewer.bin[30480] general protection ip:123257c sp:bfce3840 error:0 in libflashplayer.so[ec0000+994000]

Flash is a bloated pile of crap and riddled with buffer overflows and insecure coding.

Does this guy realized what happen the last time Jobs put out open letter to the world, it killed DRM on music.

Flash isn't a core part of the OS. Thanks

As a long-time fan of Apple technology and a lone developer, I can see some merit to both sides' arguments about developer tools and platforms here.

I fully support Apple's decision not to deploy Flash Player on its mobile platforms for all the good reasons cited by Steve Jobs and arm-waved by Adobe's CEO.

And I fully support Adobe's contention that cross-platform tools will often be seen as a preferable alternative to proprietary development environments and languages. Small developers can't afford to program in multiple tools and environments unless they manage to create a blockbuster best-seller. The member above who snidely remarked that Apple developer tools are just $99 conveniently overlooks the fact that the cost of the tool is a minor noise issue compared to the time cost of running and learning multiple development environments.

The Web is the future. Proprietary apps -- even for Apple's iThings -- will always have a place but that place will shrink in coming years. On the Web, HTML5 and its supporting cast are destined to emerge as the winner over proprietary technologies like Flash. Adobe should focus on building great tools to support the new Web standards rather than defending an outmoded technology.

100 applications.

Wow! I'm impressed.

Aren't you guys impressed?

As a rule, I stay away from Flash sites. I don't care whether Flash crashes or not. Too many sites are poorly designed by wannabe developers. Even if Flash were in the iPhone OS, I would avoid it.

This may have already been said but, at first glance the two most important complaints of Adobe's Flash is it is not modern and a resource hog...

...but I see it as Jobs has spent his life 'corralling' incompetant programmers from producing substandard software, apps, interfaces, etc.

All one has to do and pickup any camera, smart phone, cable box, digital picture frame, flat screen TV, stand alone GPS unit or any electronic device not made by Apple and 'navigate' through their crappy, clunky and clumsy SW. It's Sh*te.

Stevo does not want his Apple platform infected with inferior code! Simple as that!

Wow this is insane!!

Also, Narayen is spelled Narayan in the second paragraph. :P

The real test is when Flash is released for Android. That will be the first major mobile OS to run the full featured Flash implementation. Symbian may have had it too, but I am not sure and haven't seen any metrics on how it works. If Flash runs fine and doesn't cause issues on Android, Apple has some explaining to do. If it does crash and cause issues, Adobe has some explaining to do.

Some of the comments on here astound me.

Adobe is the scourge of the internet. Wake up.

Hi, Solipsism, love you love your posts, listen I'm a first-time poster, long-time reader, and I was just wondering, when dude claims Adobe to be "open" does that mean any of us can obtain the source code and fuck with it?

Because if not, then it would seem to me that its actually "proprietary", which would mean their CEO Tekstud is a liar.

Yeah, let's restrict Apple to the same crapware found on every other operating system. It's only fair.

Flash is bad because you need to install a plugin to use it. 95% of users don't know what a plugin is.

I don't follow your logic.

EVEN IF it works some time in late 2010 on phones that are fast A8 or A9 processors, how would that demonstrate that Apple was wrong in saying that Flash wouldn't run on 400-600 MHz processors? Not to mention the fact that there IS NO full version of Flash today, so it would be impossible to include it even on the iPad which does meet the processor specs. So the fact that there might be a product in the future means that Jobs has to explain why it's not included today?

Your logic is a little weak.

Flash websites are sooo Geocities. If I come across a site all in Flash, I immediately leave and look for an alternative (usually a competitor).

Silly . OS X doesn't crash more than Flash! (that rhymes)

More like, Flash is an animated GIF.

Spot on all the way. Aldus did a better hand with Freehand before Macromedia got it too IMHO.

Apple need to address replacement apps for all those made by Adobe in the graphics field now ... or as you say buy freaking Adobe and fix everything. Mac graphics folks cannot be held hostage by Adobe having such a monopoly on the graphics field any longer.

Interestingly, 'Narayan' (with an 'a') is the predominantly common spelling for that name in India. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narayan)

His use of an 'e' instead appears to be a bit of an affectation.

Spot on. If Flash crashes every browser in every OS, then obviously Flash is perfectly fine, but all the OS's and browsers are crap.

I just had a company send me one of those "We are experts and can guarantee your web site will be in the top 10 on Google" bla bla bla ... I visited their web site ... 100% flash!!

ROFL.

I'm no tech guy. I only understand about half of what is described in these threads by people obviously smarter than I am. But here's what I know:

1. I have never heard of this Adobe dude before this article was posted. I assume he is smart and well paid. OTHO, I've seen the Stevester on the cover of Time, on Fortune 500 lists, America's Most Admired, etc. etc. Who do I believe? Yeah, well, the weight of credibility to my naiive eye goes to the gentleman from Cuppertino.

2. I use Adobe products because I am forced to. I am not a tech guy - I am merely a consumer of content. I browse web pages, and sometimes download video. I would not choose flash if I had a choice. It seems I had to click some...thing...some...where...once and it made my mac able to read something I didn't really care about anyway. It sometimes makes my otherwise very dependable mac act...weird. Some annoying error message (not even from the mac system) I never get from any other place - flash script aborted or some foolishness. Just from experience, if given a "flash" and "non-flash" button on my screen, I pick the latter, mostly because flash has never given me any reason to want to use it. If I have to use it, I suppose I will, but I have yet to run across anything on any computer, anywhere, that I can't live without. Those that create this content clearly have other agendas, but I will leave that to them.

3. Like most of the world, I am forced to use pdfs. I don't really object, but my mac now has "Preview" that handles them. The Adobe Acrobat stuff...is just odd, unituitive, and in places very annoying. Using Adobe products reminds me of working on windows machines, and that is an overall frustrating experience. Don't know how many times I've looked at my windows box my employer insists I use and said, "if you were a mac, I'd be done by now." Then I reboot, call IT, wait, reinstall etc etc...eventually it sort of works. Like dealing with windows, I feel the need to take a shower when I am done with them.

4. I'm not digging Adobe Digital Editions.

5. OTOH, I have personally used macs continually from about 1993. Love them, never had a problem, never lost data to one's failure. I can't say that about the other devices in my life. I've lots of iPods, really like my iPhone, although it is admittedly a extravagance. My Apple TV had one hiccup, and the iTunes customer service fixed it within a day. In short, I've never, ever had a problem with an Apple device. Ever. This is diametrically opposed to every windows machine and every adobe product I've ever been exposed to. Fanboy? OK. Guilty. I like girls too.

6. iPad. I really like mine. It is a $500 toy. The "work" I do on it is very cursory, and never intensive, so that is merely an excuse to justify having a toy. It is really cool, but like all toys, I suppose I could go without. But hey, I sent $500 to Cuppertino, and Adobe, (I think they are even based fairly close to where I live in Seattle) AFAIK, has never received a payment from me. I'm not their customer, and don't plan to be. If they'd make Something Cool, I might be. Mr. Adobe here isn't inspiring me. I didn't see him do "oh..one more thing..." that made me go, "cool! I wonder if they'll take my visa for that?"

Just my experience. All first person, and am staying away from the obvious vitriol found on these threads. Peace.

What a weak response from the CEO himself.

This was what's known in journalism as a "puff piece". Narayen might just as well have interviewed himself.

Yeah, sorry.
Couldn't help myself.

Yes, Adobe are upset that they can't get at all the money that iPhone/iPad/iPod users represent, that's no surprise and really just routine business. The part that I find particularly bizarre is that Narayan said that:

...accusations about Flash draining battery power [are] "patently false"...

But Jobs made no such assertion in the open letter. Instead he said, completely reasonably, that video decoded in hardware is done more power-efficiently than in software, which can be taken as simply "Flash should support H.264" and says nothing specific about the Flash plugin itself.

In fact, any claim that Flash doesn't drain more battery than a counterpart native application (assuming it's not a totally trivial application) must be untrue, since Flash is at best an emulation environment, which means it will spend some cycles interpreting the program (or even JIT compiling) and doing things that native applications don't do but are part of the compatibility layer (an example might be repeatedly telling the program that there isn't actually a mouse pointer). It wouldn't have to be a lot, and it could be ameliorated by using sensible optimisation techniques, but like-for-like Flash will always be lower-performance (thus higher-power) than a native counterpart. It could easily be the case that Flash adds 5% to the battery drain rate of equivalent native code, which on a phone would probably only be 1% of the overall drain.

In practice, I think the battery drain you'd get due to Flash would be much higher (eg. 20%), but not because of inefficiencies in the Flash framework - rather it'll be from having several highly-animated web page adverts running at once whenever you're in your web browser on sites which use Flash-based advertising. I'm sure someday we'll have shining HTML5 web adverts which pop over the content for no reason, flash constantly, play a video that you didn't ask for, and otherwise behave like an overspecified animated GIF.

And when that day comes, I'm sure we'll be complaining about HTML5's poor battery performance - at least until someone adds effective built-in browser countermeasures (eg. freezing the state if it gibbers away for ten seconds without ever receiving focus).

Wow. Totally hysterical.

That's OK. He's a weak CEO.

I am stating that when/if Flash is released on future Android releases (2.2 is supposed to have it) and it doesn't kill battery life, doesn't crash (well it will crash at times, but nothing is 100% crash proof IMHO) and doesn't cause the issues that Apple believes that it will, what will be Apple's excuse then?

Not surprising. Mr. Murray probably has a slight ax to grind with SJ. If you recall, he's the one that got chewed out by SJ a couple of months ago: http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/...grow-back.html

I think that's just because, like (ironically) Mac OS X, Adobe just aren't motivated to clean it up because neither OS accounts for the clear majority of web user. Just think of them as little reminders that Adobe doesn't care about you. Which is funny considering that a very significant proportion of Adobe's CS user base is on Mac - surely they'd want developers to think it works well?

Excellent post, and one of the more levelheaded ones seen in a while on here. Thanks!

So...is this why my MacBook's CPU heats up an additional 30-40+ degrees fahrenheit & my system begins to crawl whenever I watch hulu or play flashbased games (usually on facebook)? Certainly has no effect on battery life at all, right?

Jobs did not make the assertion in the letter, but in the past he has said that Flash on the iPad would drain the battery from 10 hours to approximately 1.5 hours or so.

that assertion is a bit disingenuous as the 10 hour spec is for wireless productivity at 50% screen brightness, and does not include watching a video. I sincerely doubt that you one would get 10 hours of movie watching on an iPad.

Hence, the comment from Adobe's Prez

Great. A whole world of Flash apps. Just what the world needs.

Maybe Adobe can open a Flash app store?