Briefly: Windows Phone 7 US launch, Mac OS X 10.6.5 beta, Adobe Flash defended - Page 3

No, the obvious answer is that Flash should go quietly into oblivion so that we don't have to resort to such kludgy workarounds to keep our computers running properly.

Well, as I understand it, Flex can be used to create Flash content or open, standards-based content. If Flex is used for the latter, no problem. If used to create Flash content, problem, as far as Steve/Apple is concerned.

You did correct one thing for me—the fact that the Flex API can be downloaded free. So, in a way, Adobe doesn't really need to get into a hissyfit about this, because Flex's free-downloadable SDK makes Steve's comments about Flash kind of a non-issue, if Adobe was concerned about lost sales of Flash.

bollocks. He has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise, he is worthless there. If he and apple left computing the effect would be significantly less if Larry Ellison and Oracle left computing.

I don't think it is possible to do that, and as far as I know no one has tried to make an exact pixel for pixel duplication for comparison sake, which is why the video example I referred to is about as close as you can get but still says nothing about the unused capabilities of Flash. Flash is complete overkill for simply displaying video.

Anyway as soon as you bring subjective design style into the argument the scientific control is over.

Except that the whole point is that it's that "subjective design style" that makes or breaks a site, and it's that "subjective design style" of every Flash site I've ever seen that makes those sites largely useless. Flash, quite simply, is the wrong tool for the web. If you aren't using it to make bad websites, then you can just as easily dispense with it and make a good website with the HTML available today. Converting a Flash website to an HMTL website by making, "an exact pixel for pixel duplication," is exactly the wrong thing to do. The right thing to do is to redesign the site so it doesn't need Flash and so that it's more useable than the Flash site it replaces. Flash adds nothing of value to the websites it is used on. (The only thing worse than an all Flash site is a site that's half Flash and half PDF, like so many of the bad restaurant websites we see out there: Flash animations that are pointless, combined with menus in PDF.)

I totally agree with you, however it is the fact that Flash makes it so easy to to output crap that the large percentage of Flash on the web is just that - crap. These aren't designers with any training or artistic skill, it is just; oooh, look shiny moving pinwheels. It's crap. Once HTML5 is as easy with slick development tools, there will be more crap.

No. You're confusing authoring tools and SDKs. Flex 4 is an AS3 SDK. There are slightly difference libraries compared to the AS3 SDK included with the authoring tool called 'Flash CS5' the but it's really about authoring style. The end point is still Flash.

Continuing my comparison to Fox news when it comes to Flash vs. Apple, Apple calling for 'open, standards-based content' works like Fox's calls for things like 'a return to real American values' or such nonsense. It sounds like something everyone should get behind but it doesn't deal in specifics and ignores any subtleties as to what the best direction actually is.

Windows Phone launch only makes 1/3 of a news article

Yes and no. One of the problems with Flash is that when one decides to use it to build a website (as opposed to just displaying some video, or it's original, defensible purpose of making small animations to embed in web pages) its very nature encourages the designer/developer to make a site that is all bells and whistles, all flash, if you will. HTML on the other hand, by its nature, encourages more structure and thought. While it will be possible to build bad websites with HTML5 (why not, it's possible to build bad websites with HTML4, or 3.2, or 2.0, ...), it's not the case that the very medium itself encourages you to do so.

Quite a bit more intelligence as well since hand coding js and debugging it is not a trivial undertaking, however I am certain that tools are on the horizon to make it possible for the same amateur designers to jump on the HTML5 bandwagon and continue to produce their horrible animations. There will always be a disproportionate amount of bad to good when it comes to design. Always has been, always will be.

I've seen plenty of great HTML websites. I've yet to see a good Flash website.

Or you could look at it that Jobs is trying to pull the wool over your eyes for his own reasons and Flash/Flex is a lot more open and standard than he wants you to know:

- It's open source and free.
- It's as close to a cross browser standard as you can get.
- It has a set of standard front-end widgets for user interface consistency. Granted, as with any SDK, these are not used in your standard games and animated menus (look at App Store games - neither are Apple's iOS widgets) - but they are there and are used extensively in real RIA. HTML5 doesn't and won't have this.

The only issue you could have with Flash is that it is controlled by one company. Based on historical attempts with HTML and Javascript, I say this is a good thing. Apple by all rights should agree since most of its success is based on the principle of a single company controlling as much of the experience as possible.

...like Bjork...or Amy Winehouse...or RuPaul.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

If you disable Flash for a few days, you’ll see that it’s mostly used for ads and very few videos now.

Unless you play web games, catch up on free TV episodes on your computer, or just like animated ads, there’s no reason to keep Flash enabled—especially when you consider all the downsides.

Go Flash-free!

No it would not necessarily have been in the news, as the media do not particularly cover MS, unless it is negative. For example, a couple of weeks ago, both Apple and MS released their quarterly numbers. MS actually had a larger profit than Apple, but Apple got almost all of the coverage.

There were, however, multiple stories on the net indicating that demand has outstripped a constrained supply in Europe, and TG Daily is reporting today that the HTC HD7 is already sold out at T-Mobile here in America. FWIW, and anecdotal evidence is not worth much, I went to get a Focus for my wife at the local ATT store, and they sold out, but they called and the ATT store in the Mall, and they had several left.

Lastly, the tech press is lazy. It is easy to say the launch was not successful because there were no lines and be done with it. By this logic, Android is an abject failure, even though more phones are sold, because there are no lines for android phones.

The thing is, Apple's business model is explicitly designed to create lines and hence good press (1 model, released once a year, and at initial release, only available at the Apple store (or pre-order)).

However, the other manufacturers have multiple models, updated several times a year, and released at multiple locations, all of which mitigate against long lines because there is no pent up demand.

Good, bad, interesting, whatever... I know you won't do it, but you might look at Adobe site of the day page. They usually have some very unique stuff on there.

you are sure about that? Free, when has authoring .fla content every been free? Has Adobe been giving out copies of Flash for free? How would you charge someone that visits your site to view your flash content? oh right...it's called a porn hub.

I am not sure how you can call flash in any way open-source.....

Enough with the 'saint jobs' nonsense already.

Ignore.

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It may have worked for him, but my PC/laptop is only few months old and whenever I visit a flash site such as Youtube or whatever, my fans kick into overdrive mode and my CPU goes up around 80%. My laptop gets hot and that ain't good for my manly parts whenever I have my laptop on my lap. (see article)

http://www.bgr.com/2010/11/08/gentle...from-your-lap/

buy check the Apple/Adobe HIStory before you guys come on here attacking father Jobs ;
rewind the tech tapes and lQQk for yourself- back in the day (1997) when APPLE needed ADOBE to assist and agree to move the technology forward and asked that developers

(repost)

I'm happy at least Apple has the balls to stand up against the shoddy offering from Adobe. I used to be a massive fan of Adobe through the 1990s during the early 2000s - Photoshop and Illustrator were really solid, effective pieces of software.

Fast forward ten years and way too many acquisitions, and the company has turned to utter garbabe;

- Flash on OSX. Even the newest version goes routinely to 80% CPU even on my cutting edge MacBook Pro. Flash videos are the only thing to trigger a kernel panic on my Mac (the reboot now screen)

- The worst application updater in the industry. The application updater is so broken it can't even update itself

- The most unintuitive corporate purchase system I've ever encountered. I even wrote a long feedback detailing easy fixes to make it more usable with little to no effort. No one ever replied - not to speak of improving.

- Terribly sluggish applications on Mac - Photoshop and Illustrator. Both have completely half-hearted, bolted-on executions for key functions - such as extracting on Photoshop.

The worst thing is that I'm trapped with Adobe - there is no credible alternatives on the market

The truth is that its Adobes fault theres no Flash on the majority of mobiles, because the company was completely happy just misleading the world of pundits while talking instead of doing. Well its not 2007 anymore, its 2010, and thats three years of work that everyone else has put into HTML5.

Adobe hasnt done anything to earn the rights to cram the Internet back into the Flash box it likes to sit upon as it collects taxes from those creating content that only plays back via Adobes own players. Adobe never been on top of things in the mobile world, and the desktop version is not exactly doing all that much anymore either. As companies shift their resources from everything Flash to HTML5, Adobes desktop monopoly over interactive content will rapidly erode. Its not Apples fault thats happening, its Adobes. and if you rewind further back you will see that when APPLE asked Adobe to make the ADOBE programs with Cocoa to transition to MAC OS X from OS system 9.2 ADOBE REFUSED and the developer community followed their lead and APPLE was basically getting screwed by ADOBE so now we are HERE in 2010 and lQQk who's calling the shots... HAHAHAHAHA

Well, I would if it weren't uninstalled now on my Macs and it didn't not run worth a crap on my Linux systems.

But, people have posted "top flash sites" links before that I checked out and I thought all of them were horrible and/or useless.

You might consider better hardware. That never happens to me.

Come on. You only have to bother to read this thread to find out that very good Flash authoring is available for free and that the SDK is open source. Or do even the tiniest bit of Googling.

Given this, can you see how you are just repeating a company line and not thinking for yourself?

I don't like Flash websites per se, however I use Flash for applications which are useful in training programs, GUIs for space planning management, medical imaging, etc. I never ever use Flash for decoration purposes. I would use any technology as long as it was the same relative efficiency to develop and debug and equal ubiquity for deployment. Flash/Flex offers what I believe is a better solution for my needs than the alternatives.

Here is an example. Which BTW only uses 3.5% cpu.

Was watching and there was this very out-of-place and very obvious product placement where Daniel Dae-Kim's character told Grace Park's character to "Just Bing it" (who says that?), upon which, Grace Park's character whips out her Windows 7 phone and does a Bing search.

It was so blatant that it made my skin crawl and made me lose respect for the show.

So if people used HTML5 instead of Flash to create "worthless and pointless crap", banners, games, pop-ups, pop-unders and "all the other crap" that are pushed on end users, you would be ok with that?


How will open sourcing the Flash Player plugin counter the creation of "worthless and pointless crap", banners, games, pop-ups, pop-unders and "all the other crap" that are pushed on end users?

oh yeah. and then we can contend with the likes of this... http://lab.simurai.com/html5/ads/

take a gander at cpu usage on this one.

tip... of the iceberg. No click4flash to save you on this one...

As for adobe and html5, of course they're going to capitalize on that, they already are you'd be an idiot not to think that.

Which is a load of crap; Apple makes no profit off the AppStore; the 30% is there to cover the costs and that is it. Disclosures time and time again have shown it to be so in the case of their AppStore and their music store.

They don't want Flash because if they did then Apple would get blamed because Flash is crashing the phone, sucking up the battery power and killing the performance of the phone - if anything it is to ensure that the Apple brand remains associated with a great user experience and it not being ruined by pathetic third parties like Adobe who can't seem to be bothered to create a decent plugin for Flash. Adobe have had almost a decade, they've failed to deliver - time they accept the fact they suck as an organisation and get back to focusing on something different.

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Hey Rulez one question; why did you register in June and make one post then wait this long to make the next 30 posts in a couple days? Spot on?

Heh. Maybe you missed my sarcasm. For that poster to suggest Flash was causing higher CPU because his fan was dusty is rather insane. Yes the dust is a problem because maybe the CPU was not being cooled adequately so was maybe being throttled or what not.

But the fact remains, as I agree with you, that in an average use basis, Flash can cause unnecessary high CPU load. This is the biggest problem, not whether it is open or what not, the basic render engine has not been improved and has not been optimised adequately for many, many years now. I mean, FFS it's a 2D compositing render engine, how hard can it be to optimise that, for a company with some of the world's brightest computer scientists?

Yes they have started hardware acceleration but primarily for video and even then only a subset of video cards on Mac or PC. The render engine is still borked.

Try out this Flash benchmark.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/465908

At the "highest settings" which crawls on even the latest hardware, this kind of animation can be done smoothly on a iPhone 4 if coded for iOS. Clearly something is wrong with the Flash render engine. Another example would be iMovie on Macs - you can composite text on gradients, video in video, etc on even a 1.4ghz Core 2 Duo because the render engine is assisted greatly by *actual* hardware accelerated compositing in real time.

You have been told a number of times, so why are you still spouting this rubbish. Why are you constantly complaining that a company wasn't supporting a brand new OS on brand new hardware that next to no one was using? There was no reason for Flash to be released on 64bit Linux in 2004

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I don't need anybody else's benchmarks to to tell me that Flash slows down my browser and eventually causes it to crash. I can also easily compare playing html5 video vs flash video in Youtube. Don't need any fancy measuring equipment to tell the difference there. Html5 wins hands down.

Not sure about the FUD you mention, unless you're referring to your own posts.

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HTML5 is not ready for that level of complexity (yet)... But some very smart coders and tools will help with that.

A good comparison would be that animation rendered using Core Image vs Flash. That would prove my point of the poor Flash render engine. I bet my bottom dollar Core Image on integrated GPU machines will use up less battery, certainly less CPU, because of GPU assist. Though discreet GPU machines may suffer because of powering the GPU.

Or, the animation done on an iPad vs Flash. Yes, Core Image and iPad would be proprietary versions but again it could hint as to how to better render Flash.

I spent some months in 2005-2007 with 64bit Linux on Athlon64. Great processor, gave up on Linux though.

Still doesn't change the fact that the number of people using 64bit Linux back there would have been very low, not worth the effort of releasing a 64bit version of flash for it.

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