Adobe 'pleased' with ongoing Flash for iPhone development - Page 2

It seems like every discussion of Flash always brings out one Flash developer who can't understand why people are so down on it. I don't doubt their sincerity, or that they themselves don't write any of these horrible Flash pages, but really, they must spend so much time writing web pages that they never have any time to browse web pages. Well, for my sins, I do. Most of the misery associated with the internet can be attributed to Flash (and to a slightly lesser extent, Java.) Flash may have been all right before Adobe got their greasy paws on it, but now it is, like all their apps, a bloated, semi-functional monstrosity. Ads aren't even the worst part. The worst Flash-heavy website that I access all the time is nasa.gov. If you forget where you are and accidentally hit the back button, it will inevitably beachball and you'll have to Force Quit Safari. At first I believed all the people who said this was Safari's fault, so I tried Firefox. Same thing, only much, much slower, of course.

Adobe is the new Microsoft! Just Say No to Flash!

I'm a Flash developer and I am on the fence. Yes, there are a lot of Flash ads, but on the other hand there are a lot of sites which use Flash in a good integral way.

What I hate is the way that people are telling us what we are allowed to have in our browers. Why can't we let the USER decide? In other words, include Flash, but allow users to turn it off by default. You could select a Flash pane and switch it on and off at your leisure. Why not that? At least that way if I browsed to a page which relied on Flash, I could turn on the essential components while leaving the ads switched off.

Why not this?

You got my vote!

yay!

There must be a good reason why they haven't done this already... The only one I can really think of is that Jobs/whoever at Apple just doesn't want Flash on the iPhone...

How about, Adobe had no version of Flash that runs on both ARM & OS X, or that Flash 7 is pointless and Flash 9 is a resource hog that would drain your battery faster than you can say, "Can you hear me now?"?

Ok so that's a fairly good reason. People were arguing that Flash shouldn't be on the iPhone because all Flash elements are 'evil'.

As with every thread dealing with Flash, the only people defending it are Flash designers.

There are a bunch of good reasons why Apple doesn't want Flash on the iPhone.

The iPhone is an appliance. It (thankfully) keeps configuration options to a minimum. There's no plug-in manager for Safari, there's no task manager that lets you kill unresponsive apps, there's no Activity Monitor to let you see where your CPU cycles are going, or who is using up memory. There's no crash log reporter. There's no console. Etc etc. So, things had better just work.

If a user has Flash installed, and Safari starts crashing, or their battery life is cut in half, or the browser responsiveness is compromised, who are people going to blame? Obviously, Apple, since there would be little way for most users to see what was going wrong. Most users don't understand the dividing line between Flash and non-Flash content. They just want their iPhones to work.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to have a Flash player application that could be installed on its own. If the Flash player misbehaved, users would know what was going on. Safari could shunt pages to it much the way that the YouTube player is launched now from Safari.

Anyway, I've had a lot of problems with Flash. It was constantly crashing Firefox. A few weeks ago I installed a Flash-blocker, and, I've found this to be a good solution. Now, I can see the Flash I'm interested in (not much), and avoid all the glittery ads... and I'm not crashing.

do we really NEED flash on an iphone?? it just perpetuates junk....i know you are a developer perhaps your solution makes sense as a default, but i also would like auto upgrades "off" as a default and be able to delete it all together.....then with all that effort, adobe wants to do anything it can to be part of ANY new platform. that perpetuates their standard, but shouldn't there be other "standards" its MS bloatware all over again....and what about virus attacks etc etc
if flash isn't on the iphone they feel it will soon marginalize them, and allow another software to grow.

so what ....is flash absolutely necessary for the consumer? aren't there other options

can you provide a link to well done flash page??.....most sites over use it and its a major distraction, and God forbid if you roll over some mess or press a corner of some suck ad.....

where is a flash blocker for safari and firefox?

maybe it could be like firefox, if you want it download it, if not its not there

Saft can block Flash.

I'm involved in development of a Flash Web app for providing continuous streaming remote telemetry and control of a piece of industrial equipment. We designed it as a Web app so that the operator can have exactly the same experience using the controls regardless of whether they are standing right in front of the equipment, or if they're sitting at home a hundred miles away - it can be made available anywhere you can find a conforming web browser.

The streaming telemetry component involves sending a relatively large volume of raw binary data asynchronously over the network, which is then interpreted and rendered for display live within the Web app. Events are pushed from the server, they arrive asynchronously and without warning, and it would be entirely inappropriate and wasteful for the web app to be repeatedly polling the server looking for status updates.

Normal AJAX techniques didn't seem appropriate for this application because of the perceived overhead involved in wrapping up this streaming data inside a typical XMLHttpRequest infrastructure, and because of the server-push nature of the data flow. Instead, we have a custom binary protocol which is streamed from the central server through a bare TCP/IP socket. I am not aware of any pure AJAX/JavaScript solutions which would allow for binary communication over a bare socket.

It would be *very* cool if we could give our customers the ability to monitor their equipment via a scaled-down interface via their mobile phone while they're on the way out for a service call.

If I could find an alternative to Flash which was capable of delivering everything we need, I'd be willing to consider it for a future release of this application.

Thanks for the background. You're seeing virtual memory thrashing to your hard drive, but have not diagnosed what's causing it .

Sounds like you're also seeing Flip4Mac peg your CPU, which is either very bad content or a bug in that plugin.

I visit a lot of Flash sites, and did some benchmarking, finding that Flash player usually takes 16MB RAM the first time it's started. The content can greatly vary the memory used, so if you load in a big world in say, AdventureQuest, you'll use more memory. That's true of any plugin that reads content, including HTML.


I work in and care deeply about software quality, so when I see folks bashing something, I like to dig in a bit more.


Like another poster, I'm puzzled by the Adobe bashing. Seems like no matter what Adobe does, even shipping a new program only on MacIntel (see Soundbooth) the company gets bashed. Whereas Apple is golden and does everything right.

Is there a balance of perspective?

In this case, why bash Flash without providing the specific websites causing problems? I'm sure those folks would like to have the bug reports.

Dave

Full disclosure - I left out that I work for Adobe, but do not work on Flash.

Dave

I say no flash for the iPhone. I dont miss it nor is it needed.