Adobe Flash player for iPhone due 'soon' if Apple approves - Page 2

Egads, don't be stupid. Games are apps that you buy/use/run for a specific purpose, and you choose to use them (or not) based in part on the computer/GPU power you have.

Flash embedded in web sites forces crap down people's throats just because they're browsing around the web looking for info. This is not the same thing at all.

I guess you must not use a laptop, or you'd know how bad Flash craplets can chew CPU. Not because it's performing some useful functionality for me, but most likely because it's pushing distracting animated garbage in front of my face (or would be if I didn't run with it completely disabled). Not to mention the browser security mechanisms that get bypassed...

One can always argue that it's not the technology, but the "bad guys" that misuse it. But you know what? It doesn't matter! The technology enables people to make my browsing experience (and battery life) suck, so it gets turned off. The more widely it's supported, the more sites will become "invisible" to those of us who either choose to disable Flash or who use alternate platforms, like the iPhone.

Please Steve, do NOT let Flash onto the iPhone.

Yes just throw a load of big words in there, feel better now?

I'm not saying I'm as good as everyone doing "hardcore" programming, so I don't know why you are being so defensive. I was defending us Flash programmers against comments that insinuate "if you program in Flash, you're a bad programmer".

I have to say that's very self-righteous of you to believe your judgement is any more important than mine.

Ummm yep, that's exactly what I am saying. Why, is Flash an addiction?

I program AS3 but I don't really go for all these whizzy Flash-based sites, because most of them are rubbish. But I don't see what all the commotion is about. All I know is that it will mean that we will have the possibility of creating content, worthwhile content, for the iPhone.

If it's going to happen it will happen, just whining about it isn't going to change anything.

My Mac is an iMac 2.4 Ghz - 1 MB RAM. The Diablo site mentioned uses both cores and virtually equally at 35% usage.

I don't know why only one core of yours maxes out at 100%. I know virtually nothing about Flash and its ability to use more than one core, but I find it interesting that my Mac uses both cores virtually equally on both of the Flash sites mentioned above.

Am I a big Flash fan? Yes and no. Do I want to see the cool stuff on many of the sites? Yes. Do I want more open-standards based sites rather than Flash? Yes.

Put Flash on the iPhone IF it is greatly optimized (if it can be), and give it the ability to be turned off, or only used similar to YouTube.

Just my thoughts...

Ridiculous!

A minority shouldn't be allowed to keep the majority from using what most of us think is a useful tool.

Sure, it should be enabled and disabled as the user requires, but other than that, it should be here.

I have no agenda. Do you?

I would like to see Flash.

You aren't giving good reasons why not.

Example of a website that looks amazing, and can only be realized in Flash, sorry for not making that really clear

The site you post too deomnstrates that on the level of animated websites, nothing comes near flash for now. Sure, it taks up too much resources and not all Flash content makes sense on the iPhone, but it's not a bad thing over the entire line imo.

To all the detractors of Flash, yes, Flash is designed for desktop computers and is quite resource intensive. But like I said on my earlier comment, Flash can be designed to be activated on per-needed-basis, much like YouTube is.

Let's face it. Whether you like Flash or not, Flash is everywhere. iPhone alone will not destroy Flash because it is pre-installed on just about every other smartphones and computers.

Look, I would like to see other crappy technologies go away, such as MMS. But whenever I get MMS, I have to click on that stupid weblink then type in stupid code to view the image. That's poor user experience. If I stumble upon a Flash embedded video (other than YouTube), I want to view it instead of emailing the link to myself to watch it later on a Mac.

Daring Fireball's Gruber has stated that for that exact competive reason to the App Store and Cocoa programming Apple will not include Flash on the iPhone.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/ad...yer_for_iphone

NO FLASH. I dont need flash, dont want flash, havent missed it for the year and a half I have had my iPhone. If flash does come to the iPhone we need to be able to turn it off. If not I dont think I'll be updating

Flash is not available on "just about every smartphone", stop peddling that lie and even the flash that is on some cellphones is useless, that's not the kind of flash we need.

Flash Player 10 uses more extensive hardware acceleration so there's a chance it can use the PowerVR graphics chipset in the iphone to avoid being sluggish.

One reason that Flash is so CPU intensive is that it is doing animations just now without using graphics hardware. If you've ever tried to play a game in software mode you can see why it's a bad idea to do that. Dropping the frame rate helps but for smoothness, people sometimes set the clip at 60fps.

In the end, people who advertise certain types of sites such as sites dedicated to a movie or game launch like to produce a unique artistic site so that people see something cool. There is no other API so well supported that allows them to do this.

The point about Apple not allowing external APIs is probably the most important reason why they won't allow it because they seem fairly paranoid about security issues. If the Flash player has a vulnerability, they have to wait on Adobe fixing it or risk iphones all over the world being exploited. At the very least a mechanism to disable the plugin would be necessary.

Safari already has this ability so it's not a huge problem. Being able to disable plugins on an individual basis would be good though so that disabling Flash doesn't disable Quicktime.

Flash is a CPU and bandwidth black hole, and there had better be a menu setting somewhere to disable it system-wide on the iPhone and touch.

First of all, I can understand that people have differing opinions on the utility of Flash being available on the iPhone, but what I don't get is why some folks (selfishly in my opinion) insist on limiting everyone's choice in the matter. This goes for issues other than flash as well. If you don't happen to like a specific feature, and the feature can be easily disabled from a preference panel, then what is the real problem?

And no, I don't think it encourages poor design any more than Ajax does. There will always be poor use of certain techniques, and the fact is that a lot of the web uses flash, so it should be included on a mobile web device.

It's not essential for browsing but seeing as there is so much flash on the web it would make the experience better.

There are two reasons for the absence of Flash on the iPhone.
The first is technical.

Flash is quite an old technology. A lot of Flash functionality relies upon the CPU to do all the heavy lifting. I have seen some Flash sourcecode, and a lot of it was rendering spans of pixels by the CPU. Many desktop flash sites would not work at all on a phone's CPU. On the iPhone there would be a dramatic loss of performance in viewing HTML and viewing Flash. At the same time it would drive down battery life.

Flash 10 promises more rasterization on the GPU. But I am quite skeptical.

Technically the best way forwards would be a Adobe developing a variant of Flash which was designed for a mobile GPU device. Flash ES. This would benefit the whole mobile market. Not just Apple.

The second reason is commercial. Apple does not want to pay Adobe - so that Adobe can drink Apple's milkshake. If Flash came to iPhone. Who would benefit more. Adobe or Apple?

C.

I may be missing something, because this looks to me like the entire story is complete BS.

So I'll let you guys fill me in.

1st, you CAN'T have flash be an app in the app store that you download.
Adobe tried to describe what they were doing before like that, and it's complete bullshit.
Flash is NOT an application.

2nd Flash is something that needs to run from the browser, as you surf the web. (a plugin?)
That means Adobe thinks they are developing something that they will destribute from the app store that would become part of the iPhone's O.S. that the web browser would use. So, Adobe thinks they are going to mess with the iPhone browser??????
And they think all they have to do is wait for Apple to approve this?

3rd They can't be supplying their own browser, as an app, that has flash capability as that would violate the SDK agreements as I understand them.

Sorry if this has been covered by others in the thread and I missed it.
BUt I'd love to hear how anyone else can see any way any of this could be true.
This just looks to me like a more descriptive example of how Adobe has no frickin idea what they are talking about......

hmmm... interesting and makes perfect sense. But I still need the real version of Frogger.

Which part of the SDK does it directly violate. Reading Gruber's take on it I don't think Apple would allow Adobe Flash on the iPhone which would be covered under the parts of the SDK rules that basically say "because we say so", but beyond that I have seen nothing in the SDK ruels that would prevent it.

Your app is allowed to call WebKit (many apps utilize it) so if Adobe could create an app that started Flash, which then called WebKit (note: not mobile Safari) around Adobe's own browser front end. There is also the possibility for server-side browsers, like Skyfire, that will deal with all the various webcode on their end and then repackage it in a simpler, smaller package to send from the server to your device.


It would be nice if Nintendo released all their old games to the App Store. They could make a killing, but I understand their desire not to pull focus from their portable consoles. Who owns Atari? I think those games could be popular, too. I know that I'd buy Galaga for the iPhone in a heartbeat.

You will be disappointed to see how widely Javascript is being used in the coming years...


JiT will be part of the "Javascript revolution"


Very true unfortunately.


But Apple wants innovation to spread to all browsers and all platforms...


Javascript is still more compatible and standards-based. All browsers have it built-in, not as a plug-in.

They describe deploying flash as an app.
They can't destribute their own browser to use it, as that would mean the flash app would have to run in the background. (not allowed)

The only alternative, would be to distribute their own browser app that had flash directly built into it. That is not what they are describing.

So..... what they are describing makes them sound like they don't know what they are talking about.

Here is cool Videocast worthy of watching about the Fall of Atari (HD) and the French company who owns it right now.

Wouldn't Flash run as a Plugin in the iPhone's Safari browser? You can also have a standalone Flash app that runs Flash files from a private folder populated using similar code as in the Air Sharing app.

The flash player, would have to run in the background.
Not allowed to do that.....

If Apple has a plugin system for iPhone Safari then that wouldn't really count as running in the background. Also if Flash is running as a standalone app then the Flash files will not run as secondary apps they would run in the Flash player.

It wouldn't 'have to' run in the background. What it sounds like Adobe is proposing is making Flash a plug-in that is called from Safari, which isn't allowed. But what me and others have mentioned is Adobe and others making an Adobe Browser as its own app that directly calls Flash and SDK-allowable WebKit with Adobe's own browser UI, which isn't forbidden by the SDK rules. Although, as mentioned, Apple may have other issues with it just because it's Flash.

The iPhone browser, isn't Safari.
You can call it that if you want, but it's better to think of it as Apple's web browser for the iPhone built with Webkit.

If you think of it that way, then you have to ask yourself why Apple would have built plug-in capability into it? And opf course, you'd have to show me where in the SDK it's explained, or anywhere else in Apple documentation.

You can't, it can't, so it would have to run in the background.

Now, it is possible Adobe could go to the trouble of building an App that is essentially a player that allows specifically built flash applications to run in it and therefore you could build flash apps that run on the iPhone.
That of course is completely different than the expectation that websites that involve flash would work in any way in the browser on the iPhone.

Of course, if someone wants to provide any support for the idea that Safari was "ported" to the iPhone and underneath maintains plug-in support.... have at, I'm listening.
I await the links to information published on the web that say it's so.....
I wait.......\

I'm not sure I have any interest in having an App on the iPhone that is another browser.
One from Apple, one from Adobe. I use the Adobe one when I want to go to websites that have flash, and I use Apple's when I want.... what?...... compatible fast browsing?
Kind of like waiting for FF to come to the iPhone. I'm sure there are FF fans that think they would like that to happen, but somehow in a mobile world I just don't see the user interface issues of the menus being as important as the rendering and viewing experience.
(which so far, I'd take Apple's developers over... say.... the crew from Adobe)

So you may be right. Adobe may build an entire recreation of the iPhone's browser just to create an App from the sdk that includes a flash player. Kind of the long way around the tree if you know what I mean. Also, likely to be a real piece of shit, if how the flash player works is any indication. (JMO)

If they do this, you're going to see someone do a top ten list of sites that drain your iPhone battery the fastest based on poorly written flash code on a website. Most people have seen sites that when you go there, your CPU maxs out. The toy CPU in a mobile device would probably melt.

Just my feeling, Adobe and this article doesn't say "Adobe coming out with it's own browser that includes flash for the iPhone".
They seem to say "bringing a flash app plugin using the sdk" which of course, they can't.
It's more likely that the flash experience they are talking about has nothing to do with the web.
The ability to write flash code, and render it in an app that is a player iteself for the iPhone makes more sense.

Added This Part:Go back and reread this article assuming that is what they are doing.
Everything they say, still apllies but has no conflicts with the SDK or Apple.
That makes more sense to me.

Thats all very interesting, but I would think that the top people at Adobe understand more than you give them credit for. Just how sincere Jobs was when he stated that the reason why Flash was not on the phone because the software wasn't up to it YET, will be seen. He certainly didn't appear to oppose it. Just the opposite, he seemed to be telling Adobe to come out with something the iPhone could use.

He could easily have said that like Java (unlike Java script, which IS on the phone), Flash won't be on the phone. He didn't say that at all.

So we'll see.

Apple could always add this software in an update to the iPhone OS. It doesn't have to go through the store.

The truth is that we don't know what Adobe has done.

Hmm . . lot of flash haters out there. They probably click on flash menus and links all the time and don't even realize it. Maybe they should just go back to electric typewriters. Clearly Flash is too advanced for them.

It is true I give them little credit.
However, the first reaction that leaders at Adobe had to the SDK announcment from Apple was an announcement that they would shortly have their flash plug-in running for the iPhone using the SDK. They then, with a great deal of embarrassment, had to put out a retraction admitting they could not in fact use the SDK to do that. So they have a history of talking about that which they know not.

Again, if you read this article with the idea that you're reading an article describing Adobe bring a flash player for playing flash apps built for the iPhone, as opposed to a plug-in that allows websites with flash.... to work on the iphone, if you read the article assuming that's what they intend then it makes sense.

Again, without Apples support, it makes no sense to assume somehow they are talking about website flash support. And nothing in the article indicates anything from Apple.
It's all in Adobe's court, and if that's the case then the only thing they CAN be doing is flash apps running on the iPhone and NOT web sites that have flash in them working from the iPhone.

That's my take on what this all means.
Of course, if Apple has some kind of completely quiet agreement with Adobe in the works based on great optimizations from Adobe development, then I'll be wrong.
Since Adobe leaks like a rusty bucket, I can't believe they can keep that quiet so I don't see it coming anytime soon.

Like I, and some others have been saying, Jobs didn't rule Flash out, the way he did with Java. He merely stated, now, quite a while ago, that current Flash software wasn't suitable for the iPhone. He said that if and when it was, it would be a different story.

I see no reason to not believe that Apple is receptive to Flash.

Perhaps not on the current models.

If you read the new article in Ars about the SDK, and hardware, it looks as though Apple is leaving a number of things possible, including background apps. While they took some things out for the iPhone SDK, they, very interestingly, left others in.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/iPhone-SDK.ars

The assumption is that in a more powerful phone, much more is possible. This could be the situation with Flash as well.
I hope so. It's pretty silly to say NO to software, if it's implemented properly. As has been suggested by myself, and others, the software could be turned on and off as desired.

Even now, many sites that use Flash heavily ask if you want to see the Flash site, or the regular site. I'd rather have the option. My choice if the phone gets bogged down, not yours, as long as I can stop it.