Come to think of it, basically this tablet is going to be predominantly Flash-on-QNX. It's more risky the more I think of it.
The old skool Flash was where everything had to be running in an animation, and you poll for events every 1/25 of a second (eg. running 25 fps). As Groovetube mentions now it's more of something where there are listeners for events, you don't need the timeline running. But Flash player still has to be *listening* for events.
There are two forces at work. As Groovetube mentions, on the dev side, there is smart coding and so on. On the other side though, pre-10.1 as we know things are not very pretty no matter what the dev does. The problem is not so much the code but as soon as you start having animations, etc. the render engine starts to chew up CPU. I don't think listeners and idling is the issue as much as animation and sound.
Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation. Everyone is going to go nuts on the animation of apps because they can and because of current Flash habits. On top of that the PlayBook OS itself is supposed to be intensely animation heavy and especially, transparency-compositing-heavy. As Flash designers and devs know, once you have transparency, be prepared for some CPU nom nom nom. Throw in on-the-fly drop shadow, blur and other render effects on a per-element(symbol) basis. Mmm...
Basically what happened is Adobe and RIM got together based on their desire to stick it up Apple. RIM of course wants to be back in the limelight and prevent tablets and iPhones from invading their business domain. Adobe is pissed that a major, popular mobile OS almost completely locked them out. They want to get back on Flash on mobile in a big way, who knows how Froyo adoption and Flash-on-Froyo is doing. So Adobe goes to RIM, promises some very, very, very big things, they scheme, and voila. A Flash-driven, RIM developed iPad killer.
It will be good times to see how this plays out.
Adobe is smart, in terms of betting on both Android and RIM. But time will reveal the payout from the gamble.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
Isn't there a timeline and a stage?
What provides the animation when a Flash app is idling, listening for events?
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Groovetube
Dick,
as you should well know, any application dev platform requires knowledge of optimization, keeping memory use low, etc. etc.. They -all- have it. It's my view a good number of bad flash sites out there is because of very, poor coding practices.
I don't get the high cpu usage on windows, and I used to with pre 10.1 pre 10.1 was not good, this is why they've begun with a completely rewritten player. It was about freaking time, thx to SJ for lighting the fire finally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
I think the reason (necessity?) for the 1GHz Dual Core CPU and 1 GB RAM is to mitigate Flash performance issues.
What remains to be seen is if they can resolve the battery issue.
It's been a while, but AIR, Flash runs like a continuous movie clip with the ability to detect and handle mouse (touch) events and some other events. Even when idle, the "clip" is running.
If they just skin QNX with Flash (or vice versa) then both will be competing for resources to perform similar, overlapping functions. Because of the hardware, that's probably OK (at least as an interim solution).
But, to resolve the battery issue, they will need to shut down some of the hardware (display, CPU Core, a block of RAM, etc). Who (QNX or Flash) detects when and what should be done, and who actually does it-- requires some interoperability between Flash and QNX at a much lower level than that in which Flash usually runs (an app using OS services or a plugin app using browser services).
If they are successful, there are some interesting potentials:
1) An OS with Flash built-in to provide the UI and presentation components
Come to think of it, basically this tablet is going to be predominantly Flash-on-QNX. It's more risky the more I think of it.
The old skool Flash was where everything had to be running in an animation, and you poll for events every 1/25 of a second (eg. running 25 fps). As Groovetube mentions now it's more of something where there are listeners for events, you don't need the timeline running. But Flash player still has to be *listening* for events.
I have dabbled in animation and compositing with FCP and Motion... everything from simple transitions, titles, tracking, rotoscoping, particle generation, morphing, tweening... could someone 'splain to me how you do some of these things without a timeline.
Quote:
There are two forces at work. As Groovetube mentions, on the dev side, there is smart coding and so on. On the other side though, pre-10.1 as we know things are not very pretty no matter what the dev does. The problem is not so much the code but as soon as you start having animations, etc. the render engine starts to chew up CPU. I don't think listeners and idling is the issue as much as animation and sound.
For purposes of this question, ignore the old, bad, legacy Flash and focus specifically on 10.1 or state-of-the-art Flash.
Let me make sure I understand.
1) Flash remains an interpreted language, correct?
2) Instead of being poll-driven, it is interrupt-driven (listeners)
3) when a listener is triggered, an "animation" runs
4) the animation is coded in ActionScript and must be interpreted
5) once interpreted the graphics generation is handled by a real-time render engine
Quote:
Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation. Everyone is going to go nuts on the animation of apps because they can and because of current Flash habits. On top of that the PlayBook OS itself is supposed to be intensely animation heavy and especially, transparency-compositing-heavy. As Flash designers and devs know, once you have transparency, be prepared for some CPU nom nom nom. Throw in on-the-fly drop shadow, blur and other render effects on a per-element(symbol) basis. Mmm...
Emphasis mine:
I understand the attractions/costs to use dynamic, real-time animation at the app level.
But, you are saying that the QNX/Flash hybrid OS is going to do animations at the system level.
Certainly that won't be ActionScript and interpreted then rendered-- rather some very tight code like CoreAnimation on iOS... right?
Here's a Flash from the past, ca 1994:
Quote:
Macromedia Director (1993-2005)
The "multimedia" hype is now in full swing. Myst is a big seller and 'multimedia CD-Roms' are selling in shops. Bill Gates announces the licensing of Director player. Marc Canter said that this " was a trip - as I knew he didn't really get the ramifications of building animation into Windows".3 Marc had been a strong advocate of OS level support for playback and worked hard to get the MS deal done. He thought that animation should be an OS level data type like text, sound and images. Marc's successor thought that system level support (in essence writing parts of the OS) was too grandiose for such a small company and relegated the system players to the back burner where they quietly died.
I re-watched the PlayBook video paying close attention to the animation.
I think that, now, I better understand-- they were showing off the OS's animation/presentation capability.
To be fair, Apple and Android Device mfgrs do this in their presos, to some extent -- but it is always in conjunction with a user...
The PlayBook video didn't show any user interaction, not even one finger -- Don't touch that touch screen!
Seriously, it was just one big [Flash] movie... more of a cartoon, actually.
Above, you said: "Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation."
It appears, at least for now, that RIM/Adobe have fallen victim to the "animation" temptress, and forgotten the user.
Will they be able to kick the habit?
Quote:
Basically what happened is Adobe and RIM got together based on their desire to stick it up Apple. RIM of course wants to be back in the limelight and prevent tablets and iPhones from invading their business domain. Adobe is pissed that a major, popular mobile OS almost completely locked them out. They want to get back on Flash on mobile in a big way, who knows how Froyo adoption and Flash-on-Froyo is doing. So Adobe goes to RIM, promises some very, very, very big things, they scheme, and voila. A Flash-driven, RIM developed iPad killer.
It will be good times to see how this plays out.
Adobe is smart, in terms of betting on both Android and RIM. But time will reveal the payout from the gamble.
Just for the record, I ran the PlayBook vid at 720P, full screen, on a 24" iMac 2.8 GHz, Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD2600 GPU. The Flash plugin spiked from about 12% CPU up to about 104% CPU for the duration
How do you know it's going to be cool? From a mocked up video? I seem to recall a lot of people that were pretty sure the Courier was going to kick ass and take names, based on a video, and we know how that turned out....
Maybe it'll be nice. Maybe it'll be deeply flawed. I'm very curious about battery life, since the specs sound pretty power hungry.
At any rate, about the best we can say at this point is that RIM is going to bring a 5"x7" touch tablet to market running an OS they recently purchased and that given the specs it should be reasonably speedy. Beyond that (and by every metric that really counts-- ease of use, interaction with eco-system, if any, battery life, quality of apps) we don't really know anything.
But, they have nothing to show today! This was their Big day!. Their big chance to make a good impression. They showed a "concept" movie-- they have nothing else!
yes. it was a big day for RIM and they did make a good impression to many people.
with several people trying to discredit RIM, absolutely. i welcome the iPad, PlayBook and all other tablets to the marketplace; it's healthy for the consumer.
I have dabbled in animation and compositing with FCP and Motion... everything from simple transitions, titles, tracking, rotoscoping, particle generation, morphing, tweening... could someone 'splain to me how you do some of these things without a timeline.
You can code it, obviously there's an internal timer, but you don't have to touch the timeline to generate x, y, alpha, etc. parameters for objects on the screen. That's as far as my understanding. Similar to how in HTML/CSS/Javascript you can create fade-ins and animation without an explicit timeline. Basically code is in loops, every xth of a second change a certain parameter, or, generate new movie clips on the fly (that's how you create pretty particles/movie clips programatically). If someone knows how this is now done in a better way, do share.
Quote:
For purposes of this question, ignore the old, bad, legacy Flash and focus specifically on 10.1 or state-of-the-art Flash.
Let me make sure I understand.
1) Flash remains an interpreted language, correct?
2) Instead of being poll-driven, it is interrupt-driven (listeners)
3) when a listener is triggered, an "animation" runs
4) the animation is coded in ActionScript and must be interpreted
5) once interpreted the graphics generation is handled by a real-time render engine
This was what I was bitching about in another thread. 10.1 was predominantly about GPU decoding of videos. Then now they're talking about 3D acceleration. All this does not fully address the issues you raised above. I still say IMO the real-time render engine is the most CPU intense part of Flash, in most cases where highly complex math is not being done.
Quote:
I understand the attractions/costs to use dynamic, real-time animation at the app level.
But, you are saying that the QNX/Flash hybrid OS is going to do animations at the system level.
Certainly that won't be ActionScript and interpreted then rendered-- rather some very tight code like CoreAnimation on iOS... right?
Another poster mentioned above it will be more tightly integrated. Let's hope so. It will be the first time it is done for Flash at any significant scale.
Quote:
I re-watched the PlayBook video paying close attention to the animation.
I think that, now, I better understand-- they were showing off the OS's animation/presentation capability.
To be fair, Apple and Android Device mfgrs do this in their presos, to some extent -- but it is always in conjunction with a user...
The PlayBook video didn't show any user interaction, not even one finger -- Don't touch that touch screen!
Seriously, it was just one big [Flash] movie... more of a cartoon, actually.
I know you're kinda concerned about this, so am I. Basically it was a mock-up and teaser video that RIM just really needed to get out the door as a massive PR and Marketing stunt. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and see what eventuates. The whole video was probably composited in After Effects or maybe even a Discreet tool.
Quote:
Above, you said: "Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation."
It appears, at least for now, that RIM/Adobe have fallen victim to the "animation" temptress, and forgotten the user.
Will they be able to kick the habit?
Well, this is what they think they can/ need to do to fight the iPad. Not many people actually "get" Apple. Sure stuff from Apple and the UI is cool and sexy, but it is rarely outright frivolous.
Quote:
Just for the record, I ran the PlayBook vid at 720P, full screen, on a 24" iMac 2.8 GHz, Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD2600 GPU. The Flash plugin spiked from about 12% CPU up to about 104% CPU for the duration
I think your GPU is not supported for 10.1 hardware decoding. You'll have to check the release notes. Yet another issue with 10.1. It really wasn't that superb of an update, it is no panacea.
with several people trying to discredit RIM, absolutely. i welcome the iPad, PlayBook and all other tablets to the marketplace; it's healthy for the consumer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by samab
There will ALWAYS be good programmers and bad programmers.
Go and look at QNX CAR, the entire HMI is done with flash.
Well, I look forward to the PlayBook. We need other companies to step up to the plate. Apple alone is not enough (in terms of quantity of units to meet people's needs) to bring us to this next level of computing, and certainly things like holographics somewhere down the line.
A good comment on that blog: "This is clearly FUD intended to try and prevent Blackberry folks from moving to iPad between now and Q1 2011, when this device is supposed to be out."
Bingo.
That said, I still look forward to what they come up with. If it fails, at least we'll have a laugh. If it doesn't, it will be interesting.
As of now, my understanding is that it will only be Web apps + Flash. Whether they will later add native apps hasn't been addressed, I don't think. Obviously, they went this direction because, with a new OS, they have no time to put a native SDK together.
You can register for the SDK - I have. I'll let you know when it ships!
Comments
The old skool Flash was where everything had to be running in an animation, and you poll for events every 1/25 of a second (eg. running 25 fps). As Groovetube mentions now it's more of something where there are listeners for events, you don't need the timeline running. But Flash player still has to be *listening* for events.
There are two forces at work. As Groovetube mentions, on the dev side, there is smart coding and so on. On the other side though, pre-10.1 as we know things are not very pretty no matter what the dev does. The problem is not so much the code but as soon as you start having animations, etc. the render engine starts to chew up CPU. I don't think listeners and idling is the issue as much as animation and sound.
Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation. Everyone is going to go nuts on the animation of apps because they can and because of current Flash habits. On top of that the PlayBook OS itself is supposed to be intensely animation heavy and especially, transparency-compositing-heavy. As Flash designers and devs know, once you have transparency, be prepared for some CPU nom nom nom. Throw in on-the-fly drop shadow, blur and other render effects on a per-element(symbol) basis. Mmm...
Basically what happened is Adobe and RIM got together based on their desire to stick it up Apple. RIM of course wants to be back in the limelight and prevent tablets and iPhones from invading their business domain. Adobe is pissed that a major, popular mobile OS almost completely locked them out. They want to get back on Flash on mobile in a big way, who knows how Froyo adoption and Flash-on-Froyo is doing. So Adobe goes to RIM, promises some very, very, very big things, they scheme, and voila. A Flash-driven, RIM developed iPad killer.
It will be good times to see how this plays out.
Adobe is smart, in terms of betting on both Android and RIM. But time will reveal the payout from the gamble.
Isn't there a timeline and a stage?
What provides the animation when a Flash app is idling, listening for events?
.
Dick,
as you should well know, any application dev platform requires knowledge of optimization, keeping memory use low, etc. etc.. They -all- have it. It's my view a good number of bad flash sites out there is because of very, poor coding practices.
I don't get the high cpu usage on windows, and I used to with pre 10.1 pre 10.1 was not good, this is why they've begun with a completely rewritten player. It was about freaking time, thx to SJ for lighting the fire finally.
I think the reason (necessity?) for the 1GHz Dual Core CPU and 1 GB RAM is to mitigate Flash performance issues.
What remains to be seen is if they can resolve the battery issue.
It's been a while, but AIR, Flash runs like a continuous movie clip with the ability to detect and handle mouse (touch) events and some other events. Even when idle, the "clip" is running.
If they just skin QNX with Flash (or vice versa) then both will be competing for resources to perform similar, overlapping functions. Because of the hardware, that's probably OK (at least as an interim solution).
But, to resolve the battery issue, they will need to shut down some of the hardware (display, CPU Core, a block of RAM, etc). Who (QNX or Flash) detects when and what should be done, and who actually does it-- requires some interoperability between Flash and QNX at a much lower level than that in which Flash usually runs (an app using OS services or a plugin app using browser services).
If they are successful, there are some interesting potentials:
1) An OS with Flash built-in to provide the UI and presentation components
2) Flash with an integral OS
.
Come to think of it, basically this tablet is going to be predominantly Flash-on-QNX. It's more risky the more I think of it.
The old skool Flash was where everything had to be running in an animation, and you poll for events every 1/25 of a second (eg. running 25 fps). As Groovetube mentions now it's more of something where there are listeners for events, you don't need the timeline running. But Flash player still has to be *listening* for events.
I have dabbled in animation and compositing with FCP and Motion... everything from simple transitions, titles, tracking, rotoscoping, particle generation, morphing, tweening... could someone 'splain to me how you do some of these things without a timeline.
There are two forces at work. As Groovetube mentions, on the dev side, there is smart coding and so on. On the other side though, pre-10.1 as we know things are not very pretty no matter what the dev does. The problem is not so much the code but as soon as you start having animations, etc. the render engine starts to chew up CPU. I don't think listeners and idling is the issue as much as animation and sound.
For purposes of this question, ignore the old, bad, legacy Flash and focus specifically on 10.1 or state-of-the-art Flash.
Let me make sure I understand.
1) Flash remains an interpreted language, correct?
2) Instead of being poll-driven, it is interrupt-driven (listeners)
3) when a listener is triggered, an "animation" runs
4) the animation is coded in ActionScript and must be interpreted
5) once interpreted the graphics generation is handled by a real-time render engine
Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation. Everyone is going to go nuts on the animation of apps because they can and because of current Flash habits. On top of that the PlayBook OS itself is supposed to be intensely animation heavy and especially, transparency-compositing-heavy. As Flash designers and devs know, once you have transparency, be prepared for some CPU nom nom nom. Throw in on-the-fly drop shadow, blur and other render effects on a per-element(symbol) basis. Mmm...
Emphasis mine:
I understand the attractions/costs to use dynamic, real-time animation at the app level.
But, you are saying that the QNX/Flash hybrid OS is going to do animations at the system level.
Certainly that won't be ActionScript and interpreted then rendered-- rather some very tight code like CoreAnimation on iOS... right?
Here's a Flash from the past, ca 1994:
Macromedia Director (1993-2005)
The "multimedia" hype is now in full swing. Myst is a big seller and 'multimedia CD-Roms' are selling in shops. Bill Gates announces the licensing of Director player. Marc Canter said that this " was a trip - as I knew he didn't really get the ramifications of building animation into Windows".3 Marc had been a strong advocate of OS level support for playback and worked hard to get the MS deal done. He thought that animation should be an OS level data type like text, sound and images. Marc's successor thought that system level support (in essence writing parts of the OS) was too grandiose for such a small company and relegated the system players to the back burner where they quietly died.
http://www.lingoworkshop.com/articles/history.php
I re-watched the PlayBook video paying close attention to the animation.
I think that, now, I better understand-- they were showing off the OS's animation/presentation capability.
To be fair, Apple and Android Device mfgrs do this in their presos, to some extent -- but it is always in conjunction with a user...
The PlayBook video didn't show any user interaction, not even one finger -- Don't touch that touch screen!
Seriously, it was just one big [Flash] movie... more of a cartoon, actually.
Above, you said: "Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation."
It appears, at least for now, that RIM/Adobe have fallen victim to the "animation" temptress, and forgotten the user.
Will they be able to kick the habit?
Basically what happened is Adobe and RIM got together based on their desire to stick it up Apple. RIM of course wants to be back in the limelight and prevent tablets and iPhones from invading their business domain. Adobe is pissed that a major, popular mobile OS almost completely locked them out. They want to get back on Flash on mobile in a big way, who knows how Froyo adoption and Flash-on-Froyo is doing. So Adobe goes to RIM, promises some very, very, very big things, they scheme, and voila. A Flash-driven, RIM developed iPad killer.
It will be good times to see how this plays out.
Adobe is smart, in terms of betting on both Android and RIM. But time will reveal the payout from the gamble.
Just for the record, I ran the PlayBook vid at 720P, full screen, on a 24" iMac 2.8 GHz, Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD2600 GPU. The Flash plugin spiked from about 12% CPU up to about 104% CPU for the duration
,
Come to think of it, basically this tablet is going to be predominantly Flash-on-QNX. It's more risky the more I think of it.
There will ALWAYS be good programmers and bad programmers.
Go and look at QNX CAR, the entire HMI is done with flash.
How do you know it's going to be cool? From a mocked up video? I seem to recall a lot of people that were pretty sure the Courier was going to kick ass and take names, based on a video, and we know how that turned out....
Maybe it'll be nice. Maybe it'll be deeply flawed. I'm very curious about battery life, since the specs sound pretty power hungry.
At any rate, about the best we can say at this point is that RIM is going to bring a 5"x7" touch tablet to market running an OS they recently purchased and that given the specs it should be reasonably speedy. Beyond that (and by every metric that really counts-- ease of use, interaction with eco-system, if any, battery life, quality of apps) we don't really know anything.
Apple rules
But, they have nothing to show today! This was their Big day!. Their big chance to make a good impression. They showed a "concept" movie-- they have nothing else!
yes. it was a big day for RIM and they did make a good impression to many people.
this thread is hilarious.
with several people trying to discredit RIM, absolutely. i welcome the iPad, PlayBook and all other tablets to the marketplace; it's healthy for the consumer.
I have dabbled in animation and compositing with FCP and Motion... everything from simple transitions, titles, tracking, rotoscoping, particle generation, morphing, tweening... could someone 'splain to me how you do some of these things without a timeline.
You can code it, obviously there's an internal timer, but you don't have to touch the timeline to generate x, y, alpha, etc. parameters for objects on the screen. That's as far as my understanding. Similar to how in HTML/CSS/Javascript you can create fade-ins and animation without an explicit timeline. Basically code is in loops, every xth of a second change a certain parameter, or, generate new movie clips on the fly (that's how you create pretty particles/movie clips programatically). If someone knows how this is now done in a better way, do share.
For purposes of this question, ignore the old, bad, legacy Flash and focus specifically on 10.1 or state-of-the-art Flash.
Let me make sure I understand.
1) Flash remains an interpreted language, correct?
2) Instead of being poll-driven, it is interrupt-driven (listeners)
3) when a listener is triggered, an "animation" runs
4) the animation is coded in ActionScript and must be interpreted
5) once interpreted the graphics generation is handled by a real-time render engine
This was what I was bitching about in another thread. 10.1 was predominantly about GPU decoding of videos. Then now they're talking about 3D acceleration. All this does not fully address the issues you raised above. I still say IMO the real-time render engine is the most CPU intense part of Flash, in most cases where highly complex math is not being done.
I understand the attractions/costs to use dynamic, real-time animation at the app level.
But, you are saying that the QNX/Flash hybrid OS is going to do animations at the system level.
Certainly that won't be ActionScript and interpreted then rendered-- rather some very tight code like CoreAnimation on iOS... right?
Another poster mentioned above it will be more tightly integrated. Let's hope so. It will be the first time it is done for Flash at any significant scale.
I re-watched the PlayBook video paying close attention to the animation.
I think that, now, I better understand-- they were showing off the OS's animation/presentation capability.
To be fair, Apple and Android Device mfgrs do this in their presos, to some extent -- but it is always in conjunction with a user...
The PlayBook video didn't show any user interaction, not even one finger -- Don't touch that touch screen!
Seriously, it was just one big [Flash] movie... more of a cartoon, actually.
I know you're kinda concerned about this, so am I. Basically it was a mock-up and teaser video that RIM just really needed to get out the door as a massive PR and Marketing stunt. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and see what eventuates. The whole video was probably composited in After Effects or maybe even a Discreet tool.
Above, you said: "Put all this on top of QNX and you've got an interesting but risky situation."
It appears, at least for now, that RIM/Adobe have fallen victim to the "animation" temptress, and forgotten the user.
Will they be able to kick the habit?
Well, this is what they think they can/ need to do to fight the iPad. Not many people actually "get" Apple. Sure stuff from Apple and the UI is cool and sexy, but it is rarely outright frivolous.
Just for the record, I ran the PlayBook vid at 720P, full screen, on a 24" iMac 2.8 GHz, Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD2600 GPU. The Flash plugin spiked from about 12% CPU up to about 104% CPU for the duration
I think your GPU is not supported for 10.1 hardware decoding. You'll have to check the release notes. Yet another issue with 10.1. It really wasn't that superb of an update, it is no panacea.
with several people trying to discredit RIM, absolutely. i welcome the iPad, PlayBook and all other tablets to the marketplace; it's healthy for the consumer.
There will ALWAYS be good programmers and bad programmers.
Go and look at QNX CAR, the entire HMI is done with flash.
Well, I look forward to the PlayBook. We need other companies to step up to the plate. Apple alone is not enough (in terms of quantity of units to meet people's needs) to bring us to this next level of computing, and certainly things like holographics somewhere down the line.
http://www.singularityhacker.com/201...snt-exist.html
A good comment on that blog: "This is clearly FUD intended to try and prevent Blackberry folks from moving to iPad between now and Q1 2011, when this device is supposed to be out."
Bingo.
That said, I still look forward to what they come up with. If it fails, at least we'll have a laugh. If it doesn't, it will be interesting.
As of now, my understanding is that it will only be Web apps + Flash. Whether they will later add native apps hasn't been addressed, I don't think. Obviously, they went this direction because, with a new OS, they have no time to put a native SDK together.
You can register for the SDK - I have. I'll let you know when it ships!