Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash as unfit for modern era

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Comments

  • Reply 61 of 350
    Just use HTML5



    No big deal.



    Sent from iPhone
  • Reply 62 of 350
    tulkastulkas Posts: 3,757member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by BenRoethig View Post


    Jobs could care less if the standard used is open or not. He's commissioned plenty of closed ones and modified quite a few open standards to make them closed. What he cares about is that adobe has control and he doesn't.



    And he admits as much. That was the point of his sixth point. It would be very dangerous for Apple to leave control of items like dev tools in the hands of third parties. They could be inferior to Apples, but their convenience might cause a good number of devs to use them. If that happened, whenever Apple rolled out new features and APIs, they could not count on developers taking advantage of them thereby hobbling the massive expenditures of R&D that the put into these new features. If Apple want the iPhone experience for all users to improve as they improve the platform, a dependancy on third party dev tools is extraneous at best. It would massively counter productive in general, for devs and for Apple.



    I have no problem with Apple wanting control over their platform, though sometimes I question how the exercise that control. This isn't one of those cases.



    As Jobs said, if Adobe really wants to get on the iPhone train, then they can create tools for HTML5 development. This would allow them to keep all of what they claim are the benefits of Flash development, i.e. cross platform, common, rapid, etc. It would obviously cost them in resources, but no one said business was free.
  • Reply 63 of 350
    And...



    It's sort of like the USA floating our carriers around the world. WHo is going to object?



    Adobe (se post below) should have been trying to engage APple on this quietly and proactively. Not by throwing a hissy fit. They invited this by unleashing the 'evangelists' who are like midget-hitman. WHy would they go so public with this?



    I don't get how they ever thought they could win this.



    They INVITED this kind of fight didn't they? What was the name of their little evangelist who wrote his temper tantrum and declared he would never buy Apple products again and blah, blah, blah.



    Well you might thank him for this.



    Play with fire and -



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by eightzero View Post


    Ignore the content for just a second and consider the delivery. Steve is the very recognizable face of Apple Inc., and he essentially throws down directly at a competitor. Where is "Mr. Adobe?" How will he respond? There really isn't a credible way for anyone at Adobe to respond - no one will listen to some non-descript VP of corporate isoterica explain why Apple is wrong. In this case, Steve is right because he is Steve.



    Steve and Apple have this craft down to an Art. There is *no way* for Adobe to debate these issues with their now disappearing supporters. Sure, argue in their stead, but Apple wins this whole thing where it matters hands down because Jobs spells chapter and verse of why he's right. It doesn't matter if he really is.



  • Reply 64 of 350
    bloggerblogbloggerblog Posts: 2,462member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by agl82 View Post




    The fees are only waived until 2016, where after sites serving H.264 internet video will have to pay MPEG LA $5 million. It is not "open" in any respect whatsoever. It is closed and proprietary, just like Flash. You're going from one closed standard in Flash to another in H.264. It's meaningless. And Steve Jobs is a liar. I am not an advocate of Flash or any other proprietary standard. Apple is Adobe is Microsoft, etc.



    Oh and, Quadra 610...cute chart.




    Just because you don't seem to understand does not mean Jobs is a liar.
  • Reply 65 of 350
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by agl82 View Post


    This is undeniably false. H.264 is a proprietary codec which must be licensed from MPEG LA. It is not "open" in any sense whatsoever. Steve Jobs is, therefore, a liar



    Jobs never said a word about H.264 in his statement. So no he's not a liar.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by agl82 View Post


    The fees are only waived until 2016, where after sites serving H.264 internet video will have to pay MPEG LA $5 million.



    or MPEG LA might decide to waive the fees again. It is their choice. They might even just drop the whole idea of fees and make h.264 a free for all.
  • Reply 66 of 350
    bdkennedy1bdkennedy1 Posts: 1,459member
    Most Adobe products have code that's over 20 years old. Adobe has sat on their asses for years piling small amounts of new code on top of old code creating new bloated, slow products.



    They've had no competition on the Mac side since Corel disappeared so they've had no incentive to improve their dinosaur products.



    Apple is giving them a kick in the ass to join the 21st century and Adobe doesn't like it.
  • Reply 67 of 350
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jlebrech View Post


    Just use HTML5



    No big deal.



    Sent from iPhone



    Ha Ha! That never gets old.........well sorta.
  • Reply 68 of 350
    tulkastulkas Posts: 3,757member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by markb View Post


    Isnt iTunes still Carbon based? I agree that Adobe drags its feet at best, but if the heart of your media empire hasnt "fully" adopted Mac OS X then....

    iTunes performs reasonably on most of my Macs but I do have to say that it can freeze the system at will when it decides it needs to. I guess it being their main cross-platform effort limits them as much as it limits Adobe.



    retract my comment if I am wrong about iTunes.



    I was wondering about that myself. Wasn't one of the main features in Snow Leopard that the finder became almost all Cocoa (maybe this was done with Leopard). Anyway, it does seem a bit odd that Jobs brings up Adobe's slow effort to move to all Cocoa when Apple also took quite some time.
  • Reply 69 of 350
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bdkennedy1 View Post


    Most Adobe products have code that's over 20 years old. Adobe has sat on their asses for years piling small amounts of new code on top of old code creating new bloated, slow products.



    the nail in the coffin for me was when one of Adobe's people admitted that they wrote Flash for Windows, and then just ported it to the Mac via slapping on some translation code. So since it works great in Windows, it is also great on the Mac OS.



    um, yeah
  • Reply 70 of 350
    daveyjjdaveyjj Posts: 120member
    I've already sent Steve an email to correct his spelling mistake in paragraph six. BlackBerry's second "B" is capitalized. Believe me, I'm not a grammar Nazi and don't own a BlackBerry device and normally wouldn't care, but I:



    - live in Waterloo (home to RIM)

    - work with an ex-VP of RIM

    - am married to an awesome writer/editor



    I had no choice but to send an email.
  • Reply 71 of 350
    agl82agl82 Posts: 15member
    .
  • Reply 72 of 350
    anonymouseanonymouse Posts: 6,857member
    It looks like AI decided to change the title of the article to something more inflammatory. Don't worry, we'll get to 300 posts, just give it time.
  • Reply 73 of 350
    john.bjohn.b Posts: 2,742member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by agl82 View Post


    This is undeniably false. H.264 is a proprietary codec which must be licensed from MPEG LA. It is not "open" in any sense whatsoever. Steve Jobs is, therefore, a liar.



    Seriously dude, why don't you and Richard Stahlman go build your little fantasy opensores world together and stop bothering the rest of us? Nobody is interested in running a third rate Ogg Vorbis codec with poor performance characteristics and no hardware acceleration (mobile or desktop).



  • Reply 74 of 350
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by agl82 View Post




    The fees are only waived until 2016, where after sites serving H.264 internet video will have to pay MPEG LA $5 million. It is not "open" in any respect whatsoever. It is closed and proprietary, just like Flash. You're going from one closed standard in Flash to another in H.264. It's meaningless. And Steve Jobs is a liar. I am not an advocate of Flash or any other proprietary standard. Apple is Adobe is Microsoft, etc.



    Oh and, Quadra 610...cute chart.




    No. Any company that sells the encoding/decoding/trans-coding of H264 will have to pay the licensing fees, not a random business that decides to post a video in H264 on their website. So, Google will have to pay the $5 million (or w/e it is) as royalties/licensing fees. Adobe will have to pay for it. Apple has to pay for it. They sell/provide services/products that encode/decode/trans-code video. The playback of that video on a website using HTML5 has already been paid for by the person who developed the browser and the cost to encode to that video has already been paid for through use of a encoder/trans-coder purchased.



    Commercial streaming = pay fee



    Small business with a profile video on web-page = no fee



    Unless I'm missing something...





    addition:

    and as far as I can see, its not $5million flat - its $0.20 per unit (from 100,000 to 5 million units) and $0.10 per unit (above 5 million units) with a capped cost of $5 million.



    and under 100,000 = no fee
  • Reply 75 of 350
    solipsismsolipsism Posts: 25,726member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by markb View Post


    Isnt iTunes still Carbon based? I agree that Adobe drags its feet at best, but if the heart of your media empire hasnt "fully" adopted Mac OS X then....

    iTunes performs reasonably on most of my Macs but I do have to say that it can freeze the system at will when it decides it needs to. I guess it being their main cross-platform effort limits them as much as it limits Adobe.



    retract my comment if I am wrong about iTunes.



    iTunes, iLife and many of their pro apps are still using legacy code. I suspect iTunes X will come out this fall for the next iPod/iTunes event. The others might appear this year, too. I have to think that if Jobs is stating how Adobe is still using Carbon that Apple may be ready to drop all Carbon this year, which would make that statement valid (after the fact) since it will be few years of CS5 using Carbon while Apple is full Cocoa. Just an assumption. They might not even support Carbon in the next version of Mac OS X if the rumour that no 10.7 preview will be coming until 2011.
  • Reply 76 of 350
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by scotty321 View Post


    Bravo, Steve Jobs!!! OUTSTANDING LETTER!!!



    Keep buying into the lies. SHEEPLE!



    Third party IDE's NOT from adobe include:

    FlashDevelop

    Eclipse with AIR / Flex SDK (Flex is open source and free)

    swfmill

    swish

    SWFTool

    haxe

    etc...

    Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_F...rd-party_tools



    And if you're talking about alternatives to flash player:



    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Playback



    You don't need adobe to exist to keep flash rolling, they're just the main company behind the momentum of flash and for obvious reasons. They have the best creative suites and they sell like crazy because they are the best. AIR runs with webkit and HTML5 included. Flash is far less closed than Objective C. Flex is open source. AMF is open source. Eclipse is open source. I'd say Adobe is taking a seriously unjust pounding by a bunch of people who don't know crap about crap.
  • Reply 77 of 350
    herbapouherbapou Posts: 2,228member
    The thing is loads of tablet computers supporting flash running on android and win7 will make it to the market soon. If Steve is right then those devices will have short battery life and multi-touch flash apps will suck. If not the ipad is going to be in trouble.



    Well with the amont of AAPL stocks I have he better be right
  • Reply 78 of 350
    Sweet. Very well written.
  • Reply 79 of 350
    gqbgqb Posts: 1,934member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by walshbj View Post


    I'm pretty surprised he felt compelled to write this letter. If Adobe Flash is going to circle the drain, let it. If not, so what? Adobe makes products that complement the Mac, why call them out?



    Because a day doesn't go by that some 3rd rate reviewer or reporter doesn't bring up freedom from Flash (or as they put it, 'lack of Flash') as a negative for Apple's mobile products.

    This letter just puts a stake in that meme's heart.
  • Reply 80 of 350
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    Quote:

    "Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"



    Except those technologies can't do half of what Flash can and to develop with the canvas tag (which is not really open standards either) takes a zillion times longer to do even the simplest animation. Furthermore to deploy an HTML5 application is more difficult as it is not encapsulated like an swf. It has several bits an pieces, which in some cases, conflict with other parts of the Javascript on a page and is difficult to debug.



    I totally agree that Flash is made for PC and not for mobile so no complaint about the lack of Flash there, just the criticism of Flash in general as serving no purpose in today's Internet, that I disagree with. Until there are better development tools for HTML5 and universal browser compatibility, it amounts to nothing more than dumbing down the web. Flash is a much more powerful application platform than javascript and your code can be encrypted so others cannot steal your work. Not so much with Javascript (is possible but trade secret)
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