It's going too far for a U turn. I'd really hoped this would get sorted... As the spec of handsets gets better and better they're far more able to run flash easily. There was an argument for what Steve is saying but every day that passes makes it less relevant.
Quote:
My business partner has an HTC desire (ugly handset) but the browsing on it includes flash, and it's absolutely great.
It has Flash Lite 4, not Flash. Being able to see Flash ads and play a very, very small selection of games designed for Flash Lite is NOT running Flash. This is the problem and proof that Adobe has been lethargic on their Flash monopoly. Apple and MS are the saviours getting Adobe to actually do something about Flash. If not for Silverlight and the iPhone Flash would be even farther behind than it is now.
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This is history repeating. Apple are going to go down a closed path while someone else develops a parallel open path and they will overtake eventually. Apple innovate, but the control that leads to that innovation will eventually lead to them being surpassed.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but now you're just blatantly lying. Apple is going down an open path by supporting open web standards. They even developed a browser engine that would be effective for mobiles while offering a rich browser experience. Adobe's Flash is proprietary and closed. Being developed to run on all platforms does NOT make it open.
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It's only going to take one really nice Android handset with drag and drop and flash integration and huge swathes will move over because they are copying all of the strengths but leaving out the draw backs. I've seen it and used it and Android in itself is actually really good and getting better.
Playing video over Flash is not "leaving out the drawbacks". Just wait until Flash 10.1 finally comes around. Even the Nexus One with its 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM will not be able to play a 480p video from Hulu. Just check out the Joojoo or a netbook which is on a much more capable Atom processor to see how much of a resource hog it is. Once it finally does playback without stuttering you then have power issues. You can test this yourself with YouTube under HTML5 and Flash on a notebook.
Question: If this is all Apple's fault and Flash has been around and available since before the iPhone then why is that Flash is STILL not yet released for the OPEN Android that was well known before the iPhone was officially announced. Seems to me, that even if Apple agreed to allow Flash 10.1 on the iPhone the FACT that it's still not on Android means that Adobe is playing a lot of catch up. That is even before you take into consideration just how bad Flash is for Mac OS X.
But, without flash it will never be a complete web browsing experience.
This "complete" stuff is extremely subjective, and is the last refuge of the defeated.
If you're talking surfing porn on your mobile device, then yes, you're potential orgasm will be incomplete or severely impacted. It might be a rather floppy situation.
Otherwise, it all depends on the sites you visit. Many of the major sites have moved or are moving to HTML5, YouTube among them. Everyone is getting in line (perhaps apart from BangBros., YouJ*zz, and M*lfslist, etc.) to make their content iPad friendly. The web-browsing experience for all is about to get pretty damn complete. So why be without Apple-device goodness when everyone's moving in Apple's direction?
You're either on the Apple train or you're doing it wrong. Developers move in whatever direction the big dollar-signs are. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's all in Apple's direction.
"While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."
Wow, that's rich! One proprietary dinosaur of a company bad-mouthing another. Apple is just as proprietary as Adobe, if not more so. Nice try, Steve!
That's the best answer you could come up with?!?!?
There are a hell of a lot of valid points in Jobs' letter, which you ignore. Instead, you just want to be snarky?
Apple doesn't need to tell developers how to write apps. Let the USERS decide the winners and losers as far as apps on the iPhone goes. If developers use inferior tools and produce inferior apps, compared to apps written with proper tools leveraging all the APIs, they will be rejected by users. This is how it ought to be IMO.
Photoshop is unique in that it has no competitors and has been allowed by Adobe to languish on the Mac platform. I don't think that'll happen with the iPhone because the app environment is too competitive. How many iPhone apps have no competitor?
Telling developers how to write their apps just pisses them off. It may have the undesired effect of driving them to other platforms.
There is no evidence of that at all. In fact, it appears to be the other way around.
As for Mac developers, we love it. Apples SDKs are a god-send. Follow the guidelines, use the provide tools and let your creative bent be the final judge.
If it weren't for Apple's directions, the App store would not be so successful. Sure, not every app is to everybody's liking, but if the developer doesn't make the cream come to the top, somebody else will.
Why allow inferior tools? Why allow unproven APIs? Same reason why the millions of PC apps aren't worth shit. Not that some Mac apps aren't equally bad, it is just a fact that the more loose the controls are there are the more bad the PC apps are. The majority of them don't work on the latest Window's OS. And worse they bring with them a degree of insecurity, and the consequences of which Apple or those of us who understand it, will not accept.
You're delusional if you think I support Adobe. I just enjoy pointing out the irony of Steve Jobs calling Flash a closed standard when every aspect of the entire Apple ecosystem is closed, proprietary, and anti-competitive. You can't develop iPhone applications without using XCode. You can't sell your app for the iPhone unless it's approved by der Führer Jobs himself. You can only use iTunes to transfer your media onto an iPod, iPad, or iPhone. You can't have Flash on your iPad. You can't have an HDMI port or Blu-Ray player on your Mac. It seems Mr. Jobs loves dishing out punishment and his followers are some seriously brainwashed masochists!
There are DVI to HDMI cables. It's compatible you know that?
You can have a blu-ray burner in your MacPro if you want to.
Who wants a blu ray player in his computer. Blu-ray is COPYRIGHT/DRM disaster.
Have you actually used OSX before?
It runs ADOBE software too you know. Oh ofcourse. Any software company has to ask Steve if they can write software for OSX.
Any company can write software for MacOS.
You can't say the complete ECOSYSTEM is closed.
You talk a lot of trash. And lies. Exact prototype of someone who never used an OSX system before.
Yep, you've made it clear that you don't understand the differences among things like "closed" and "proprietary" and "free", or things like "platforms", "operating systems", and "the web", so it's not surprising that many things would strike you as ironic. Being massively clueless will do that.
No party should have as much influence over the web as Adobe does right now. The stance that Apple is taking had helped to revise that power, whether that was their ultimate intention or not.
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web and in to apps (iAd!) to disrupt Google's ad revenue/plans.
Fair enough, reasoned and valid points. Especially about flash lite. I accept defeat.
The only point I'm trying to make is that Android has stated they will be including full flash (I think in 2.2?) and the pace that the specs of handsets have been increasing in my opinion it will not be an issue in the future, and I had hoped for the possibility of a U turn in the future, this is looking less and less likely.
Android itself may be open, but there *are* no Flash players for the various mutations of Android smartphones.
Even if there were, neither the $699 Flash CS5 development environment nor the Flash player are open sourced. Anything that has to be licensed from Adobe is, by definition, "not open".
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Originally Posted by hobbes-99
Yes... Really...
I'm still waiting to see any shipping version of mobile Flash... Until then it's all pretend stuff made up by the Adobe "evangelists". Come back when we can all run benchmarks against an actual deliverable of a mobile Flash player on a mobile platform.
... If you're talking surfing porn on your mobile device, then yes, you're potential orgasm will be incomplete or severely impacted. It might be a rather floppy situation. ...
Oh, the porn sites are definitely going to switch to HTML5/H.264.
If there's any industry that doesn't care about the technology as long as they make money, it's porn, and sticking with Flash is not what's going to make them the most money.
The lie is a blank Flash document uses 120%. Even my most complex Flash apps start out at maybe 50% on launch and run at a sustained 20%. I can make HTML5 canvas tag use a sustained 77% on a quad core Mac Pro. I have a stupid test page that I wrote just to see if I could max it out. I was able to bring the machine to a crawl using a really bad javascript loop but the browser is smart enough to stop the script and open an alert box. But with just piling on canvas tags (6) and animating them, HTML5 becomes very CPU intensive just like Flash.
I've had "simple" Flash sites run my processors to max, and therefore my fans and temps up.
I will agree that Canvas being a processor hog and Canvas ads will likely be a bitch to block once that becomes a standard for browsers. Maybe one day Canvas will be offloaded to the GPU and HW accelerated, but for doing interactive animations Flash will be the de facto standard for many years to come simply by virtue of the creation tools.
That is one aspect of this issue. It's not an all or nothing attack against Flash. HMTL5 offers many things that much better than Flash on any platform. The most notable are the video and audio tags. The other end of this issue is the resources Flash needs, which Jobs addressed. It's just not a good plugin for a pocketable device.
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web to disrupt Google's add revenue/plans.
Apple are trying to kill the internet? Wow, that's a new one on me. You'll know it's happened when they take the i out of iMac
Which iPhone is he using where there is 10 hours of video playing?
My hunch is that Apple has, on the iPhones in their labs, the ability to run apps in isolation (i.e. without any other things going on). And I mean more than just turning off Bluetooth, or 3G, or toggling down brightness, etc, which anybody could do. I mean significantly shutdown other parts of the iPhone system so that they can directly compare codecs (for example) without a bunch of other cruft going on to confuse the answers. In other words, a controlled experiment, rather than an "as used" experiment. Both types of experiments have their uses, obviously.
Maybe Jobs was quoting results from a controlled experiment.
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web to disrupt Google's add revenue/plans.
No one would ever argue that Flash makes the web passable. Flash on the web has or had its place, but at best it made some parts of the web more usable. Other, more open and better performing alternatives are now available.
I also don't agree with the assertion that the web is a competitor to iPhone apps. Web apps will never be able to integrate with the OS as well as native apps, so that isn't really a concern. If Apple were worried about web apps in general, they wouldn't be promoting tools like HTML5. I don't think Google really cares what the medium for their ads is, so long as the ads get served. iAd is definitely a shot at Google ad revenue, but that is a separate issue.
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 there is a great deal of angst in the community, including the user community, that wants to know WHY Apple has made this choice. To many, it doesn't seem right, fair, or reasonable. My kids want to know why they can't play on their "Poptropica" accounts. (I still need to check whether there's an App for that, Doh!) And my wife misses her favorite online Mahjong game. (None of the other implementations we can find measure up somehow.)
This letter serves as the beginning of answering the questions that are floating around. I certainly appreciate the decision more now, and I wasn't even that much against it to begin with.
You managed to reply to my comment without confronting its central thesis. Steve Jobs claims that Adobe's Flash technology is proprietary. This is a fact. Flash IS proprietary. However, Steve also claims that HTML5 (which includes H.264 for video playback) is an "open standard". His words:
"...we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript ? all open standards."
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.
HTML5 is an open standard. It includes other forms of playback as well as H.264. You are killing your own central thesis.
Comments
Nobody but geeks will even know the letter exists. This is hardly national news.
It's on FoxNews and guardian.co.uk already. Not to mention several tech sites. Which people do read. Not just geeks.
It's going too far for a U turn. I'd really hoped this would get sorted... As the spec of handsets gets better and better they're far more able to run flash easily. There was an argument for what Steve is saying but every day that passes makes it less relevant.
My business partner has an HTC desire (ugly handset) but the browsing on it includes flash, and it's absolutely great.
It has Flash Lite 4, not Flash. Being able to see Flash ads and play a very, very small selection of games designed for Flash Lite is NOT running Flash. This is the problem and proof that Adobe has been lethargic on their Flash monopoly. Apple and MS are the saviours getting Adobe to actually do something about Flash. If not for Silverlight and the iPhone Flash would be even farther behind than it is now.
This is history repeating. Apple are going to go down a closed path while someone else develops a parallel open path and they will overtake eventually. Apple innovate, but the control that leads to that innovation will eventually lead to them being surpassed.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but now you're just blatantly lying. Apple is going down an open path by supporting open web standards. They even developed a browser engine that would be effective for mobiles while offering a rich browser experience. Adobe's Flash is proprietary and closed. Being developed to run on all platforms does NOT make it open.
It's only going to take one really nice Android handset with drag and drop and flash integration and huge swathes will move over because they are copying all of the strengths but leaving out the draw backs. I've seen it and used it and Android in itself is actually really good and getting better.
Playing video over Flash is not "leaving out the drawbacks". Just wait until Flash 10.1 finally comes around. Even the Nexus One with its 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM will not be able to play a 480p video from Hulu. Just check out the Joojoo or a netbook which is on a much more capable Atom processor to see how much of a resource hog it is. Once it finally does playback without stuttering you then have power issues. You can test this yourself with YouTube under HTML5 and Flash on a notebook.
Question: If this is all Apple's fault and Flash has been around and available since before the iPhone then why is that Flash is STILL not yet released for the OPEN Android that was well known before the iPhone was officially announced. Seems to me, that even if Apple agreed to allow Flash 10.1 on the iPhone the FACT that it's still not on Android means that Adobe is playing a lot of catch up. That is even before you take into consideration just how bad Flash is for Mac OS X.
But, without flash it will never be a complete web browsing experience.
This "complete" stuff is extremely subjective, and is the last refuge of the defeated.
If you're talking surfing porn on your mobile device, then yes, you're potential orgasm will be incomplete or severely impacted. It might be a rather floppy situation.
Otherwise, it all depends on the sites you visit. Many of the major sites have moved or are moving to HTML5, YouTube among them. Everyone is getting in line (perhaps apart from BangBros., YouJ*zz, and M*lfslist, etc.) to make their content iPad friendly. The web-browsing experience for all is about to get pretty damn complete. So why be without Apple-device goodness when everyone's moving in Apple's direction?
You're either on the Apple train or you're doing it wrong. Developers move in whatever direction the big dollar-signs are. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's all in Apple's direction.
"While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."
Wow, that's rich! One proprietary dinosaur of a company bad-mouthing another. Apple is just as proprietary as Adobe, if not more so. Nice try, Steve!
That's the best answer you could come up with?!?!?
There are a hell of a lot of valid points in Jobs' letter, which you ignore. Instead, you just want to be snarky?
Thompson
I disagree with this.
Apple doesn't need to tell developers how to write apps. Let the USERS decide the winners and losers as far as apps on the iPhone goes. If developers use inferior tools and produce inferior apps, compared to apps written with proper tools leveraging all the APIs, they will be rejected by users. This is how it ought to be IMO.
Photoshop is unique in that it has no competitors and has been allowed by Adobe to languish on the Mac platform. I don't think that'll happen with the iPhone because the app environment is too competitive. How many iPhone apps have no competitor?
Telling developers how to write their apps just pisses them off. It may have the undesired effect of driving them to other platforms.
There is no evidence of that at all. In fact, it appears to be the other way around.
As for Mac developers, we love it. Apples SDKs are a god-send. Follow the guidelines, use the provide tools and let your creative bent be the final judge.
If it weren't for Apple's directions, the App store would not be so successful. Sure, not every app is to everybody's liking, but if the developer doesn't make the cream come to the top, somebody else will.
Why allow inferior tools? Why allow unproven APIs? Same reason why the millions of PC apps aren't worth shit. Not that some Mac apps aren't equally bad, it is just a fact that the more loose the controls are there are the more bad the PC apps are. The majority of them don't work on the latest Window's OS. And worse they bring with them a degree of insecurity, and the consequences of which Apple or those of us who understand it, will not accept.
I should send Steve Jobs the link in my signature.
You're delusional if you think I support Adobe. I just enjoy pointing out the irony of Steve Jobs calling Flash a closed standard when every aspect of the entire Apple ecosystem is closed, proprietary, and anti-competitive. You can't develop iPhone applications without using XCode. You can't sell your app for the iPhone unless it's approved by der Führer Jobs himself. You can only use iTunes to transfer your media onto an iPod, iPad, or iPhone. You can't have Flash on your iPad. You can't have an HDMI port or Blu-Ray player on your Mac. It seems Mr. Jobs loves dishing out punishment and his followers are some seriously brainwashed masochists!
There are DVI to HDMI cables. It's compatible you know that?
You can have a blu-ray burner in your MacPro if you want to.
Who wants a blu ray player in his computer. Blu-ray is COPYRIGHT/DRM disaster.
Have you actually used OSX before?
It runs ADOBE software too you know. Oh ofcourse. Any software company has to ask Steve if they can write software for OSX.
Any company can write software for MacOS.
You can't say the complete ECOSYSTEM is closed.
You talk a lot of trash. And lies. Exact prototype of someone who never used an OSX system before.
Yep, you've made it clear that you don't understand the differences among things like "closed" and "proprietary" and "free", or things like "platforms", "operating systems", and "the web", so it's not surprising that many things would strike you as ironic. Being massively clueless will do that.
Kind of ironic, that.
No party should have as much influence over the web as Adobe does right now. The stance that Apple is taking had helped to revise that power, whether that was their ultimate intention or not.
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web and in to apps (iAd!) to disrupt Google's ad revenue/plans.
Fair enough, reasoned and valid points. Especially about flash lite. I accept defeat.
The only point I'm trying to make is that Android has stated they will be including full flash (I think in 2.2?) and the pace that the specs of handsets have been increasing in my opinion it will not be an issue in the future, and I had hoped for the possibility of a U turn in the future, this is looking less and less likely.
Android... Think before you type....
Android itself may be open, but there *are* no Flash players for the various mutations of Android smartphones.
Even if there were, neither the $699 Flash CS5 development environment nor the Flash player are open sourced. Anything that has to be licensed from Adobe is, by definition, "not open".
Yes... Really...
I'm still waiting to see any shipping version of mobile Flash... Until then it's all pretend stuff made up by the Adobe "evangelists". Come back when we can all run benchmarks against an actual deliverable of a mobile Flash player on a mobile platform.
... If you're talking surfing porn on your mobile device, then yes, you're potential orgasm will be incomplete or severely impacted. It might be a rather floppy situation. ...
Oh, the porn sites are definitely going to switch to HTML5/H.264.
If there's any industry that doesn't care about the technology as long as they make money, it's porn, and sticking with Flash is not what's going to make them the most money.
The lie is a blank Flash document uses 120%. Even my most complex Flash apps start out at maybe 50% on launch and run at a sustained 20%. I can make HTML5 canvas tag use a sustained 77% on a quad core Mac Pro. I have a stupid test page that I wrote just to see if I could max it out. I was able to bring the machine to a crawl using a really bad javascript loop but the browser is smart enough to stop the script and open an alert box. But with just piling on canvas tags (6) and animating them, HTML5 becomes very CPU intensive just like Flash.
I've had "simple" Flash sites run my processors to max, and therefore my fans and temps up.
I will agree that Canvas being a processor hog and Canvas ads will likely be a bitch to block once that becomes a standard for browsers. Maybe one day Canvas will be offloaded to the GPU and HW accelerated, but for doing interactive animations Flash will be the de facto standard for many years to come simply by virtue of the creation tools.
That is one aspect of this issue. It's not an all or nothing attack against Flash. HMTL5 offers many things that much better than Flash on any platform. The most notable are the video and audio tags. The other end of this issue is the resources Flash needs, which Jobs addressed. It's just not a good plugin for a pocketable device.
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web to disrupt Google's add revenue/plans.
Apple are trying to kill the internet? Wow, that's a new one on me. You'll know it's happened when they take the i out of iMac
Hmmmm...
Which iPhone is he using where there is 10 hours of video playing?
My hunch is that Apple has, on the iPhones in their labs, the ability to run apps in isolation (i.e. without any other things going on). And I mean more than just turning off Bluetooth, or 3G, or toggling down brightness, etc, which anybody could do. I mean significantly shutdown other parts of the iPhone system so that they can directly compare codecs (for example) without a bunch of other cruft going on to confuse the answers. In other words, a controlled experiment, rather than an "as used" experiment. Both types of experiments have their uses, obviously.
Maybe Jobs was quoting results from a controlled experiment.
Thompson
The web is Apple's main competitor to iPhone apps. Also Google depends on people staying on the web. One conspiracy theory might go that Apple knows that Flash makes the web passable, so they are trying to kill it, to lower the quality of the web, weakening competition with iPhone apps, and in general getting people off the web to disrupt Google's add revenue/plans.
No one would ever argue that Flash makes the web passable. Flash on the web has or had its place, but at best it made some parts of the web more usable. Other, more open and better performing alternatives are now available.
I also don't agree with the assertion that the web is a competitor to iPhone apps. Web apps will never be able to integrate with the OS as well as native apps, so that isn't really a concern. If Apple were worried about web apps in general, they wouldn't be promoting tools like HTML5. I don't think Google really cares what the medium for their ads is, so long as the ads get served. iAd is definitely a shot at Google ad revenue, but that is a separate issue.
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 there is a great deal of angst in the community, including the user community, that wants to know WHY Apple has made this choice. To many, it doesn't seem right, fair, or reasonable. My kids want to know why they can't play on their "Poptropica" accounts. (I still need to check whether there's an App for that, Doh!) And my wife misses her favorite online Mahjong game. (None of the other implementations we can find measure up somehow.)
This letter serves as the beginning of answering the questions that are floating around. I certainly appreciate the decision more now, and I wasn't even that much against it to begin with.
Thompson
You managed to reply to my comment without confronting its central thesis. Steve Jobs claims that Adobe's Flash technology is proprietary. This is a fact. Flash IS proprietary. However, Steve also claims that HTML5 (which includes H.264 for video playback) is an "open standard". His words:
"...we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript ? all open standards."
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.
HTML5 is an open standard. It includes other forms of playback as well as H.264. You are killing your own central thesis.
Thompson