Adobe Replies to Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flashâ€

[kevbo]

I wish it was supported too. Anyone else remember the days where top web designers would come out with an ultra cool flash design every few months specifically 2advanced? They're still around and all, but I bet they won't be able to use flash much longer. Any large company (many of 2advanced customers are) who has a decent technology advisor is going to put that stuff on hold. But I do miss it.

HTML5 is a coding language right? Versus Flash which is developed by something like Flash CS4, a very artist oriented tool. Perhaps it will work for most video (although I can't stream live video at any news sites, why?), but will it work for games and flash "apps"? I've seen that they have a couple of games on HTML5, but it was Doom or something. Flash games are vibrant and somewhat easy to make. I think we'd be doing the internet a disservice by ridding it of artist-oriented, rich content like Flash. There needs to be an alternative.

Anyone else think that Apple is doing this to "protect" us from free Flash games that could potentially harm their Apps Store revenue.

 

[BassGear]

It sux the iPad don't have flash, I understood this when I pre-ordered it, and I'm still happy with my iPad, but would enjoy it more with flash.

 

[Npred]

Flash

Completely agree. I have no opinion on the technology itself but when you can't play a video on your favorite sites it just makes you wonder if you made the right call buying an iPad. When ipad is launched in the uk loads of people will want to use the BBC iPlayer to watch tv but they won't be able to with the ipad. Any Brits reading should think about that before buying.

 

[kevbo]

So what happens if Flash makes a comeback? Android is already bigger than the iPhone, which may likely happen with the tablet scene since it seems Google's Android will be quicker to the scene this time. Will Steve Jobs be so arrogant as to continue making excuses about adding support it? Adobe has already shown that tablets can run Flash flawlessly.

I love my iPad. I've been using it 6+ hours a day. But if a nice Google is announced this week or early next, I'm taking it back. Android has its shortfalls, but its not a result of hubris on the part of the CEO.

 

[NumbLock]

Yep, there are so many people who just want the website to work and will have no clue why it doesn't.

+1 in the group who wants Apple and Adobe to play nice.

Show me something like Farmville in HTML5 and maybe I'll be a little more understanding. The best I've found are a few small proof-of-concept sites with rather poor support for various browsers (including Safari).:ipad-keyboard:

 

[Avalon]

I'm new here. This morning I went to online browse at Raymour & Flanigan for recliners. I got the message Adobe Flash Player was needed. I didn't buy my iPad to take the place of my laptops. There's enough I can do on iPad until a solution is found. I love the iPad and I'm still amazed by what it does!

 

[Seadog]

Apple products not working on sites is nothing new. Many sites will not recognize Safari. Many organizations, especially big institutions, will not port features for all of the major formats. The go with Microsoft operating systems, and Internet Explorer and that is it. You don't like it, too bad. Flash is the same way. It is a lazy way of doing things. Monday we had a major tornado episode, so I tried see what the news was tracking. All of their radar images were animated in Flash. Very agravating.

 

[4phun]

Apple products not working on sites is nothing new. Many sites will not recognize Safari. Many organizations, especially big institutions, will not port features for all of the major formats. The go with Microsoft operating systems, and Internet Explorer and that is it. You don't like it, too bad. Flash is the same way. It is a lazy way of doing things. Monday we had a major tornado episode, so I tried see what the news was tracking. All of their radar images were animated in Flash. Very aggravating.

I am a severe weather spotter for the NWS. I have no problem following SVWX on the iPad. You need to examine the top iPad WX apps, local TV apps etc. - all work with the iPad here in N GA.

Adobe has taken an noncompetitive position now that they control 96% of the web with flash. Only a world of fools will echo their anti competitive arguments which try to block HTML5 without thinking it through.

 

[write-stuff]

I guess I'm in the minority here. It's not that "sites don't recognize Safari". It's the other way around - Apple decided to exclude support for the sites.

It's looking to me to be a case of Steve Jobs having some personal vendetta against Adobe. So he invents this nonsense about saving us from ourselves by excluding flash support. It's an obvious straw man argument.

 

[4phun]

Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML5 Did

Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML5 Did

from Mashable! by Christina Warren

The battle over Flash and its role (or lack thereof) on the iPhone came to a head today when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter explaining why his company won’t support Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke with The Wall Street Journal to deliver his response. Unsurprisingly, the arguments from both parties are self-serving in parts and gloss over some realities.
It’s time to cut through the BS and, in turn, determine what the Apple-Adobe feud means for consumers and developers.

<hr>H.264 Rules Web Video, Not Flash

<hr>For most end-users, the debate over Flash is largely a debate about web video. Yes, Flash is used in other ways — for web-based games and ever-decreasingly in website design — but thanks in large part to YouTube, Flash is most commonly associated with web video.
In his letter, Steve Jobs highlights a point that I have made myself on many occasions: Web video is overwhelmingly encoded in H.264. Not only is the H.264 codec the default encoding setting for practically every video service online, it is also by and large the default codec for raw video from digital video cameras. That means that if you upload video from your Flip camera directly to YouTube, it doesn’t have to convert that video into a new format, which requires more time and resources.
Adobe started to support H.264 back in 2007, essentially buying Flash time as a video container without forcing video services like YouTube to transcode the native H.264 video into something else that Flash could use.
<hr>HTML5 Is the Best Way to Deliver Video on Mobile

<hr>The problem for Flash isn’t that it can’t adapt to contain other types of video; it is that software and hardware, particularly on the mobile side, have moved in a direction that natively supports the playback of H.264 content. Why bother using a container if you can play the file natively and get the memory advantages of not having a container plus hardware optimization?
Even on devices that support Flash Lite, the video experience is almost always optimized for H.264. HTML5 just makes the process easier to integrate across multiple platforms. While the proprietary and licensed nature of H.264 has turned some browser makers away from supporting H.264 in the HTML5 video standard (Mozilla and Opera are the most vocal opponents), mobile devices that already have it licensed by hardware vendors are going to use the technology. The quality, player experience and even live stream and ad insertion abilities of HTML5 are expanding all the time as well.
<center>
</center>Look at the Sublime Player demo from Jilion for a great example of what can be done with HTML5 and web video. SublimeVideo is working on a solution that will serve HTML5 video by default in mobile browsers, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9, and serve Flash video by default in browsers such as Firefox and Opera.
The fact that so many web video providers are working to embrace HTML5 isn’t because Apple doesn’t support Flash, but because it is the best way to deliver video to all smartphone users. With or without Apple, the shift to native playback is where web video is headed.
<hr>Flash Hasn’t Proven Itself on Mobile

<hr>Even if you completely disagree with Apple’s position on Flash, the reality is this: Flash has not proven itself on mobile platforms. Specialized systems like Popbox, the new TiVo Premiere and some other embedded iTV systems aside, as a technology Flash has existed almost solely in the desktop browser.
Flash 10.1 is supposed to be the first version of Flash that will actually ship on a number of mobile phones in a way that is more than just Flash Lite. Flash Lite, which is the current implementation that some Windows Mobile and Android phones support, is not a great experience. It doesn’t have hardware acceleration and is limited in terms of what types of content it can support.
Adobe claims that Flash will be shipping on supported devices later this summer, but at this point, I’ll believe it when I see it. It also looks like the minimum requirements are going to be the equivalent of what the Nexus One offers, meaning it will only be available on the high end of the smartphone market, not the mid or low-end. The promise of Flash on mobile devices has been long in the making, but aside from demonstrations, it hasn’t happened.
<hr>Flash on Mobile Has Issues

<hr>Even on hardware that is supposed to support Flash, Flash is often not included. For instance, when Firefox Mobile was released for the Nokia N900, Flash support was removed at the last minute. Why? Because it wasn’t a good experience.
Even on Intel’s Atom platform, Flash has issues. This is why playing back fullscreen Hulu or HD YouTube clips is often painful on a netbook (even an ION or Tegra netbook). Again, Flash 10.1 is supposed to bring hardware acceleration that will make those types of processors handle video in more robust ways, but frankly, when there are still longstanding issues with Flash on x86 computers, how can we expect the transition to mobile to be problem free?
This isn’t to say Flash couldn’t become a killer, hardware optimized superb mobile platform — but at this stage, everything that Flash is so good at doing on the desktop isn’t happening with Flash on mobile devices. Rather than defend Flash’s performance on mobile devices with words, I’d much rather have Adobe actually release working products that show off why the technology can work well across platforms, including mobile.
<hr>One Size Never Fits All

<hr>It’s nice to get caught up in the fantasy of building an application that can be deployed on any type of device and work the same way across the board. Sun Microsystems called this “write once, run anywhere,†and it was the defacto slogan for Java. However, as anyone who has ever actually written for Java knows, the differences in Java virtual machines (JVM) means that that in practice, it can often take more time to try to debug a solution and get it working on another platform than it would to just write it natively for that platform.
Web applications are actually the closest example of “write once, run anywhere†actually working. Even then, browsers still need to be optimized for specific platforms in order to run applications built using web languages. This is one reason why native application building for smartphones has become so popular: native applications usually offer a better experience than simply using the web.
It’s fine to aspire for solutions that will work well across a variety of platforms, but users need to continue to be aware of the technological realities that prevent that from happening. If nothing else, the Apple-Adobe debate highlights that computer software — web based or otherwise — is not one size fits all.
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[NumbLock]

All I know is that places I go don't work. Including "working" sites like CNN.

 

[kevbo]

Yep, there are so many people who just want the website to work and will have no clue why it doesn't.

+1 in the group who wants Apple and Adobe to play nice.

Show me something like Farmville in HTML5 and maybe I'll be a little more understanding. The best I've found are a few small proof-of-concept sites with rather poor support for various browsers (including Safari).:ipad-keyboard:

This. I'm not a web designer, but the lack of games/integrated web animation makes me think that HTML5 cannot do everything that Flash can. It has replaced Flash for movies. We know. But it doesn't replace everything. Flash is a unique tool that has given the internet another "WOW" factor for at least a decade.

So what if Flash 10.1 does deliver on it's promises? Will Apple admit it's mistake? Benchmarks have shown it exceeding the expectations of most critics. Even at the level it is now, the battery life difference would be negligible. But let's say, absolute worst case scenario, you get 20% less battery when you're on Flash-intensive sites. Wouldn't you like the option to use it?

As far as rollovers not working.. That is a cop out. Years ago there were no mobile websites, but the Internet has since evolved. It would be very simple for Adobe to compensate for the lack of mouse. The fact is that Apple is not willing to give Adobe a chance, let alone give consumers a choice. Flash would bring a lot to the table.

There is absolutely no reason that is beneficial to the consumer not to bring Flash to the iPad. I hope Flash becomes a major selling point for Android. Maybe once it hits Apple's pocketbook, theyll change their mind.

 

[mpengle]

With all this talk about Flash, what are people's feelings on Silverlight? I go to a couple sites that use Silverlight for video and I don't think the iphone supports it, how about the ipad??

 

[NumbLock]

With all this talk about Flash, what are people's feelings on Silverlight? I go to a couple sites that use Silverlight for video and I don't think the iphone supports it, how about the ipad??

It doesn't support Silverlight. But in reality, its Flash that is found all over.

 

[Jeidaho]

I/we caught in the Flash war

I could care less about Adobe vs Apple vs new technology vs old technology. All I know is I have two sites I use all the time and I didn't think twice about whether they used flash or not until I got my iPad yesterday and they both give me the pop up.

Lendingclub.com
Mint.com

I'm really annoyed about it.

Thanks for including me in your war - Apple