I think it’s about time we got an Adobe category. Apple recently made public an API to allow OS X software access to hardware H.264 acceleration (albeit such acceleration is only available on chipsets since the Nvidia 9400M–early 2008) and Adobe have already baked this in to a beta preview of Flash 10.1 “Gala”! Update: Steve Jobs himself weighs in on Flash (via Engadget): “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”
I’ll admit fault that I thought they’d never get around to this in a timely fashion, but indeed they have. The addition of hardware accelerated video playback will go a long way to quell continued criticism of Adobe Flash Player being slower on Mac OS X and it was shown that in the case of video, hardware acceleration APIs are available on Windows but were not available on Mac OS X, shifting the blame to Apple.
Adobe have also adopted CoreAnimation in Flash betas.
The support for the Core Animation drawing model was originally driven by Apple and we have worked feverishly to finish the engineering work on both sides. Yes that’s right: This was and is a joint effort between Apple and Adobe engineers. Given the now almost perfect integration of Core Animation plugins into Safari I hope that future versions of the Flash Player will take advantage of more capabilities of OpenGL. And that without the requirement of setting any special wmode. I am pretty stoked about it.
These changes to Safari to give plugins more access to native APIs will provide Flash with opportunities for much tighter integration with OS X and could hopefully solve the age old problem of Flash content spinning the fans up—Core Animation is hardware accelerated and managed by OS X, so Flash content will appear to OS X in such a way that it can throtle power effectively instead of the Flash walled garden wracking up 100% CPU with no way for the OS to peak inside.
Also in minor related news, Adobe were criticised by blogger Chris Messina who keeps a fascinating stream of screenshots of various bits of UI/UX. Chris had taken a screenshot of the Flash Installer asking him to force-quit the Finder! Complaints about Adobe UI are all over the web, but Adobe did the gentlemanly thing and fixed the issue and even replied on the Flickr page!
Adobe will have a lot of bad rep to get over in the HTML5 “warâ€. There’s no reason Flash couldn’t be an excellent product (of which Flash Player 10.1 looks set to be) and a lot of the reasoning thrown at Adobe for the will for HTML5 to replace Flash is simply the current Flash experience. Not so much has been said about the open / close side of the arguments. Adobe can and will fix the performance and stability issues with Flash Player and then when the complaining goes away, how many will be fighting for HTML5 because of openness rather than stability?
Whilst the iPhone and iPad will not support Flash as long as Steve Jobs roams this mortal coil, the truth is that as of yet there is no handset that fully supports Flash (that means Flash proper, not Flash Lite or Flash 9) so the argument is for intents and purposes, moot. Adobe have stepped up their game though and are in talks with numerous handset vendors to provide Flash 10.1 across the board. Flash 10.1 will be arriving on Android handsets capable of running Android 2.2 “Froyo†(“The Frogurt is also cursed.â€)
Adobe’s business model for Flash depends upon it having a majority of availability for content delivery. As an opponent to Flash (for the freedom reasons, not the stability ones) I can’t see a reason to develop content with Flash and then have to do it all again for the purposes of supporting iPad users when supporting iPad users comes almost free when you’re writing the content in HTML anyway. Adobe will have a genuine battle convincing both users that they should be demanding Flash support on their handsets and that developers should be providing Flash content using Adobe’s tools. This will be the interesting aspect to see how Flash competes with HTML5 on user experience, performance and battery life. The browser war is over,but the runtime war has just begun.
Come on Croc, iPad/iPhone not supporting Flash is a good reason to actually add flash content to your website (if the website is not commercially profitable, i.e. you don’t depend on the ad revenue). Previously Flash was plain evil, but now it can actually be used for purposes of good ;-).
or for awesome
NO it isn’t, unless you want to render your web site inaccessible, as well as unable to be viewed on alternate platforms. Jumping from one bad guy to the other doesn’t make either of them less nasty, and ignoring a web standard for crying out loud in favor of proprietary crap just because of Apple, who ironically support a more open web than Adobe do?
Use your imagination; you could make the flash portion a “trampoline” to perfectly standard html page. Even a minimal flash implementation (gnash?) could be able to handle that.
That doesn’t even make sense, just do the thing in HTML/JS/CSS to begin with and then there’s no worries about Flash implementations at all and any os on any platform will work with it so long as there’s a standards-compliant browser for it. Use your common sense. Using Flash just because you hate Apple is shortsighted to say the least. What you’re effectively saying is that because Apple supports HTML 5, you will push the proprietary Flash and would rather the web be closed just because you hate Apple? Talk about not seeing the long term.
Now, if you want to piss off iPad and iPhone users, use codecs they don’t have (which is basically every codec except H.264) if you’re serving content. Use ogg/Theora/Vorbis or Dirac, that’ll get ’em good and riled up if you’ve actually got something they really want to see. Just as effective, but doesn’t screw anyone else along the way.
Or, one could just code their site to be 100% standards compliant and let whoever wants to have access, provided they have a standards compliant browser. Isn’t this supposed to be an open web, after all?
Actively excluding certain users because you don’t like the company that made their hardware is kind of petty anyway.
If you don’t like the iPad, just don’t buy that thing and don’t act like a retard who wants to force his own view on other people.
I’m a full-time Linux user and Apple’s work on WebKit, CUPS, GCC, LLVM, etc. already helped me more than Adobe did with their braindead abomination of proprietary software that after 10 major versions and countless minor revisions still performs like utter garbage on Linux.
I don’t care about iPods, iPhones, or iPads. I don’t buy any of these.
But if Apple’s stance on Flash results even in a tiny drop of Flash usage, then it’s another step into the right direction of a Flash-free web.
If it is excellent only on a subset of the platforms it officially supports then I wouldn’t really call it excellent. Flash is STILL a horrible resource-hog, crashy and plain nuisance under Linux, and probably under several other platforms. I’d like to see them work on improving them all and not just the Windows and OSX versions.
Oh they will; Adobe have realised that this is a multi-platform race, period. Their Linux port will have to shape up for the likes of Chrome OS (not to mention ARM platforms), and for Linux-based handsets like Android.
In fact, Adobe’s survival hope for Flash will have to be that it is consistent across many platforms where before they (and largely Macromedia) were quite happy with the Windows monopoly making their life easy.
Great! What about other platforms that aren’t Linux, OSX, or Windows? You see anyone can implement HTML5, how good or bad is dependent on the programmer. Flash on the other hand is dependent on one company to implement correctly and they may not even really care to support your platform, especially if they feel its not important.
I’m not defending Adobe
I’m with HTML5 all the way. Even with the SWF specification readable, it’s still a proprietary spec that can only be steered in the direction Adobe chooses where Google, Apple and Microsoft have all added to the HTML5 spec.
Flash can’t adapt to new devices (and paradigms, like touch) as quickly as HTML5, but Flash can implement and push out new features quicker than HTML5. Choose your poison
When I play video on an old 1st generation mac book (Intel i850 graphics which obviously has no hardware decoding), any flash video bumps the processors up to about 75% and consequently the fans start sounding like a Harrier jet taking off.
On the other hand, when I watch html 5 video (like youtube), the cpu usage is only around 10%??????
Similar with VLC (which rocks btw), that I know uses software decoding, and typically only uses about 30 – 40% cpu even when playing full screen 480p h.264 mkv files.
So, this really raises the question that if an open source project written completely by volunteers like VLC can make such a good video decoder, why does Adobe with millions and millions of dollars of revenue produce such a suck a$$ product like flash that can’t even play youtube video with less then 75% cpu usage???
Because Flash was never meant to do video. It’s like wondering why a garbage truck performs so badly in an F1 race.
Yes, but if you throw a $billion at garbage truck R&D I’m sure it could beat an F1 car. Intel managed to do it with x86.
If it hurts their bottom line, then Adobe will throw a $billion at Flash. They’re a company, they sing to the tune of money, it’s as simple as that.
But then it will suck at collecting garbage.
Well, the truck isn’t what collects the garbage anyway.
No way, the drivers could get a weeks worth of collecting done in 2 days with the added speed and cornering capabilities!
Up here in the Great White North (or at least in our little corner of it), the garbage trucks have robotic arms on the side that pick up the garbage cans and the recycle bins. We also have mandatory, standardised garbage/recycle cans, for just this purpose. Takes maybe 5 minutes to do all 33 units in our complex, and that includes 4-point-turns to get around the corners.
The driver rarely has to get out of the cab.
Edited 2010-04-29 18:57 UTC
Neither was Firefox. Still Mozilla achieved better video performance in Firefox than multi-billion corporation Adobe in Flash.
We can go down this path forever; computers were never meant to do video. See?
Honestly though, there comes a point where one has to say “enough is enough!” and leave old tech in the past. After all, we’re not still trying to back up our terabyte hard drives to CD-Rs, right? Flash video was a quick fix to a long-standing problem, and like any quick fix it can either go away gracefully when a better, more permanent solution comes along (HTML5) or it can languish well beyond its necessity, keeping its horrid performance and closed nature with it.
Let’s take this opportunity to do web video the right way, and leave flash for website intros and time-sink games, where it performs well.
The article starts very positive but I feel that the end is a little biased [Kroc loves Apple, so by order of his Stevness, he at the moment dislikes Adobe
]
I mean, what the hell does “Adobe will have a lot of bad rep to get over in the HTML5 war” really mean? What bad rep? I felt that Apple was the one f–king up, not Adobe.
Also, “there is no handset that fully supports Flash (that means Flash proper, not Flash Lite or Flash 9)”. Why is Flash 9 not good enough? Is that a randomly chosen number to disqualify handsets like N900?? Just to prove a moot point?
Here is some more: “Adobe will have a genuine battle convincing both users that they should be demanding Flash support on their handsets”. Didn’t pretty much everyone complain about lack of Flash on iPhone and Android just a few months ago? Have you been living under a rock lately?
—
Sorry if this post sounded like trolling, but I feel that Kroc is trying to sneak in some negative stuff into this article which should really be about one thing: Apple finally have done what Adobe was asking them for years, hence mac users will soon get better “web experience”.
Edited 2010-04-29 13:57 UTC
A bit biased?, probably.
But it balances out Thom’s Apple is the Antichrist and Microsoft is here to protect us from the evil Linux and Apple tirades:)
So, look at it this way, unlike Fox news, here you actually get differing opinions.
In other news, I switched to Linux full-time early this year, and haven’t looked back, while also buying an iPhone late last year, of which I wrote yet another stellar Apple review.
I know you’re partly tongue-in-cheek, but still. I’m not saying I’m not biased, but his idea that I’m anti-Apple and pro-Microsoft is just utter bullshit. If you run a website like this, you’ll get people claiming I’m anti and pro everything. I’ve literally been called pro AND anti just about anything you can come up with.
Only a few of those are true. Pro-BeOS, pro-Fiona Apple, pro-Gilmore Girls, pro-unicorns, and pro-Miss Hannah Minx.
Edited 2010-04-29 14:34 UTC
Yes, it was tongue in cheek.
But you know what, we’re ALL BIASED! and you know what else….
THATS OK!…
We just need to make sure that differing opinions get fair time, and I think that OSnews does a pretty good job with that.
Which reminds me… Thom have you seen this? http://www.cornify.com/ add rainbows and unicorns to any site! Maybe we can have some on OSNews.
What that side needs is an input where you can give it a URL and have it present a “cornified” version of that page.
Yeah, really does. Although the javascript bookmark they provide is arguably more useful… as useful as covering page content with unicorns can be, of course.
See Thom, that’s where the confusion sets in. You’re just so inconsistent! One day it’s pro-Apple, the next it’s “Apple must die!” Give the poor girl a break, she’s doing the best she can!
😛
In all seriousness, I’m feeling your move to Linux full time. I’m getting nervous about when — not if — Apple will pull the rug from under my Hackintosh and leave me without a main OS. So, I’m waiting to see what Linux Mint 9 will be like, and if I like it I’m there.
As for Windows…well if Star Trek Armada II runs well enough under Wine, and I can find (or write — *shudder*) drivers for my son’s MP3 player, I’ll be sailing the Linux seas permanently.
News needs to be reported, I am not always the best person to be doing so for all topics, but report it I must as I am an editor and put myself forward for the task.
I have never hidden my disdain for Flash, there’s no attempt to ‘sneak in’ any bias, I was actually keeping the bias to a minimum when it came to presenting the facts, and the final paragraphs were my own personal opinion which I expect OSnews readers to discard where they may disagree (and I have no problem with that).
I don’t love Apple, I love HTML5. It would be hard to say that Adobe don’t have a bad rep when it comes to Flash. It is almost universally hated and is demonstrably awful. They will have to get over this “flash is crap” mindset just the same as Java had to get over the ever persistent “Java is slow” mindset. That is what I meant.
Mozilla disabled Flash in Firefox Mobile on N900 because it was unusably slow. And what good is Flash 9 if Flash 10 content is common? That would be like the iPhone supporting only HTML4. Fine, but not really much use when the desktop clients support HTML5.
The article explains that Flash 10.1 will be coming and greatly improves in all areas so this complaint should (I hope) be moot within time. The reason I mentioned that no handset supports Flash proper is because the iPad / Flash debate has had people defending Flash, yet there is no like-for-like support of Flash on any mobile device of which to point to and say look–Flash is better than HTML5!
Again, I hide no bias, I am biased–I prefer open standards and HTML5, but I had to write this news up so I did. Take from it what you will, and your comments are constructive so I thank you for that. It would help if we had more editors though so I wouldn’t have to write about things not in my field of expertise.
some people seems to forget that from very begin of the iPhone Apple wanted all the Apps to be build in HTML5 ; but developer wanted to write it in Cocoa, like Apple did and does. Now it is possible to write apps in Cocoa and people want a bazaar where everyone can do what ever he wants. Let not be that naive – There are people out there that wants all our data. Apple have found a way to make as much money as possible from the iPhone and they will not give that away! I’m afraid the Appstore will remain the only way to deliver apps for iphoneOS based devices. it’s sad but lets see what the concurrence will deliver…
…of Jobs and Apple extolling the virtues of opennes.
Steve Jobs published a lengthy letter Thursday, detailing his personal stance on Adobe Flash, declaring that the Web format was created for the PC era, but that it “falls short” in the mobile era of low-power devices, touch interfaces and open Web standards.
Its here:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Heh, and again promoting H264 while also going on about open standards.
Consistency fail.
…and, lest we forget, since Jobs is so happy about adopting open standards and HTML5, surely Apple itself uses it too, right?
Oh wait.
http://twitpic.com/1bsjqh
Awesome, just awesome! There is that evil smile on my face >:-)
There are several wrong things in this letter that cry for a detailed deconstruction of the arguments! Like the Carbon thing, that’s disgusting. Apple still uses Carbon and they accuse others, holy cow.
Please write a separate article about it, Thom!
I caught this too. iTunes is STILL 32-bit Carbon. There are a few others that have not yet been re-written in 64-bit Cocoa, Front Row and DVD Player (on Mac OS X) come to mind.
Of course, I doubt anyone really wants iTunes to have access to more than 4 GB of RAM, whereas this is definitely helpful with Adobe’s Creative Suite applications.
Still, it doesn’t seem like a very good point for Jobs to have made.
If the reason Flash is so prevalent on the web is because its easier to create, then that says something about Adobe’s authoring tools.
It seems to me that Adobe makes no money on Flash since they give it away for free; its all in their authoring tools.
If this is the case, they better step it up and make their flash authoring tools target HTML5 and let Flash die off on its own.
With that said I can’t stand Flash, and I don’t think HTML5 is any better. Sure its open, but its ridiculously over-complicated to do anything meaningful. Your application consists of SVG, xml, ECMAscript, JavaScript, HTML5, and Ajax all modifying each other asynchronously.
At least with Java Applets and Java WebStart you have one paradigm and one language (which is now open). Sun just never cared about the implementation, authoring tools, startup-time etc.
With most browsers being built on WebKit nowadays (BlackBerry FINALLY) it would be nice to be able to use Qt directly in your webpage.
Oh well… I don’t know what the solution should be, but I still don’t like HTML5. Over complicated.
When Adobe said Apple is closed and Flash is open Steve said the opposite is true.
Then he starts comparing Flash to HTML5, CSS, Javascript, etc as if that is what Adobe was saying.
It wasn’t!
Adobe is clearly talking about applications that run on the iPhone. Apple is in no way telling developers to use all that HTML crap for app creation, just for advertising. You can’t hook into the iPhone API’s through Javascript, or HTML…. they strictly forbid it… ObjC only.
As far as I’m concerned, they’re both closed and proprietary. Except that you can run anything on Flash (if your device has it) while you can only run Apple approved garbage on your iPhone.
Let’s see … use the Mach micro-kernel with BSD userspace, OSX! We need a browser, lets rip off KHTML! hmm … these are derived works and we’d be sued if we didn’t release them; Public Relations!
Darwin, Webkit, etc… It doesn’t take long for me to to connect the dots. There is nothing great about any of apples “openness”, they’re building on others free work and being “open” because they must. They may have some valid reasons for not wanting flash on the iPhones, I understand. Flash isn’t the best tool, it’s just been the one with the most market penetration.
Anyone remember quicktime? Here it is for free! Oh wait, now that we have a decent market share you’ll have to pay for this horribly slow buggy software to view videos above a certain resolution. I so freaking glad that died, it was far worse than anything flash ever did.
But the licence of BSD and (I believe, correct me if I’m wrong) kHTML specifically allowed Apple the opportunity to not release their changes! Yet they did.
Apple made kHTML not suck and now almost every mobile device is using WebKit. Apple created their own competition.
Apple’s use of open technologies is where they a) want help from the outside and b) want everybody else to adopt the same technology. It’s still business, but don’t think that Apple are publishing code because they _have to_, they don’t. They are genuinely contributing to the world.
KHTML is LGPL, so Apple had no choice but to release the code. I find it almost cute that you think they would have done so otherwise
And if it were not Apple’s intention to comply with that then they would have just written their own engine. Are you implying that Apple were _unwillingly_ forced into taking kHTML and making it into a usable product? No, they took it knowing that it would be open source—so how could they have a problem with it continuing to be open source? They can and would have written their own engine if their desire was for it to be closed, but they knew the benefits they would receive having WebKit open source.
Apple don’t suffer from NIH syndrome, they suffer from WIF syndrome—“We Invented it Firstâ€.
Edited 2010-04-29 15:53 UTC
They probably would have, consider that most of Darwin is BSD licensed and Apple released the source to it.
Also consider that releasing and promoting webkit is in Apple (and everyone other than MS) best interests as it promotes an open standard that works on a wide range of devices.
Get a clue about WebKit. KHTML code was only used in WebCore and JavaScriptCore which are only two parts of the larger WebKit. After Apple rewrote the whole JavaScript implementation from scratch, today only WebCore includes KHTML code.
There is no legal need at all why Apple has to open source the WebKit shell, Web Inspector, SquirrelFish Extreme (=JavaScript), etc.
Yeah KHML isn’t but you do bring up a good point about Darwin kernel. Still I believe its a PR move. What really pissed me off was the Web Kit comment at ‘http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/‘.
Apple may not have technically had to release their kernel for free. That said there was MkLinux which apple basically just wrote drivers for. Back in the days when Apple was struggling to stay afloat and update there aging operating system (vers 8.6), I’d bet over half their developers for OSX were unpaid and in the Open Source community.
The thing that is good about this that open standards are being made more attractive to developers. The bad part is Jobs has got on his I’m so awesome horse again and most the apple fanatics will swallow it. Meaning everyone else will have to hear about how awesome he is for controlling what people can and can’t do his hardware.
P.S. They probably didn’t use MkLinux as a base because its license would be less favorable to BSDs license. They sure learned quite a bit from it however before switching.
… except that HTML5 does only a tiny fraction of what Flash does, expecially in its (Flash) last versions.
Pretending that Flash is for videos only is a blatant lie, useful to sneak that overpriced Apple hardware out. I understand he can’t simply say “We just want developers to do what we want them to do and the way we want so we can hustle their revenues…” 😉
A serious businessman would say: I will let my users install Flash and let decide themselves if they prefer battery life or fancy websites. And if Flash is a reason for crashes, well, let users decide if they want it installed or not…
But heck, IPhone users had to beg even to get Copy&Paste so I’m not surprised at all 😉
Please tell me, what does Flash do that HTML5 can’t? Considering that if HTML5 doesn’t have a specific feature, there’s nothing preventing you rendering any feature you want in Canvas.
The problem in reality is that HTML5 doesn’t do what Flash does as easily and as consistently and in many cases as fast. Having seen Quake II in HTML5, I’m sure there’s nothing it can’t do—but that it can‘t do it in every browser and at a viable speed—yet.
The reason Flash became so popular it’s just related to what you said: HTML didn’t do anything specific while people were in need to something specific. So the first available technology to provide that became de-fact standard.
HTML5 is ages far from doing anything specific, except for displaying videos maybe (considering they didn’t even agree on codecs…) and proof-of-concept implementations won’t help.
Flash is just an example of how pathetic W3C is. The reason for existence of these bodies is to *drive* evolution, not to chase it. If W3C was able to drive the evolution of HTML, instead of arriving when things are all done, they could have prevented Flash from becoming a standard wide-spread technology *AND* propose an alternative technology. If you’re not ahead of times, you’re just enjoying free travelling around the world and free hotel rooms. And that’s what they do at W3C.
When, in 6-7 years, HTML5 will be finalized and ready in browsers and every browser maker will have things implemented the way they should, Flash could simply fallback to HTML5 stuff. Rest assured that when it will happen, Flash/Silverlight will power MinorityReport-like interfaces while W3C will still be discussing which codec to implement.
People always blame Microsoft for preventing HTML to become a standard up until a couple of years ago but it was all a fault from W3C ducks.
Having said that, if you really believe Jobs is interested in standards, well, good luck 😉
Secure (ok, semi-secure) transmission over a protocol like RTMP? Attempts at PREVENTING user copying of video streams? Hell, it’s part of why I’m SHOCKED at Apple OR Youtube supporting HTML5 video. (Not that youtube’s HTML5 demo has ANYTHING to do with HTML5… slapping the VIDEO tag into a XHTML 1.0 tranny document is NOT…horse, dead, flog). Given Apple’s history of vendor lock-in, and youtube’s history of trying (note I said TRYING) to prevent people from downloading the videos on the site [/i](doorlocks on a car approach – keep the honest people honest, you’re not stopping a crook)[/i] much less the thousands of porn sites who use mixes of flash, rtmp, custom players written in flash AND javascript to try and prevent downloads – I don’t understand why EITHER company is embracing HTML5… that latter part being the antithesis of what HTML5 video is about.
But how about Keyframing with automatic sync of vector to an audio track? Tweening? Auto-Frameskipping on vector animations? … and no, a 300k javascript library to implement those should NOT be the answer.
Or just how about a decent set of tools for developers? Right now it’s ALL code, and your art ***’s don’t usually line up to embrace an all code approach.
Edited 2010-04-29 22:36 UTC
Right.
These guys are wrongly informed and Steve Jobs is currently exploiting such misinformation to push his view.
Anyway, problem is pretending that Flash is only useful to display videos won’t help because soon or later you will face people wondering : why can’t I view that website / application with my OH-SO-EXPENSIVE device ?
Jobs is fighting a business war without having the same tools / quality his competitors have. If Jobs was really smart, he would develop a competing technology (like Microsoft did) and use tens of millions of IPhones / IPads to channel that to end users: then he would be in control of his platform and could open his devices and attempt to compete on technology. But of course… 😉
But that tiny fraction of features makes up about (estimated) 97% of all Flash use on the web.
There seem to be an attempt at redefining what “open standard” mean.
It used to mean a standard that is free of royalties and patents. Now it is being redefined by a few who have capabilities to influence public opinion to a standard that is infested with patents and requires a kidney and a leg for royalties but its “free” because the requirements are imposed on all in a non discriminating manner.