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Flash Is No Longer Necessary

jamor

jamor

Android Expert
What do you guys think of this? It's a little confusing. Any techies out there like to comment..


Steve Jobs has just posted a long open letter on flashhttp://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/, listing all the reasons why Apple has decided not to support it on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The letter is a clear, sober, in-depth view in all of Flash
 
pissing in the kid's cereal might be a little too much.

stevie is just trying to minimize the fact that the incredible supports flash and other smart phones, besides the iphone, will soon support flash too. whether flash is a relic or not it's still being used a lot right now. and right now is what people want.
 
What you have to realize about an Apple zealot or fanboy is that whatever Steve Jobs says is pure truth. If he told them to drink poison kool-aid, they wouldn't even ask the flavor... Jobs can say whatever he likes and lots of people will believe him and start repeating it to everyone they know, whether it's actually true or not.

Anyone who has been to Gizmodo.com can attest to this. They claim to be impartial but are total Apple fanboys and lust after every utterance from the mouth/pen of Jobs. Even when there explicit facts they refuse to believe unitil it can't be denied anymore. (See iMac display issues)

That being said, ask anyone that has experience in both flash and HTML5 and they will tell you that flash is (at this point) still better. With GPU support now making an even bigger case for flash. As much as Jobs wants it to not be true, all test have show Flash to be less CPU intensive than HTML5.

Regardless of these facts, being such an arrogant ass in that assuming you know what is best for your customers and not even giving them a choice is complete crap.

Screw Apple, screw Steve Jobs, screw all the apple fanboys and zealots. Let them have thier crappy toys. When they want to stop being a tool and get a tool they will move to android.
 
Well he also thinks the mac os should only run on pcs built by apple, which imo has held the company back for many many years. On one hand they make a killing on their mac pc hardware, but on the other hand he could have the os market nearly dominated if he just opened it up all the way and let it be installed on non-mac pcs. Its being installed anyways but you must go the hackintosh route to do it, which is kind of a pain and needlessly complicated. I could go on and on but they are a multi billion dollar company and i'm sure they aren't too worried about cashflow right now, so its a moot point either way. But imo steve jobs has always kind of had his head in the sand on various issues, but things are going well for them so i guess that make him a genius and it makes all of us haters. Oh well, life goes on, i don't have to buy into their platform and i certainly won't be buying an ipad anytime soon. If he doesn't want flash support then they don't have to get it, but android supports it, so all is not lost. Maybe we'll see the market shift in android direction, but i doubt this will be what pushes the tide in androids favor.
 
I am by no means a fanboy for any consumer product. I own a couple PC computers, a mac laptop, an iPod and iPod Touch. My wife is now the proud owner of an Incredible while I still continue on with my workhorse, but admittedly "unsexy" BB Curve.

With all that being said, I think Steve Jobs overall makes some good points. 75% of it is probably genuine, the rest smoke and mirrors to cover up the underlying business reasons for not wanting flash. At the end of the day, consumers and content providers will make the final decision. If consumers truly want flash, they will get a flash compatible smart phone. If content providers want their videos to be able to play on an Apple product, they will convert to HTML5. Market forces will win.

I do think Adobe needs to be careful. I understand they need to protect their business, but they are being very vocal about this fight and at the same time are losing credibility as more and more content providers move away from Flash.

My two and a half cents,

Brian
 
As someone whos been in ecommerce for the last 12 years i have always stayed away from flash. Sure it eye candy but it can be a resource hog and those running a much slower connection don't get the same experience. Its always been a goal of mine to minimize graphics and eye candy as much as possible to make the overall experience better for the potential customers i am trying to get. I do know there are alot of sites out there that do use flash in ecommerce, but personally i've never felt it was nessissary. I rememeber when sites used to come in 2 flavors, html and flash and you got an intro screen so you could choose between them. Ahh the good old days. If i'm given a choice i always go with html over flash even though i have broadband, i find it to be a quicker more efficent experience.
 
The problem is that Flash is well established. They've already said it'll take quite some time to get HTML 5.0 up and running. So if you're an Apple user, you just live without imbedded video for a year or two? What I see is Apple speeding up HTML 5.0 development, going exclusive with it, and charging a premium. No thanks.
 
what i love about jobs' argument is that he a) hasn't said anything new since this all started, and b) employs circular logic to fit whatever best suits him.

case in point: flash is a closed, proprietary sytem. jobs himself even admits that the ipod/iphone/ipad os is a closed, proprietary system. but since it's his system, that's not a negative thing.

second case: he claims that flash is a cross-product development platform, and as such, can never have "developing great iapps as their priority." last time i checked, html5, css, and javascript were all cross-product development platforms that do not have developing great iapps as their main business driver.

jobs just thinks that he can say whatever he wants and have everyone awed by the apple design/packaging and say, "oh, that's pretty!" and make everything go away. he's like adam mayor west in the dig'um statue/gay marriage ban episode =)
 
As a web developer, I'll tell you that Jobs isn't wrong. Flash does drain battery life. It's processor heavy. Then again, using Wi-Fi, regular web browsing, and listening to music will also drain your battery. Too bad most people want their phones to do all these things.

Flash is unavoidable for those wanting anything close to a complete web experience. Flash video's dang near ubiquitous. And while Apple was recently able to point out a few websites that had moved to HTML5, they forgot to mention the bascillion other websites that hadn't moved to HTML5 and won't for years to come. Fact is, not every company has the money (or want) that CNN, The New York Times, and Flickr have. The transition will be slow. It'll take years. And, in the meantime, people using browsers that aren't Flash enabled will be losing out...a lot.
 
I LOL'd a steve jobs complaining that Flash isn't "open" coming from the guy who runs the most closed computer/phone/software business on the planet.....pot, kettle, black....
 
I think flash is nessissary for information based website, such as corperate websites and those that feature product information. However i don't like it on the website i am ordering from, it just slows things down. But most companies seem to have it right nowadays. They use flash for info on a seperate website than the site that sell their products. This is a perfect balance of the 2 imo.
 
As a developer, (including iPhone Apps, so I know what the developer agreement says) I can tell you that Steve Jobs is more interested in keeping his "walled garden" than providing the most open, developer-friendly environment that encourages innovation. I don't have time to go into the details, but one of the strengths of Flash (and I'm not a Flash developer myself, I'm old-school) is its cross-platform (OS and browser) compatibility in a world of incredible incompatibility. I love the W3C standards (he calls this HTML5) and think they're very important, but even standards that are many years old (such as SVG) are only inconsistantly implemented in browsers. This is getting better, but it will continue for some time. Further, Flash addresses, in one box, seamlessly, a lot of types of rich media that require knitting together a lot of different ?ML standards. Very difficult to do "seamlessly" so that the user has a nice experience. Calling something HTML5 is a bit disingenuous itself as there is really not an HTML5 standard but a bunch of ?MLs used together. Again, inconsistently supported in browsers.

From where I sit, Jobs's bashing of Flash looks very self-serving. You don't embrace innovation and the future by cutting off compatibility with the past. It's like a tree trying to divorce itself from it's roots so that it can reach the sky. Some of his criticisms are technical and legitimate (introducing an abstraction layer that may itself have quality and performance problems is always risky.) But some of the stuff about "the future" is just malarky to try to justify his position. I'm sure Adobe would be happy to work with Apple on the quality and performance issues in order to have access to the platforms.

On the subject of multi-touch. That one just cracks me up. Adding multi-touch support to Flash is trivial. Who's he kidding? What I think his mind was speaking while his lips were moving was "Flash doesn't support multi-touch, and if it does, I'll sue them."

At the end of the day, Apple is going to lose to Android for the same reasons the Mac lost to the PC. Apple will continue to be a boutique supplier with very nice, controlled, user interactions that inspire the rest of the industry. And, from where I sit, that's all good. I, and many other developers, will choose to live outside Mr. Jobs's garden. It's nice in there, but a nice prison is still a prison.
 
Honestly I like the fact that the Incredible supports some flash but really I could care less, it's a phone I don't do power surfing on it and I want things to load as fast as possible on my work desktop it's not an issue a phone using a 3g connection it is kind of an issue. I'd say 98% of phone users could give a shit less about HTML5 or Flash and I fall into that catogory
 
Isn't this like MMS all over again? Sure there are better options but most the world uses Flash(just like most the world uses MMS and not email for pictures like Jobs wanted). It's not about more efficient it's about using what everyone else is using so you aren't stuck with the future and not able to share it with anyone.
 
Scincidae said:
Isn't this like MMS all over again? Sure there are better options but most the world uses Flash(just like most the world uses MMS and not email for pictures like Jobs wanted). It's not about more efficient it's about using what everyone else is using so you aren't stuck with the future and not able to share it with anyone.
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I remember when the Iphone first came out and I would try to send a pic to friends with the Iphone just to get a "no I didn't get it you have to send the pic to my email address"

umm yeah no funny pics for you
 
Oh the irony of Jobs calling other companies out for being "closed."

From the guy that doesn't want you to look at pron, or see comics that ridicule celebrities.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that Flash does not just mean Flash banners, widgets, and videos. "Flash" is really much broader, now encompassing the Flex / ActionScript 3 / Adobe Air for WebApps, including games. While I don't expect these to take over the world (they're coming from behind Ajax), you will be glad that you have "Flash" on your hand-held platform. Most Flash games are just stupid, IMHO, but it has proven itself to be a valid game development platform.

Earlier I forgot to say that a "walled garden" can be a nice, safe place for users. By controlling things the way they do, Apple has done a pretty good job of ensuring a pretty nice user experience. Where the AppStore started to get a little seedy, they've stepped in to try and cut down on the "crApps" that were clogging it up. Everything has it's good side, and it's bad side I guess.
 
IncredibleWait said:
At the end of the day, Apple is going to lose to Android for the same reasons the Mac lost to the PC. Apple will continue to be a boutique supplier with very nice, controlled, user interactions that inspire the rest of the industry. And, from where I sit, that's all good. I, and many other developers, will choose to live outside Mr. Jobs's garden. It's nice in there, but a nice prison is still a prison.
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Love this quote from your response! Very eloquent and well put.
 
jwm2 said:
Well he also thinks the mac os should only run on pcs built by apple, which imo has held the company back for many many years. On one hand they make a killing on their mac pc hardware, but on the other hand he could have the os market nearly dominated if he just opened it up all the way and let it be installed on non-mac pcs. Its being installed anyways but you must go the hackintosh route to do it, which is kind of a pain and needlessly complicated. I could go on and on but they are a multi billion dollar company and i'm sure they aren't too worried about cashflow right now, so its a moot point either way. But imo steve jobs has always kind of had his head in the sand on various issues, but things are going well for them so i guess that make him a genius and it makes all of us haters. Oh well, life goes on, i don't have to buy into their platform and i certainly won't be buying an ipad anytime soon. If he doesn't want flash support then they don't have to get it, but android supports it, so all is not lost. Maybe we'll see the market shift in android direction, but i doubt this will be what pushes the tide in androids favor.
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I've used Macs in plenty of applications, though never actually owned one. In response to your point about MacOS only running on Apple constructed equipment, though, one has to understand that the reason Apple can claim MacOS is so stable and Windows is so buggy is this exact reason. By controlling the hardware the OS runs on you eliminate virtually all possible hardware related conflicts and bugs that arise from hardware that's not quite engineered up to spec. By closing the loop you eliminate hundreds of thousands of necessary testing iterations to produce software that might not be bug free, but is free of bugs that apply to the platform the software runs on, which is good enough.

Opening up MacOS to other hardware platforms would put it right where Windows is and Jobs and the rest of the crew at Apple know it.

To their credit, though, you do have to admit that Macs do tend to have less problems than the Windows machines of old...
 
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