iPhone vs Flash
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"I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late."
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Flash 10.1 "better than HTML5" on mobile, says man
Runs better on Apple
by Nick FarrellApple's Steve Jobs' might have got it all wrong when he targeted HTML 5 as a suitable replacement for Flash on mobile phones.
Web developer Chris Black has been doing some benchmarking and discovered that Flash 10.1 is better than HTML5 technology on mobile phones.
Black has used an iPod Touch device from Apple, and an Android Nexus One, to test which find out whether HTML5 or Flash runs better on mobile devices.
Writing in his bog , Black runs an animation on the iPod Touch which is integrated with HTML 5's Canvas and Java Script technology.
He also runs another version of the same animation on Google's Nexus One.
Black concludes that canvas performance on the new iPod Touch and iPhone 4G is laughable at 22FPS rendering simple animation. At least the Nexus One can muster up a decent 40FPS for basic canvas rendering.
But the "Flash Player 10.1 on the other hand, blows HTML5 out of the water running at 57FPS on the Nexus One. To make matters worse for Jobs' vision HTML5 consumed twice the battery life as Flash for these tests on the Android.
Jobs always claimed that Flash had to be purged from his walled garden of delights because it was responsible for all the crashes in Mac Land.
However if the Flash player is actually much better, then it calls into question Jobs' real motivation. Perhaps Adobe has simply refused to do what it is told.
Read more: http://www.techeye.net/mobile/fl…
- "walled garden of delights" is quite hilarious used here... ; )ideaist
- raf0
Some of the comments smash the test... ie. offer properly coded html5 version which performs better than Flash.
- fadein100
without sounding harsh apple needs to look beyond jobs and his weird little historical grudges... anyway ie9 is great!
- fadein100
flash will always survive as a sensible and efficient way of handling animation on the web, it just got a little too big for its boots trying to be an application framework - nah - stick to the bells and whistles. 6000 lines of code to make a whale fly? nah - i think i will continue to make those wings flap with flash thank you
- ukit0
Very pro sounding article
"Flash 10.1 "better than HTML5" on mobile, says man"
"Writing in his bog, Black runs an animation on the iPod Touch..."
- Whether it's pro written or not, the point is pretty obvious.Boz
- Point is you lose credibility when you have all sorts of typos in your bog entries.ETM
- Okay..so the point totally goes over your head because a developer has typos on his blog? GOT IT! JeezBoz
- Sort of points to the fact that it's just a test by one guy...far from scientific.ukit
- There's a reason you don't often see real news stories that end "...says man":)ukit
- Hombre_Lobo0
What a tool. If it's a performance / battery draining issue he should be saying "mobile technology restrictions mean that flash on the iPhone current runs poorly, drains battery. Maybe in the future when processors can cope with flash it would be suitable"
but itstead he is clearly saying "screw you adobe, and screw you web based flash apps I'll get all my cash monies from my app store shamone!!!"
- It's all about the app money. His rants are a smoke screen.CyBrain
- kpl0
JS > AS3
http://jacksondunstan.com/articl…And Flash 10.1 didn't really improve AS3 performance over 10.0:
http://jacksondunstan.com/articl…
Really, stop saying AS3 is all so great, and how it's so much better than JS. It's not.
- CyBrain0
Speaking of Smokescreen, these guys or someone like them may very well end this tiresome load of Apple's shit: http://smokescreen.us/
- Boz0
@kpl
Where is the code he used in his examples and tests..
Vectors and other improvements to AS3 have brought considerable speed increase to AS3..
One example: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog…
Vector performance: 1.824
Array performance: 2.938
Improvement 62.08 %So until we see what code and how he tested that chart means absolutely nothing as in the real world AS3 is considerably faster not to mention it can do a hellava lot more than JS.
When I write JS, it is most likely I will write the same or similar code in AS3, and that's where the code sample is important. If you use same/similar logic to write AS3 app it might perform on par with JS, but if you use AS3 specific things and improvements (such as vectors for example) the results are significantly better.
- kpl0
@Boz
RTFA. Or, if that's just not interesting to you, go to the first article in his series with this handy direct link: http://jacksondunstan.com/articl…
- also, you do realize the mike chambers blog was about AS3 feature vs. AS3 feature, right?kpl
- and while we're at it, vectors aren't so great afterall either: http://jacksondunsta…kpl
- I don't really understand because Vectors are considerably faster.. Even when I write my own code.Boz
- Plus you can also read comments people have different results from what he has.. Vectors are considerably faster.Boz
- Boz0
Yep, as I thought.
http://www.oddhammer.com/actions…
That's the test.. and it's arrays as I suspected.. Vectors are not being used here. Half of the test has something to do with arrays.
Plus he himself admits:
"You’re spot-on about this test only measuring AS3 performance versus that of JavaScript, hence the title of the series. I’m deliberately not testing anything related to graphics, sound, input, etc. in these tests."So basically, he's using Arrays for both, when vectors in AS3 perform almost 70% faster, he's not using any real world applications of JS such as animations or sound or whatever you will be doing when building apps.
As I said, this is extremely unreliable test. It actually doesn't prove anything.
- until I see the actual code.. this is just one example that we really have no way of verifying.Boz
- Boz0
Smokescreen is getting more and more impressive. For banner stuff and simpler apps I can totally see this being usable.
- ukit0
These tests are kind of pointless, aren't they?
They don't really prove one technology is "better" than the other, only what the current browser implementations are capable of.
Taking a step back the more important metric for me is the long term commitment to JS/ HTML5 by Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Or anything Adobe has planned for the future with Flash. But these performance tests of the two don't really tell us anything about the long term viability of the two approaches.
- kpl0
I already posted it, but seems you missed this detail as well, Vectors are no panacea:
http://jacksondunstan.com/articl…And, if you want to bitch about JS, then the only criteria that matters is the vm's performance. Fact of the matter is, if you splice Flash Player and replace AVM2 with Google's V8, I'm willing to bet that you can leave all your code untyped, get the eval statement back and everything would still work a bit faster.
If you want to talk about how Flash handles vectors and how it's better than Chrome's SVG handling, ok fine. That has nothing to do with JS/AS3. And same applies with virtual machines.
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