Sticking with Flash
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- ukit0
Steve Jobs will be interviewed at the "D8" conference this afternoon so I'm sure he will be forced to talk about the Flash issue.
- ukit0
Walt: So you just woke up one morning and heard about Android?
Steve: Kinda.
Walt: So do you feel betrayed?
Steve: My sex life is pretty good. How's yours?
Kara: Don't ask.
- gabe0
not sure if it's relevant anymore, but my thoughts _
- SteveJobs0
^ good points. however, i think it's important to remember who is actually challenging the relevancy of flash these days. it's really two different parties:
1) Steve Jobs/Apple: their intentions are pretty clear for the most part as to why they want to avoid the technology on their mobile devices, whether their arguments hold any water or not. It's still very much a part of their OS X-basd Safari, however, and will remain that way.
2) Web Developers. And not just any web developers; front end developers. Particularly the ones who got burned by Adobe when they went OO on everyone in as3. Also those who favor the tools (ajax, jquery, javascript, etc) they already know and understand and don't want to have to learn a new and more complicated technology.
i'm generalizing, of course. there are other parties who perhaps dislike the techology, maybe a few end users who's browsers crashed because of a badly written as3 code. also, the open source community, etc. but these voices have little effect to the outcome of the technology in the big picture, i think.
having said all that, i do think the relevance of flash *could* shift with the advent of html5 particularly within the context of video and ads. however, considering the fact that the technology has been around since 2004, it's taking a considerable amount of time to get enough momentum to rally all browser developers to commit to these standards and as a result, IE has barely any support for html5 even using excanvas, and even firefox has problems running some of the popular html5 demos and games. i think once the standard is finalized and everyone jumps on board, html5 will complement flash quite well and possibly (read: hopefully) reduce the need for the plug-in in some of those cases where it would be otherwise overkill.
- ukit0
Even though the performance stuff matters (more on mobile than desktop) I don't think it's the overriding issue. I mean, clearly Flash has some issues, but it's not stuck with the performance issues it has now. It's just software, people can fix the bugs, they could even rewrite it from scratch if they wanted to.
Same thing with HTML5 BTW. You'd be crazy to try to go out and build the kind of site that gabe makes, using HTML5, and Flash will be the best tool for that for some time I think. But there's nothing stopping HTML5 from improving either, and I'm sure it will. It's not even limited to HTML5 - apparently the WHATWG is working on stuff beyond that, like video conferencing, and that is moving forward. Or you can have third party solutions like Web GL, or, to take a simpler example, JQuery, that let you do things that you didn't think were possible with the underlying technology.
So the real motivation behind all of this is pretty simple, and has almost nothing to do with Steve Jobs or Apple. It's the objection against Flash not being an open standard, coming from the web standards community.
People who care about this stuff actually do have a large amount of influence in the industry. They aren't just some group off somewhere in an ivory tower, they are running companies, like Opera whose CEO invented CSS, or Mozilla, which has on its board the developers who created Javascript and the Apache server.
But the second, and maybe more important element I think are companies like Google, that share the standards point of view but also see HTML5 as a business opportunity. For them its all about creating a richer experience on the web so they can beat Microsoft. Flash is a weak link in that chain because it's the only element in terms of media they don't have full control over. Google are also practical, obviously (they still use tables on many of their layouts for instance) so they still use Flash for some things, but they are really going to be pushing HTML5 over the next couple years. Much more than Apple despite all the talk coming from Steve Jobs.
- msbert0
Flash in HTML5/JavaScript
http://smokescreen.us/
(it's an open source project... will be nice to see this project 1 year from now)
- robotinc0
i don't get it. the only thing i think of when i think of flash is horribly long intros where the elements fly in from off screen. why is everyone on flash's jock?
- ignorance is blisshotroddy
- haha, yeah, if you have to ask...SteveJobs
- ok, captain passive aggressiverobotinc
- flash excels at inserting itself between information and the user.kpl
- in ways that jquery and similar open source tech cannot? i am not trying to be an ass, i just don't get the appealrobotinc
- video, banner ads, games, marketing sites, and user trackingukit
- dbloc0
Steve Jobs at D8 on Flash, iPad and the post-PC era
- PonyBoy0
^^ from that article:
"Apple is a company that doesn't have the most resources of everybody in the world. The way we have succeeded is by choosing which horses to ride very carefully."
—Steve JobsHe left out the $150 mill from Microsoft back in the 90's that saved their then weak-asses...
- gabe0
good points ukit. i think perhaps my biggest gripe is with people trying to kill a technology that is still the most appropriate solution for any number of scenarios (as opposed to pushing competing technologies to offer more so that we won't have to rely on things like Flash).
calling for the death of flash without a more sophisticated replacement is just...dumb.
- Timmiller0
iPhone is last year, send in the droids!
- PonyBoy0
maybe we all switch to PC's in protest?
...
...
*crickets
- ukit0
- AVAVA0
Why does douche nation always feel compelled to revolt against any corporate moves such as this one.
Damn it, the guy is right, Flash stinks. Clunky, cumbersome and too easy to screw up.
Can't wait to see the back of it.
- ukit0
I'm really curious to see what Adobe does with CANVAS and SVG. Will they build a new application? Implement into DW or Flash somehow? Or just wait and see before doing anything?
There was that whole weird issue back in February, where the Adobe rep in the HTML5 working group made some kind of formal objection stopping the spec from being published. Apparently his problem was that a few of the elements of HTML5 (which included CANVAS) were technically "out of scope" for this release because of the way the original plan had been drawn up and they should be dropped from the HTML5 spec and pursued separately.
Ian Hickson, who oversees the whole HTML5 process (the industry side of it), seemed to think they were trying to derail CANVAS being included.
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=126596…
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adob…It's hard to really know because the whole process is so inside baseball with lots of different interest groups involved.
- Milan0
Flash Player 10.1 is out:
- whatsup0
Does anyone know how much Apple has to pay Adobe in order to run Flash on their computers?