Apr 29
2010
2010
My Quick Reaction to Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" Letter
Technology , Miscellaneous , Adobe Add commentsSo just when I thought that all of the rhetoric regarding the Apple verses Adobe dustup over Flash had died down, Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash" on the Apple website today, ringing in yet another round in this boxing match.
I encourage those folks who care about this issue to read the letter in its entirety (rather than someone's summary of it).
Some quick thoughts I have on what was said (just my opinions/observations):
- When Jobs dings Adobe on the issue of Flash being proprietary, he acknowledges that Apple has proprietary products as well, but that "we strongly believe all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Why, exactly? What makes it okay to engage in proprietary protections off of the web but not on it?
- Jobs makes the point of mentioning WebKit to illustrate that Apple contributes to the open standards for the web. He fails to mention that Adobe also makes contributions to web standards as well (the partnership with Mozilla on Javascript engine code comes to me) and that Adobe does have products in their toolset to allow developers to create websites using the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Adobe certainly has an interest in promoting Flash, but they continue to support other competing technologies.
- It's interesting that Jobs implies that Adobe was tardying in providing support for the H.264 hardward decoder, yet it has been pointed out by a number of sources that Flash has long suffered from performance issues on Macintosh computers because Flash was not allowed to make use of the graphics accelerator on Macintosh chips.
- Jobs states that any Flash sites that rely on "rollover" events to activate certain functionality would have to be re-coded in order to work on the iDevices. That may be true in some cases, but let's not forget that certain HTML and Javascript events also rely on the idea of hovering over a page element with a mouse, or dragging and dropping an item. The need to adjust to a multi-touch paradigm is not something that just affects Flash-based sites; it affects websites built with those open web standards as well. And just because something doesn't work quite right on a new device doesn't mean you should throw it out and start over from scratch.
- I see the issue of allowing Flash to run as a browser plugin on the iDevices and the issue of letting Adobe provide a tool for developers to translate Flash code into a binary file that runs on the iPhone OS as two separate things, yet the way the letter is written it seems to combine the two issues. Perhaps it was done as a means of using the earlier arguments to sway some options regarding the Flash-to-iPhone compiler issue.
- A lot of these complaints Jobs has regarding Flash (valid or not) can be or are being rectified. Instead of encouraging Adobe to address the things he has issues with, he "suggests" Adobe should drop Flash and stop criticizing Apple. That certainly implies to me that even an open, secure, battery-friendly, and efficient version of Flash would still never be allowed on the iDevices.
- I have to wonder what he thinks this letter will accomplish. The fact that he wrote it at all seems to imply either some desperation or annoyance over the fact that that Apple's anti-Flash stance hasn't been as widely accepted amongst the industry and amongst consumers as he'd like. Perhaps he's looking to gain a few more converts to his stance at the cost of making his opposition that much angrier with him?
Apr 29, 2010 at 5:24 PM I take issue with several of your analysis. First, h.264 is new in flash. Apple supports hardware acceleration for this codec. If Adobe uses software decoding instead of Apple's accelerated decoder within Flash, then that's on Adobe. The only other native Flash codec Apple supports is .MOV, which I assume is accelerated in OSX as well. If Adobe wants hardware acceleration of these other codes that Apple doesn't naively support, or doesn't provide hardware acceleration for, why is it Apple's responsibility to provide it? It's not that Apple didn't 'allow' it. They had no interest in supporting Adobe's alien video formats in the first place.
Second, you jump to the conclusion that rollovers are some sort of red herring, missing the fact that Apple has control over the browser and java script source, but not flash's internals. Yes rollovers work in 'iDevice' browsers, and I have no doubt that there's an Apple published API for implementing such behavior. Is that Apple's fault or Adobe's for not including it in Flash?
Lastly, so called 'iDevice' apps have *always* forbidden interpreted and JIT compiled apps. No java, no python, no perl, no basic, and yes, NO actionscript. This is hardly prejudicial. Apple does this is for security and performance reasons, and I applaud that. Too many people expect their mobile device to do all the things their desktop does, and they're not meant for it. These limitations didn't seem to hurt the 10's of thousands of developers that produced nearly a quarter of a MILLION apps. So why jump up and down whining that Apple won't let me develop my app in ADA or COBAL?
As Job's letter outlines, Adobe has failed to bring their A game to flash on the Mac, and as a Mac user I can attest to the insufferable performance playing video through flash. Maybe it's time Adobe employees stopped writing hateful blog posts trying to create descent, and start cleaning up their shabby code and support the users who put them where they are today.
Apr 29, 2010 at 6:03 PM "He" did this post cause apple fanboys believe these things.
Apr 29, 2010 at 6:08 PM Hyper, I stopped on "First, h.264 is new in flash", Flash started to support h264 3 years ago (ages for the IT world). Your credibility end here.
Apr 29, 2010 at 7:04 PM "Hyper, I stopped on 'First, h.264 is new in flash'"
I read the whole post. It gets more idiotic. This is Steve Jobs' target audience for his Flash article: people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Apr 30, 2010 at 1:19 AM @hyperkinetic:
It's not that Apple forgot or simply neglected to make use of hardware acceleration, it's that Apple continually refused to give them the OS hooks to do so. Apple forced that hand themselves.
The rollovers ARE a red herring. The fact is that ANY website written with ANY technology using roll over effects is going to have a problem on a touch device, period. Whether it's Flash or HTML 5 makes no difference.
In case you didn't notice, ActionScript is NOT running on the iPhone inside a JIT compiler. It is being cross-compiled to C and run natively.
May 3, 2010 at 3:31 AM @hyperkinetic your passion is admirable but unfortunately you have all of your facts laughably incorrect.
about video - forgetting the fact that MOV isn't even a code, you are still confused about hardware acceleration and why flash doesn't have it on the mac - because apple didn't allow it. Job's point is that many flash sites have video in an old coded. Just because flash supports older video formats doesn't mean it can't support new ones as well.
about rollovers - no the iDevices do not handle rollovers in any way, nor is there any API. because there is no way to hover over something on a touch screen.
about languages - you are correct here it is not legally allowed by apple, however many games use 3D engines and old classic games are ported using various types of emulation. the only problem with these technologies is the apple developer license. why does apple care what programming library you use? because they want total vendor lock-in. if you're a small shop and can't afford to write 3 versions of your app - you might go for only the iPhone because it's got the best market share. that's what apple wants. they want exclusive apps.
As far as Flash performance - that may be your only truthful point. I don't think Flash performs that great either, but it certainly acceptable and at any rate, why would apple care? if you write an app and it has terrible performance, people just won't buy it. Or if it's so bad, Apple can just reject it.
This is about vendor lock-in, that's all it's about.
May 7, 2010 at 4:44 PM I really appreciate Brian's original comments. I base a lot of what I do including my own website on Flash. I agree that it doesn't mean Steve needs to throw it all out and start over. Flash is an amazingly creative tool that is object oriented with a timeline. And can be adjusted for the multi-touch paradigm. Flash in my opinion especially with Actionscript 3.0 is entering a whole new level of object oriented programming that we should all embrace.
Thanks,
Tim