News Apple explains why no Flash on iPhone

This is the best thing I have read in recent times and while some points are valid when you apply them to apple they also hold.

1. Sure adobe flash is not open but are apples products or platforms open either? Sure they might push some open standards but their business model for their touch devices revolves around a locked down app store which doesn't sound very open to me.

2. Yeah you don't need flash to view the web but it would be great to give your customers the choice since Apple is such an open company o wait.

3. Developers misusing flash basically isn't adobe's fault. I hate the stupid flash menus and stuff as much as others but adobe isn't really to blame.

4. Battery life argument is bunk, there is no flash on apple touch devices so no comparison can be made. Also HTML5 isn't the silver bullet when it comes to this anyway, I have seen some battery life tests of HTML5 vs Flash video playback and I dont see a definitive advantage to HTML5.

5. Good point here on touch interfaces but I would like to see javascript, HTML5 and CSS produce an interactive app of similar quality to a flash app/game without random additional plugins.

6. the last point jobs makes is the most laughable one of all, Unity 3D is a third party layer of software and I don't see how that hasn't helped the iphone platform immensely. He even has the nerve to say that Adobe was slow to adopt Cocoa, hey jobs what about all the first party apple apps like itunes and final cut pro which are still Carbon based.

The real reason they don't want flash is because it will completely undermine their app store and the new iAd initiative and reduces the stranglehold they have on the platform.

 

yeah should have made myself more clear.. thought it was obvious we were talking about the iphone and ipad

I love adobe products myself.. I use them practically every day from photoshop to premiere cs4- even do some after effects and have done quite a bit of flash programming back in the day

but to bag on pc's for a mac.. that's typical apple user for you.. they are clueless imo XD maybe back in the day of windows 95 they had a point in graphic arts.. but nowdays please

yeah we discussed html 5 on youtube back before it came out.. remember trying to get it to work on these forums.. but anyways youtube is a good example of flash programming and what it can do right..

think what jobs was getting at is- what if a typical iphone user bogs down because of a badly written flash ad.. how will that user comprehend it's not the phone.. apple rely on their image to rip everybody off like they do- don't get me started on their viao laptops!

 

Try the N900. Your HD2 uses Flash Lite, which is not fully featured. The N900 at least uses full desktop flash 9, which means that whatever site I go, most will run fully and quickly, especially since apparently only Nokia thought about how to solve the hover mode issue.

Vaio is a Sony brand (In fact, the only laptop line they have, and will have, according to one of their execs). Unless Apple bought Sony... What?

The N900 doesn't lag with any site I go to, but then unless I have a site with a 100% confirmed badly coded advert, I can't really say about the potential effects. Also, considering that the iPhone uses a smaller res display, it would require lesser processing grunt, unlike the N900, which has a much higher display resolution. Or they could ship the iPhones with Flash disabled, but let those with some more tech knowledge flip a toggle switch in the settings to enable flash? I call ******** on his argument.

2. You DO need flash to view some of the web, when these websites are completely flash based.

4. The battery life argument is NOT really bunk. MicroB without flash chews through my battery at a smaller pace, but not very significant drain. HTML5 should draw similar amounts of current.

5. Just enable a curser mode. Google for N900 videos for more info on how that would work - and it works like a treat.

6. Please remember Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field. No, I'm not joking. He could probably sell poop with an Apple logo on it, and it'd sell millions in a month.

 

lol trippin man.. yeah nm that it's just another one of those things XD I dunno why I was thinking it was apple- probably cause I tend to bunch them all up into one big pile

my mom owns one and I can't believe how much she spent on it.. think my pops was leaning towards getting a vaio too until I found a better deal for him

 

I am aware of that but I am of the opinion that sites that use flash and silverlight etc in this way are generally quite terrible for actually providing the information that the user came to the website for as quickly and efficiently as possible so in effect they are bad websites.

I don't deny that flash reduces battery life because it is something additional that uses CPU cycles but is it worse than HTML5 in a video playback situation? I haven't seen that shown objectively.

I have heard lots of good things about the N900, good to see that Nokia is back in the smartphone market with a non-Symbian entry.

lol

 

Er... Has anyone actually seen Flash work well on a mobile device yet?

Only when I read reviews of Flash capable mobiles and tablets they all complain about slow, jittery framerates. Does anyone out there have, say, an Android-based phone who can enlighten me?

EDIT: Never mind, I did some Tube-Fu. Flash does appear to work well on the Google Nexus phone (hope it scales up well to a bigger screen, but I don't see why it shouldn't). So I'm not really seeing Steve Jobs' objections. The hardware is capable; I don't buy the argument that it is to protect the App Store. People can give away their games for free on it (yes, often they are demos enticing you to buy the full version, but they could and Apple would not stop them).

 

Vaio branded Sony's are expensive because of the quality. Sony has the ability to chuck very high end internals in slim cases without it being a (HP) Envy/MacBook Pro (Or is it CookBook Pro now?), AND preserving decent battery life. You pay for what you get.

True - but sometimes these websites are the only way I can get my information, so I'm sort of glad that I didn't pick another phone over my N900 - otherwise I'd need to haul a netbook around, which is a pain (vs the size of an N900).

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html

 

The same realistic assessment could be made about Apple laptops. In terms of quality, reliability and indeed customer support they are pretty much comparable. In fact, they share a lot of the same innards and batteries.

 

BreakHinge Air, iCan'tConnectPhone, CookBook Pro, BoilBook Pro...

Nothing more needs to be said about the (lack of) quality.

 

Yeah, and Sony has none of those problems. Vaio's have problems with overheating (to the extent of deforming the plastic casing), boiling batteries, faulty memory sockets (always the second one, for some reason), cooling fan failures (VGN-CS series and VGN-BZ series), hinge problems (screws falling out or the hinge just snapping, on four different models) and wobbly power connectors.

As i said: pretty much comparable. I would even go as far to say that Apple customer support is slightly better --even though that still is not saying much.

 

Not from a sales perspective but from a quality control perspective.

Given the amount of iPhone App submissions I'm sure Apple have some sort of automated unit testing process. This is easy to implement for them as the entire development process is completely locked down by the various proprietary frameworks apple employs.

Now imagine the logistics cost of expanding that quality control process to include the more open-ended actionscript, the pixel bender kernel language, and custom C++ routines written with flash alchemy...nah better to force people to buy more apple hardware so they can deploy on mac hardware...screw the desires of the developers, and as for the end-user, we'll easily win him over with our marketing machine.

I actually have a way of proving Jobs to be full of crap, but I can't talk about it yet...

 

hehe i got lot of feedback. yes, english isn't my first language, i'm trying hard though. calling me an apple fanboy for owning mbp is a bit too harsh. things just worked out for me that way. I had my quad/4GB/4870x2 and mbp for roughly 3 months but i've been using big desktop less and less and i sold it. for all i do at home my laptop is more than enough and for gaming i've got ps3 (xbox died in september).

i can't wait to develop fully in html5 and css3 but currently you'd address mostly audience using webkit browsers (btw webkit was developed by apple and is open source and is used in most mobile browsers and google chrome).

Unfortunately lot of our customers are using our service at work which means mostly on IE6 - bummer.

HTML5 is future and i guess adoption of this new specification (not finalised yet) will be much quicker than for example css2. there are already loads of users using html5 ready browsers . MS is going to support html5 in IE9 which will be of course offered as part of automatic updates.

Personally i've got nothing against flash if it's correctly written but this where the problem is. most of the flash sites/animations are created by designers not coders and therefore they're not fully optimised. Power of flash lies in action script which is very similar to javascript but designers don't know action script and can't optimise their work as a coder would do. I'm blocking flash by default as i find most of the flash content annoying.

 

Stevie is focused on two things: the long-term and the user experience.

If shaping products to fit like perfect puzzle pieces into his long-term strategy means making apparently strange choices now, then so be it. It is not the first time he has gone out on a limb and was rewarded with spectacular success.

If keeping an iron-fisted control over what goes on the iMobiles guarantees a certain level of quality, then so be it. Annoying for us geeks who can get around bugs and imperfections just fine, but for the regular end-user who gets baffled by such things a godsent. You don't want to have to debug your car either, no? Or worry whether the fuel you put in your tank will bugger your engine. You just want to turn the key and know it will work; fill up the tank and know it will play nice with the engine. That's the way most non-geek people approach computers too --especially mobile devices designed for transparent use.

You don't have to agree with it (I don't), but it undeniably does make sense, and has met with a lot of success.

 

Not sure about Macs in films lately, but i saw 2012 and i lost count of the number of Sony Vaio laptops on the screen for the duration of it.

 

Or Dell. Dell is friggin' everywhere. All the CSI series run on Dell.

 

It's about choice. Mozilla allows all users to tweak the heck out of Firefox, even the way it renders, by providing an avenue known as about:config, where most regular users have absolutely no idea about the existence of this master key.

Do the same thing for flash? Make the geek need to enter about:config in the Safari browser AND as additional safeguard, enter the Konami Code rock to enable Flash?

 

I can see where you are coming from, but most ordinary people don't want choice. Choice only confuses them. What they want is for things to just work. Steve Jobs is mindful of the user experience: he'd rather that his gadgets either do things well or not do them at all, then do them badly.

I'm not entirely sure why Jobs is down on Flash, but I suspect it is not just a matter of commercial control.

 

Which is why all users that want to have THAT choice will need to go through quite the complicated process - don't advertise it, don't put it in the manual, let Adobe release it, code a few lines to disable it by default but allow for it to be enabled, which will allow the more technologically inclined to have a choice, yet not confusing the ordinary people...?

 

After reading all these comments, my head hurts.

I wrote a blog post about Apple and their products the other day; I doubt many will be bothered to sit through my ramblings, so let me summarise.

I used to hate Macs and by extension Apple. Then I started using their products (iPod Nano, iPod Touch, some brief dalliances with OSX/hackintoshing) and realised they're actually not all that bad. I see why they sell well and I see the appeal. My cock didn't drop off when I bought an iPod and I didn't start slaughtering goats in Satan's honour when I used OSX. I grew up a little bit and stopped being childish. I'm not a 100% convert, because I like my PC games. I also like being able to tinker and overclock, or even install watercooling.

Apple aren't all good of course and they do have their faults. But before people start pointing the finger at others, let's not forget that other software/hardware companies don't exactly have a squeaky clean reputation. Why does it take a monster PC to run Vista well, when a free operating system will deliver a comparable user experience on hardware that is less than a third of the power? Let's not also forget that most software companies in existence are devious, thieving, scheming gits. Microsoft's way of competing with someone? Buy them. They pretty much ripped off their first operating system. Both Apple and Microsoft ripped off Xerox's interface; Xerox invented the mouse/pointer interface, Apple and Microsoft saw it and made their own. Almost every single desktop OS now uses a WIMP-style interface.

Bottom line: Apple has it's faults, and so do PC's/PC manufacturers. Different strokes for different folks. You don't have to like someone's choice, but their choice doesn't make them a bad person.

 

no, their choice doesn't make them a bad person, but their ignorance (once they became Apple fan) does make them an irritating person.

i've used both, more on Windows/PC but have experienced fair share of OSX and its hardware. i can safely say it is not what hexx or other Apple fanboy made it out to be.