

Flash Co-Creator Responds to Steve Jobs - ryandvm
http://coldhardflash.com/2010/05/flash-co-creator-jonathan-gay-responds-to-steve-jobs.html

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danudey
It's somewhat annoying to me that Flash proponents seem to muddy the lines
between app development and website development. I've seen so many arguments
lately that either Flash is more open than the App Store, so Apple should
allow Flash in the browser, or Flash is more capable than HTML5 so Apple
should allow Flash apps in the App Store.

Flash is less open than HTML5 in the browser, it churns the battery, it's
slow, and it's unreliable. It crashes on the Mac often, it doesn't support
hardware video decoding (yet) and there isn't a stable version released for
ANY Arm platform yet. Adobe is so far behind it's not even funny, and the
arguments that Apple should have allowed Flash from the start are ridiculous
because three years later it's still not ready for prime-time.

As for app development, Flash produces much larger apps that run slower and
use more memory than native iPhone apps. There's no way to provide a truly
'native' UI (CocoaTouch) so developers will have to re-invent everything in
ways that doesn't work or look like regular iPhone apps. Like Adobe Air apps,
Flash apps on the iPhone would end up working and looking different not only
from other native apps, but from each other as well. Users would have to get
used to different behaviour from every app, instead of having a uniform set of
behaviours that they can quickly learn and internalize.

If you're going to complain about Flash on the iPhone, it would behoove you to
specify which specific implementation of Flash you're referring to, and
compare it just to the equivalent offering for the iPhone. Otherwise, you're
just making confusing arguments that don't hold water.

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Detrus
Amazing how groupthink works. Even people that don't work at Adobe now refuse
to see the issue from the other side's perspective.

This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it
doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs
for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without
Apple's help. Like <http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82>

And why should Apple devote resources to Flash when they're working on a
technology that does the exact same thing in WebKit, canvas, etc..? Flash is
not a standard, no one agreed to improve it or support it. They only agreed to
support HTML/JS/CSS web standards. No one owes Adobe their support.

Microsoft could ignore Flash and push their own Silverlight instead. The lack
of cooperation might make Flash inferior over time, but that's the risk Adobe
took by not agreeing to become a standard when offered the chance.

~~~
Locke1689
_This guy says that Flash performs consistently across platforms, when it
doesn't. That's the main reason for the whole argument, Adobe neglected Macs
for years. They did not improve things that could have been improved without
Apple's help. Like<http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82> _

Agreed. Why has it taken this long to develop a 64-bit version of the Flash
plugin for Linux? Yes it's a difficult software development task, but a
company like Adobe should thrive on solving difficult software development
tasks where its competitors fail. Apple certainly did. One of the main
problems that I see with Flash (and Adobe in general) is they make closed
platforms--that are bad! If they were closed and worked great they wouldn't
have half as many detractors. If they were more open (so that other developers
could fix them), same deal. Instead, they're closed and bad which is, in my
view, the worst possible situation.

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stuntmouse
He makes good points about video codecs, but it's nonsensical to imply that a
486 could handle anything like modern Flash usage.

~~~
acangiano
Not a chance. I remember PCs from that era struggling when playing MP3s.

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alain94040
I'm getting tired of those discussions. From Apple's point of view, Flash is
like MSDOS: they don't want to support antiquated apps.

If Flash is so great, just port it to the iPhone and install it (with ad-hoc
distribution) to the 100 top journalists and bloggers, and see what they
think.

~~~
weego
It is tiresome now in itself. It is a far more interesting topic to look at
from a different point of view though. It is amazing how people will ally
themselves zealously when really the sides they are picking are corporate
entities vying for future profit margins in one way or another.

It's kind of a holy war of pure capitalism in a way.

~~~
icefox
Except it isn't just between apple and adobe. I wrote a little browser called
Arora and constantly had to deal with the pink elephant in the room that was
flash. While my browser ran good on arm boxs, tvs, and random embedded
hardware eventually those who were messing around with arora on embedded
hardware would come and ask me how to run flash at which point my only option
was to tell them to give lots of $$$ to adobe who may or may not give them
something they can use (assuming x86 or arm to begin with!). On the desktop it
wasn't much better. Flash would cause crashes, behave stupid and without the
source it made things harder then it should have been. Not to mention memory
leaks. I quickly added FlashBlock as a standard feature to Arora. Flash also
prevented me from looking into serious process separation (back before it was
big with chrome) due to the amount of work involved because of flashes
dependency on a top level window. As a user I hate how flash uses memory and
cpu. As a developer I just hate flash.

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metamemetics
The casual game ecosystem is huge and owes its existence to Flash. Casual
programmers (i.e. not us on HN) who are more or less graphics designers are
not going to be able to grok programming a complex JavaScript html5 app and be
able to leverage their graphics skills appropriately. Furthermore, they need
their source code and media to be _compiled_ and _closed_ so others don't make
quick rip offs of their games and post them as competition on kongregate.
Flash is here to stay.

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dca
"People built it in Flash because there was no other decent technology from
companies like Apple, Microsoft or Real Networks that enabled this kind of
content to be created and delivered. To say that all this content should be
discarded because Steve Jobs is afraid that people will build Flash content
that runs on mobile devices running any operating system instead of building
content that will only work on Apple mobile devices is doing a disservice to
the efforts of all those individuals."

Interesting perspective I haven't seen in other articles on this topic. By
existing for years in popularity, its almost a required technology in order to
truly maintain internet history, as would be the case with image formats for
instance; though, granted, its arguable whether the majority of Flash content
is truly worth maintaining in perpetuity.

While certainly it may be displaced as a choice for new content, can Flash
ever truly "die" given that a likely sizable portion of the web will never be
converted to anything else?

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chl
Tangential hypothesis du jour: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash (in the
"middleware" sense, ignoring Flash-as-plug-in) on their iAppliances because it
would offer a _significantly_ superior development experience when compared to
Objective-C/Cocoa? From my experience w/ Flash development, it would be
_perfect_ for at least ~50% of the (rather) simple games and applications that
are on the App Store nowadays.

In other words: Maybe Apple doesn't want Flash because it's so bad, but
because it's too good?

~~~
mcav
As someone who has developed both for Flash and Cocoa: Yes, Flash (and its
IDE) is better suited for game development. (2D, sprite-based games, that is.
Not 3D.) That said, Flash is _horrible_ for the kinds of programs you would
typically use Cocoa for (ones with UI controls, data, etc). Flash's UI
controls look and act glitchy. Not a good experience, for developers or users.
Flex die-hards may feel otherwise, but I try to stay far away from Flex and
any other Flash-based UI-centric apps.

Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.

~~~
zacharypinter
I've found Flex, particularly MXML+Binding, to be one of the nicest GUI
frameworks I've developed with.

However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw
for mobile: memory use. CPU and Battery are debatable issues, but Flash has
serious memory management issues. On a device like the iPhone or iPad, with a
max of 256mb of RAM, no swapping, and a browser that has trouble keeping a few
"tabs" in memory, adding Flash to the mix seems like a recipe for disaster.

It'll be interesting to see how Android handles this. Hopefully it'll spawn
some much-needed improvements to the Flash VM.

~~~
alex_c
>However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw
for mobile: memory use.

It's because this isn't REALLY about technical issues. If it really was, Apple
could easily say "Sure, we'll include Flash if you give us a version that
performs to our satisfaction under these scenarios, otherwise too bad", and
that would be the bulk of the argument for not including Flash. I haven't seen
much evidence of this happening.

~~~
lurch_mojoff
But isn't this pretty much what Jobs said in his rant. To quote: "We have
routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any
mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it." The way I see it,
"we have ... asked" implies Apple were at least somewhat open to the idea to
include Flash support.

~~~
alex_c
I stand (partially) corrected. This doesn't seem to be the main argument in
all of the stories (see, for example, "freedom from porn"), but there has been
a lot of noise in the discussion, so point taken.

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greyfade
Drama, drama, drama.

Why don't we just get rid of Flash for good and end it all?

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yigit
Even Apple users does not find this reasonable. And also here is an opinion
pool which shows most of the people thinks that this is a wrong move:
<http://www.applevsadobe.net>

~~~
stuntmouse
Wow. That is not even close to being a legitimate poll.

