
Ex-Adobe Engineers on Thoughts on Flash - ptomato
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs
======
stevenwei
"Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said
that because Adobe’s Flash Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create
apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. A simple
"Hello World" app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone would
take up 8 MB, he said, when it should be no longer than a few KB. (Wired.com
verified this figure with two other developers who have tested the iPhone
Packager tool in CS5.)"

8 MB for a simple binary? Really? That alone is almost enough justification
for me. I frequently end up downloading apps directly via my iPhone - a
massive increase in download time for no actual gain in value _would_ hurt the
experience.

~~~
windsurfer
I would still rather have a large download than no download. Adding flash
wouldn't hurt anything, it would simply enable some more developers into the
iPhone space.

~~~
butterfi
meh... I'd pick quality over quantity any day...

~~~
jarek
Unless you didn't have enough to choose from; that is, you were drastically
deficient in quantity.

~~~
ptomato
That's one thing the iPhone App Store isn't.

------
jafl5272
> If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple
> operating system ,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street
> Journal.

Yeah, that’s it. Program crashes. Must be the OS. Right.... Heck, why not
blame the hardware, too!

~~~
akmiller
Not that I agree with him but this article kind of murdered his quote. He was
replying to the fact that Jobs had implied that Flash was responsible for the
majority of Mac crashes.

I think jobs just meant that Flash simply crashed a lot on Macs but he seemed
to infer that Flash actually caused the OS to crash. If Flash is causing the
OS to crash then yes there is a problem as you'd hope a program residing in
the user space wouldn't crash the kernel.

~~~
steveklabnik
I think when they say "crash" they mean crashing Safari, not crashing OSX.

That stat came from Apple's automated crash reporting tool, and I can't
imagine that'd work after a kernel panic.

~~~
Zev
OS X saves a log and sends (or asks to send) the report back to Apple the next
time the user logs in.

~~~
Locke1689
A program in user space cannot be the root cause for a kernel panic. He meant
Safari.

~~~
Zev
I was simply referring to OS X's automated crash reporting tool. Which _does_
work after a kernel panic, regardless of what messed up badly enough to cause
such an event.

~~~
steveklabnik
Cool, thanks for the info.

------
asnyder
Interestingly enough these Ex-Adobe engineers are likely just as affected as
Adobe. On their blog they believe their project Corona will prevail, I'm not
so sure.

Unfortunately, I can't go into much detail, but Apple is definitely cracking
down on these multi-platform developer tools.

~~~
mahmud
_On their blog they believe their project Corona will prevail, I'm not so
sure._

They're not sure either. That's why they're kissing up to Apple and hoping by
showing allegiance they might get an exception. They're probably thinking that
Apple would be happy to partner with, or buy out, a flash-like platform that's
iPhone OS friendly.

I don't think these guys are the most credible arbiters on the issue; they
have a horse in the race, and probably an axe to grind.

------
acg
This reads like Adobe left flash to wither on the vine. In retrospect perhaps
Adobe is better at tools and they should have open sourced the flash plugin 5
years ago. Allowing them to concentrate on world class tools.

I can't help thinking that acrobat reader is perhaps going the same way. Will
anyone use the plugin in a few years?

~~~
jacobolus
Adobe only acquired Flash (w/ Macromedia) ~4.5 years ago, so they could hardly
have open-sourced the plugin 5 years ago.

~~~
acg
I thought the acquisition may have been almost exactly 5 years ago, but you're
right that it wasn't complete till December.

Also I was thinking if the plugin were opensource over this period when there
has been increased browser competition how much more innovation we would get
natively in the browser.

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shawndumas
“Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the
user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch,
accelerometers and GPS,” Luh said. “It wasn’t designed with that in mind at
all.”

Bingo...

~~~
dougmccune
The same can be said of all technology whether that's HTML or any runtime or
platform ever in existence. The fact that it existed before these things
(touch, accelerometers, GPS) means that obviously it wasn't designed for these
things. But technology advances. You wouldn't say that HTML 5 shouldn't be
used for drawing capabilities because HTML 4 wasn't created for drawing.
That's just silly.

The current beta of Flash player supports touch events (including gestures),
accelerometer input, and GPS.

~~~
thought_alarm
The iPhone was announced over 3 years ago. Now it's 2010 and this Flash player
is _only_ in beta. It demonstrates how Adobe has struggled to deliver their
software for these devices, likely due to the reasons these former employees
suggest in the article.

In the meantime, Apple has delivered an excellent mobile video and HTML5
implementation, and they did it using open standards and open source.

~~~
dougmccune
Well ok then... I wasn't saying that they did it fast or that it's released or
anything of the sort. I was simply saying that the argument that a technology
was first developed before the current needs of the technology is a completely
bullshit argument.

~~~
shawndumas
The point is that HTML5 was designed for touch, accelerometers and GPS where
as Flash was not.

~~~
dougmccune
and my point was that HTML _5_ is being designed for touch, not any prior
version of HTML. Just like Flash Player _10.1_ is being designed for touch,
not any prior version of Flash.

Saying Flash wasn't originally designed for touch, etc. is the same as saying
HTML wasn't originally designed for touch, etc.

~~~
shawndumas
but all flash apps, up till 10.1 where not. where as all HTML 5 apps are.

listen, I get what you are saying: the past is the past, but we want to move
on, now, and adobe seems to be moving glacially.

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figital
There was something called "Flash Lite 1.0" that was usually on cell phone
demos circa 2004-2007. I don't recall any apps ever being built for it,
getting any buzz, etcetera (especially on my Treo 650 which was a great
phone). I do remember a few Vaporware™ press releases though. Sorry, plugins
are _ghetto_.

~~~
blub
Flash Lite is alive and well on the Symbian os, including applications and
websites.

In fact Symbian is probably the os with the most dev tools available: java,
c++, python, flash, ruby(?). There was a .net too but the company that made it
closed shop.

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BudVVeezer
"A simple 'Hello World' app created in Flash and compiled to work on the
iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when
it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode..."

Am I the only one that finds both scenarios to be ridiculous? 400k or 3.6MB
doesn't matter -- both are stupidly large just to put up hello world...

~~~
Qz
Making Hello World apps is an edge case for commerical software development
frameworks. They're not optimized for it and there is no reason for them to
be.

~~~
wtallis
When your framework is made to build apps that may be downloaded over the air
on the nation's least reliable cellular network, you should at least try not
to include the kitchen sink with every app. Waiting for the app to download is
the user's first impression after clicking "buy".

Hello World is not just an edge case - it's a lower bound. There are plenty of
non-trivial apps that can be implemented in under the ~3MB overhead for Flash.
Once multitasking arrives, this kind of overhead will be even more important,
because small single-purpose utilities will be more useful. Also, if the
overhead is 3MB on-disk, the in-memory overhead is likely to be even bigger,
and it's not likely that it could be shared between several Flash utilities
running simultaneously.

------
est
Now I really want to hear the an ex-Macromedia engineer's thoughts on Flash.

