
  This Will Be The Year Adobe’s 2 Million Flash Developers Come To The iPhone  - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/10/flash-developers-iphone/
======
ronaldj
"The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both
consumers and developers"

As a consumer and developer I don't believe this statement is true. If Flash
ran like it did on OS X the iPhone might explode. Why do I need to almost max
out both of my desktop's processor cores for a Youtube video?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Obligatory _clicktoflash_ link:

<http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/>

 _"Ever wanted to get rid of the scourge of the web that is Adobe Flash, but
still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want? With ClickToFlash,
you can! Using ClickToFlash, all of those icky Flash bits that have infected
most webpages on the internets are replaced with a nice, smooth gradient and
the word "Flash" set in a nice, pleasing font. When you want to view the
Flash, just click on it!

ClickToFlash supports viewing all those ADORABLE meowing cat videos, annoying
dog videos, and hilarious rickrolls from YouTube without using Flash at all!
That's because YouTube also offers H.264 videos, which are used when viewing
YouTube on the iPhone. With ClickToFlash, you get access to those same, higher
quality videos.

Come join us! The web is so much better without Flash."_

------
netcan
Adobe's support for Flash on OSX & Linux has always been pretty bad. I suppose
that was one of those rational decisions everyone keeps talking about. Don't
spend 50% of your effort on optimising the experience of 10% of your audience.

But.. You never know what's down the road.

Now that Linux & OSX run the interesting phones, people from the Linux & OSX
worlds have a 'Flash Sucks, let's find another way to do it" mentality.

------
GeneralMaximus
Flash is evil. Whenever I'm watching Flash videos on OS X or Linux, my CPU
usage shoots up to 100% and temperature goes up to 80ºC. Worse still, I have
to install several 32-bit libraries if I want to run Flash on 64-bit Linux.
The only place Flash works sort-of-okay is Windows.

QuickTime can play Flash videos just fine. More importantly, it's not a CPU
hog and can actually use your video hardware (AFAIK). If Adobe haven't been
able to optimize the Flash Player for plain ol' x86 processors (which is their
major market), I don't see how they're going to optimize it for low-power ARM
chips that power the iPhone.

About the "packager": I suspect they're just going to put your Flash app in a
application bundle along with a binary of the Flash Player itself. What makes
them think Apple will allow something like this through the App Store approval
process?

Aside: I was under the impression that Flash is the only crappy app Adobe
produce, and the rest of their Creative Suite was solid. Well, a couple of
days ago I tried installing Photoshop on my Mac and it refused to install
_because I had a case-sensitive partition_. Needless to say my opinions on
Adobe have changed radically.

~~~
jdowdell
"GeneralMaximus" is difficult to help, because s/he assumes that their
abnormal Linux performance is normal, and is due to the de facto standard
rather than to individual configuration.

(Apple APIs let QuickTime use hardware decompression. Adobe Flash has been
seeking permission to do the same....)

------
mpakes
Yikes. The app store is already flush with mediocre apps. Adobe is really
opening the floodgates with this one.

I might be the only iPhone user who feels this way, but I'm totally pleased
with Apple's decision to not support Flash within MobileSafari.

~~~
rinich
As am I. But I'm also pleased that Flash developers don't have to learn a
wholly new language to port their app. Flash is a standard for indie game
developers, and there's a lot of talent to be found there.

------
10ren
Apple has a point with the technical issues it cites. A compiled version of
Flash would address them. However, if Apple needed to block it for the
"strategic" reasons given in the article, it could find a way.

Come to think of it, I reckon Flash requires a virtual machine to operate (a
compiled version would need to overcome some fundamental architectural issue).
Assuming that's true, CS5 wouldn't produce a compiled version at all, but a
standalone flash player for the iPhone plus the code and data. This would have
the same technical problems as before. Therefore, it would be equally easy for
Apple to justify blocking it, and equally easy to implement that blocking (by
disallowing virtual machines, because they are potentially programmable like
that C64 emulator).

~~~
tumult
You can have VMs in your iPhone apps, you just can't let users load in
external code. Everybody repeats the 'no VMs or interpreters in iPhone apps'
line, but it's just not true.

------
cmelbye
As they alluded to at the end of the post, this year is also apparently going
to be the year that the App Store gets flooded with crappy
<http://www.addictinggames.com/> type games. (Not to be disrespectful to the
flash developers that would actually create quality apps, but you know that
the other stuff is coming.)

~~~
pavs
There are a lot of crappy apple apps out there too. Imagine a flash game like
this: <http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill2/> coming to iphone.

------
mcav
From one proprietary system to another.

I wish HTML5 included a decent way to do the things that Flash excels at, like
vector animation.

~~~
djcapelis
You mean like the canvas tag? Or do you see something wrong with the canvas
tag?

~~~
mcav
Canvas does bare-bones drawing all right, but it's nowhere near Flash in terms
of being a featureful graphics engine for things like games. For instance, you
can't really detect clicks on individual shapes, etc. Maybe I just need to
wait for a good wrapper library to come about... as long as it performs well,
that would work I suppose.

Canvas just isn't a good Flash replacement yet. It can replace some things
that were done in flash, but not everything.

~~~
djcapelis
Thanks. I hadn't heard that criticism of canvas before and I found it
valuable.

(I have seen it used for games though, I believe, so I think perhaps you're
likely to see the features you want available sooner or later.)

------
spiralhead
"...while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be
converted into an iPhone app."

The title is misleading...

~~~
aaronblohowiak
No, it isn't. The new creative suite lets flash developers program
actionscript and use the flash APIs to develop their applications. The fact
that it is converted to arm as opposed to running on the adobe virtual machine
is immaterial to the developers and development process.

------
iuguy
s/Developers/Malware Authors/

FTFY.

