

Full screen, in browser, Flash 10.1 content shown running on a Nexus One - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/full-screen-in-browser-flash-10-1-content-shown-running-on-a-nexus-one-20100218/

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tvon
> _So the idea that you can’t do Flash in a mobile browser is just not the
> case as you can see._

Nobody that I know of has claimed otherwise. The claim is that you wouldn't
want to run it because of stability, performance and battery life issues.

> _In my opinion Apple do not like Flash and AIR because it is a major threat
> to revenue from App Store sales._

That's a common opinion, but I don't see how it holds up. If you're talking
about free Flash games the obvious competition would be free iPhone games
which Apple makes no money off of. If you're talking about ad-supported Flash
games then the competition would be ad-supported iPhone games, which Apple
makes no money off of.

> _The other aspect of Flash that worries Apple is obviously control. They
> have none over that content. So if someone wanted to produce a strip poker
> app with full nudity, for example, they could, and have it running full
> screen on an Apple device._

That's also reaching. They have no control over any webapp you build either,
and you could certainly pull off a strip poker game online without flash. You
could even use real people.

~~~
bad_user
> _If you're talking about free Flash games the obvious competition would be
> free iPhone games which Apple makes no money off of. If you're talking about
> ad-supported Flash games then the competition would be ad-supported iPhone
> games, which Apple makes no money off of._

Apple may not get any money on freebies, but those freebies are still
distributed through the iTunes Store, you still need to pay the $99 entrance
fee, and you still have to own a Mac to develop iPhone software. That's
control they are going to great lengths to keep.

~~~
rimantas
Interesting, I did not know that Adobe gives Flash development tools for free.
Where can I download my free copy?

~~~
Spikefu
They don't give away the IDE, but the SDK and command line compiler is
available here:

[http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3sd...](http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3sdk)

There are also a few open source editor/IDE options here:

<http://osflash.org/projects>

Particularly
[http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Pa...](http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page)

~~~
rimantas
you can get Xcode and iPhone SDK for free too and directly from Apple.

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swilliams
"Forget everything Steve Jobs is saying about Flash being buggy. In my opinion
Apple do not like Flash and AIR because it is a major threat to revenue from
App Store sales."

No. That is the MAIN reason Flash isn't on the iPhone, it is the number one
crashiest program on the Mac.

How is the battery life? That's another big concern with Flash on a mobile
device.

~~~
henrikschroder
The big problem isn't Flash itself, but what people make in it. Most of the
crap Flash movies out there are made by graphical designers who have no
knowledge about programming, and typically only test their creations in
isolation on their own machines. When that thing is then released, it is
actually displayed on some webpage together with lots of other flash elements
and other ads, and the whole thing slows to a crawl because none of it was
optimised.

A good Flash programmer can make very good Flash movies that don't perform
like crap, but good Flash programmers are very rare.

A lot of people hate flash because of all the low-quality crap that is made
with it, and shoved down people's throats through websites, but if you replace
Flash with something else, you can bet your life that there will still be a
lot of low-quality crap, made by non-programmers, that will be shoved down
your throat and slow down your browsing experience.

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rauljara
All true... except that the same flash app running on a non-windows machine
will use more resources than one running on a non-windows machine. Full screen
flash video takes up a ridiculous amount of resources on a mac, and an obscene
amount on a Linux machine. Based on adobe's crappy track record with non-
windows platforms, I have no trouble believing the reports that the version of
flash they submitted to the app store drained the iPhone battery in under an
hour, as rumors indicated.

Non-optimized flash apps are indeed a problem that Adobe can't really fix. But
the problem is multiplied by Adobe's god-awful implementation of flash on non-
windows machines.

~~~
henrikschroder
Fair enough.

For comparison, it's interesting to see that there's a new "browser war"
concerned with optimizing the javascript performance, and the results of that
are pretty impressive and to the benefit of all. If Flash had been a more open
standard and there would have been competing Flash players, we could have seen
something similar there, a race to improve the Flash player performance to in
turn make the browsing experience better.

But it's proprietary, so the only thing that motivates Adobe is the fear of
being marginalized.

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jsz0
Amusing and possibly telling that the one screenshot that includes the battery
indicator shows it in late-orange to early-red territory. I'll give Adobe the
benefit of the doubt. Maybe it wasn't fully charged when they started the
demo.

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dirtbox
I like this new, under pressure Adobe. It's almost as if they're trying to
please people rather than save their own skins.

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btipling
They'd please me most if they abandoned flash. Flash is a closed black box
sitting in a web page. I'm working on a Google Chrome extension that finds
MP3s on web pages and I hate it when I find a site with cool music but they
use flash. Also it eats my CPU.

I hope flash goes away. I have half the mind to uninstall it from my computer.
Most flash content is just ads and sites that don't really need flash for
whatever it is they're doing.

Adobe's Kuler is a great example of something that doesn't need flash. What
does it do that can't be done with HTML and JavaScript? Why would someone
choose flash for a project like that? Google analytics and other online chart
software are another good example.

~~~
cjbos
<http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromanimage> that's something thats trivial to
implement in Flash, but much harder with JavaScript I imagine.

~~~
sp332
Something like this, maybe? [http://harthur.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/getting-
the-color-sc...](http://harthur.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/getting-the-color-
scheme-of-a-website-using-canvas-and-hierarchical-clustering/)

