I'd like a little more detail on what they mean by "flawlessly." It could be that Steve's idea of "flawlessly" involves things like being thrifty with battery-hogging system resources, playing nicely with the upcoming multi-tasking in 4.0, and having a culture around writing applications that feel "native" on their host platform.
There's nothing wrong with having a different definition of "flawlessly," I'm just wondering what Adobe means.
I agree. Steve Jobs never said that Flash can't run on the iPhone/iPad. I'm sure he even tried prototypes for it himself. 30 seconds videos doesn't make a solid product.
Actually there are 100 apps written with Adobe's Flash compiler on the App Store, and no one has complained.
That is, they seem similar to all the other apps on the App Store: simple, quickly written, drain battery life, crash often. Just like native Objective C apps :)
They are neither Air apps nor Flash movies so are irrelevant to what Adobe are showing off here. This is about the performance of the Flash/Air runtimes, not the Flash CS5 cross-compiler.
This will be an interesting test of Steve Jobs' reasoning on why Flash should be kept off the iPad.
My predictions of Jobs' accuracy:
-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.
-I think he'll be right about made-for-PC flash interfaces being awkward on a tablet, (e.g. problems with hover states).
-I think performance will be acceptable for video but poor on most non-tablet optimized games.
-I think he will be mostly wrong about Flash holding the platform back, because I think most devs who are making content for the tablet will use native code or web apps.
Overall, I think people will be pretty disillusioned with the idea of Flash on a touchscreen once they use it and its limitations become evident, but I do think that it will still be seen as an advantage over the iPad among tech-savvy people, if just for the ability to use flash-reliant websites and to play non-youtube videos.
Also, I think there's going to be a ton of flash apps that won't have updated their apps to properly use flash's touch apis. I'm sure there's going to be a whole bunch of apps on yahoo games that just won't work and the owners of the tablet won't understand why.
-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.
It's probably worth pointing out that the Macbook Pro line has about 10 hours of battery life. It's only the so called "equally good laptops for cheaper" that struggle on with a couple of hours of battery.
I expect Flash to run well on tablets eventually (if Apple hasn't motivated Adobe to make this happen then nothing will). I'm not exactly sold on this demo though, show it working "flawlessly" on a shipping device with a price tag and published specs.
I don't think it is fair to say Steve Jobs motivated Adobe. Yes, we've all seen the hundreds of articles basically saying "Steve Jobs thinks flash 'sucks' for various reasons and will never run on the iPhone OS;" however, it is clear that other companies, like Google, Nokia, ect., have an interest in Flash. Flash will run on the Android phones (for example), and I know Google has been "motivating" Adobe to get moving.
All in all, I would say it is safe to say Google has been a great motivator for the engineers at Adobe, not Steve. I would guess the engineers at Adobe could care less what Steve says, for they won't be helping him with his iPhone OS.
Android should just do h.264 video. There is less overhead.
Also, won't apps written directly for the native (Java) APIs on Android provide better results? Aren't "native" Windows or Mac apps usually better on their respective platforms? AIR is a nice idea but adding one more layer on a phone with limited resources has to cost something in terms of app performance, battery life, and/or usability. It's good that Google is supporting Flash. However, I think they just need to be careful to make sure that there are a lot more "native" Android apps.
3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.
Uh... which market? The cell phone market? I hate to break it to you, but most people don't buy their phones after considering whether or not the apps they might be interested in will be running natively or using an intermediate platform. To most people, phones are about communicating status more than anything else.
Well, here's something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0 Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that, according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps "flawlessly." Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired's Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup, although we'd definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.
I hate how people blame Adobe when videos run slow, it seems to work out well for Apple...
People on this world: If flash videos on your mac have been slow in the past, it is because Apple, as a closed and proprietary platform, didn't expose the proper API for hardware video acceleration and thus, Adobe wasn't able to use hardware acceleration! This is not Adobes fault!
Shenanigans. I can watch HD Netflix streaming on my Mac Mini without a hiccup with CPU to spare, but 480p Lost on the same machine makes it cry for mercy. Pretty Microsoft doesn't have access to any super secret APIs that Apple saw fit to hide from Adobe.
Mh, as a developer i can see that it can be a totally different thing then just "here it works, here it doesn't". Software architecture is not as simple as you seem to think.
Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe.
I just can't understand why software decoding of video would be that slow if you're implementing the stuff using standard api calls. VLC & MPlayer run great on the mac and I doubt they're using undocumented api calls to play video -- I just don't understand why flash video runs so slowly. I'm guessing they just have a really crappy video software architecture.
The Mac Mini in question has no means for hardware video acceleration, so you're right, Silverlight does software rendering but faster. How on earth then is it not Adobe's fault that they can't do the same?
I haven't said that it's entirely Apples fault. I wanted to give the understanding that there may be different technical reasons to that.
From my point of view it is obvious that video playback could be faster if Adobe had access to hardware acceleration. We can agree on that point, right? This is obviously Apples decision to make an API public or not. Of course, i am not saying that video playback couldn't be smooth in software mode. The point that mplayer plays almost everything and smooth on different hardware is a good point. But to pass the buck to Adobe all the time is just wrong. I mean, the API is now public and Adobe already has built in the hardware acceleration, that is quite fast and shows that they are doing something to address the problem.
Obviously my opinion seems to upset others, so i should have just shut up and let people brag about how bad Adobe is. I'm not using a Mac, i am not developing with Adobe tools and i have no problems with my flash plugin, so in the end why should i care. I just hate one-sided views.
Thanks at the blind Apple Fanboys downvoting me because i hurt their feelings and expressed my opinions, even tried to find prove with the link. Go ahead, downvote here too, please, because i am apparently an evil person in your twisted reality!
(fyi, i wish that flash video dies, too, as much as everyone)
Why people are so stupid? (a stupid rhetoric question =)
The same crap designed to run on x86 CPUs with heavy FPU usage even with hardware GPU acceleration on Windows, cannot run smoothly on ARM CPU without any acceleration or comparable FPU. That is all marketing bullshit.
Even on Linux i386 they use no acceleration at all. Do ldd libflashplayer.so and try to |grep nvidia or something like that. Then try ldd mplayer and compare.
Flash sucks as technology, and Apple understand it. Of course, they want Flash on their devices, but it just broken. By definition.
The same shit with JRE. Dalvik VM in Android or that on Google App Engine is not the same as JRE, and you cannot, and never will be able to run some bloated spring+hibernate+swing crap on ARM.
Just face it: ARM is a completely different platform. Their favorite mantra "Code once, run everywhere" does not work anymore.
There's nothing wrong with having a different definition of "flawlessly," I'm just wondering what Adobe means.