Apple iPad and related items
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hiraethified
Not video, but Flash games.do you have any flash video on urban?
grit
an ugly force for good
do you have any flash video on urban?
non-video uses for flash don't really bother me personally. can't remember the last time I used it ofr such a thing
Why does using flash to deliver video bother you?
grit
an ugly force for good
All of their content?
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Because when I'm using my ipod touch to browse the internet, I'd like to be able to view videos
ooooh
I'll say "the majority of" with a Bonus Ball for "all of"
grit
an ugly force for good
Because when I'm using my ipod touch to browse the internet, I'd like to be able to view videos
ooooh
I'll say "the majority of" with a Bonus Ball for "all of"
Thats an issue with the touch, not using flash to deliver video to be fair. In summary, I think flash will remain as the default for delivering video content. Sure ffs we still have not gotten people off IE6 yet
editor
hiraethified
Ultimate Apple fanboy Stephen Fry has wowed the world by uploading the all-important 'unboxing' video - but he sounds too awestruck to speak!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/01/stephen-fry-apple-ipad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/01/stephen-fry-apple-ipad
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
exactly - and the choice between using a (on a mac at least) buggy plug-in to view video, or this (obviously iPhones & iPads need not worry about the former choice).
grit
an ugly force for good
whats a buggy plug in?
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
flash on OSX
editor
hiraethified
Presumably it'll become less iffy on future Mac OS versions of Chrome.
http://mac.blorge.com/2010/03/31/google-sides-with-adobe-in-flash-war/
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
but that just bundles adobe's flash plugin. it's not some wonderful googles-own flash, just the same old.
grit
an ugly force for good
Um, can you give an example of the issues with the flash implementation on OSX?????
E2A: I dont have any Mac boxes but I find it really hard to believe that flash is not stable on it.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Flash is notoriously less reliable and less efficient on OSX than it is on windows. I have only anecdotal evidence for it myself, though.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
So? That's not addressing the stability and efficiency issues?
Chrome already has threading for each tab, to avoid plugins (flash) taking down the whole browser. That's great. This moves adds extra security. That's also great.
grit
an ugly force for good
If there are implementation issues such as Crispy is suggesting, those changes will have no issues at all as all they address is Chrome's handling, not the flash code.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Safari was recently updated to sandbox Flash so it couldn't take down the whole browser, which it used to have an appalling tendency to do. Now, you just see an "Adobe Flash Plugin has unexpectedly quit" dialog. While Safari is not the world's most non-crashy browser by any means, I can tell you that Flash is definitely the biggest culprit for freezes and crashes in my experience. It also takes a noticeable time to start up (my heart sinks when I open a page and Safari starts to beachball - it means that page has some Flash content that I didn't expect and almost certainly don't want) and has poor performance.
Some of this I think is Adobe and Apple fighting. Adobe want Flash to have very low-level access to hardware and functions and almost be a little OS of its own. Apple absolutely does not want anything doing that even in OS X, let alone on the iPhone.
Some of this I think is Adobe and Apple fighting. Adobe want Flash to have very low-level access to hardware and functions and almost be a little OS of its own. Apple absolutely does not want anything doing that even in OS X, let alone on the iPhone.
skyscraper101
0891 50 50 50
testing...does this work?
Sent from my iPad
Sent from my iPad
editor
hiraethified
Isn't it also because Flash lets users run games and fully fledged apps within the browser, and Apple isn't so keen on the competition?
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/a...is-mobile-applications-competition/1266602742
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
No, not really, I would say. Apple is not a games company and makes little to no money from the sale of games, and web flash games would not be a significant threat to natively compiled games anyway (slow to load on 3G, poor performance on mobile devices). It's an OS architecture decision; Apple has always quite clearly stated that it wants to keep full control over the basic elements. There are some good pieces on Daring Fireball about the issue - I'll look them up when I get home.
editor
hiraethified
Are you sure? I'd imagine they're making an absolute mint from their juicy cut of the ten zillion games downloaded onto iPhones.
I know Apple claim not to make money from it, but that sounds a bit weird to me, as this poster commentated:
grit
an ugly force for good
This. end of.
grit
an ugly force for good
WTF? Of course it is dont be silly.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
This is a good piece on Flash and Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash
elbows
Well-Known Member
Oh we are doing the full on flash debate again, thought we had already done this to death but I dont mind repeating myself endlessly 
so here goes...
I think the reason Apple dont go for flash on these mobile devices is just about every reason anyone can think of.
Performance, multitouch, battery, security, protecting their app-store revenue, getting developers to use the Apple developers tools (& buy mac computers as a result), and possibly some previous souring of the relationship between Apple and Adobe. I think its fair to have mixed feelings about some of these explanations, but again it comes down to Apple thinking that their winning formula is to craft the user experience to a very specific design, and whilst many users could be happy with flash even if it didnt perform amazingly well, anything better than nothing, thats not how Apple tend to work.
Whatever Adobe claim, the Flash experience on mobile devices up till very recently has been less than wonderful. Im slightly out of date but I suspect this is not really going to change until the feature-full version of flash for mobile devices becomes mature. One of the good things that come come from Apples stance is if it encourages others to do better.
Have Adobe got a decent multitouch implementation for flash yet?
From previous posts it should be clear that I want the reliance on flash for browser-based video to erode, and I believe it will because in many instances the transition is easy. The html5 video alternative is not without its teething problems and flaws, but it can provide a better user experience on certain devices. Its not at all hard to imagine that the transition will for many people be almost un-noticable, with sites simply serving the h264 video via html5 for some browsers/devices, and wrapping the same h264 video in flash for others. Its not very hard for sites to do this. Where it is trickier is with the addons they have put in their flash video players, eg adverts or additional functionality. This can mostly also be done with html5 & javascript but it will take a little while for equivalent functionality to be reengineered.
Games and other stuff will be much harder, and whilst browser technologies such as WebGL will probably be better for games than flash is, given time, the development tools and services to make WebGL, html5, canvas & javascript a joy for developers of all levels are not with us yet by a long-shot. There are also quite a lot of flash developers out there who arent going to be able to transition to alternatives without quite a learning curve, even once some of the alternative tech has matured. Adobe have provided a way for them to turn their existing flash games into native iphone apps but this does not help the 'flash game/app embedded in a web page' on devices like the ipad at all.
Its a shame Microsoft couldnt help themselves but to try to launch their own flash alternative, silverlight, and some pretty rich development tools to author that stuff. It doesnt go down well in an age where Microsoft dont garner much trust, and lots of people like cross-platform web standards. So the only useful purpose Silverlight ends up serving is to give developers who are already well versed in various microsoft (& other) languages/technologies a way to develop stuff on the client-side web, and its overcome some of the issues that sites that serve protected & nonprotected video in wmv format had with working on non-windows platforms. Its still been a failure overall, the wrong era to do it in, but time will tell if they get anywhere with silverlight by making it fairly central to Windows Phone 7. Personally Id rather Microsoft had tried to copy Google than Apple in various key ways relating to standards and control freakery, but its impossible to say which approach will successfully help them to reinvent themselves and deliver really good products.
If I had the resources and the skill I would be looking at starting to make rich development tools that work in a way similar to Flash authoring software & Microsoft Expression Blend, but deliver results that use html5/css/js/canvas/webGL. This is far easier said than done at this stage, likely we will get there in the end but it could be a very long road.
My original reason for disliking flash was the large amount of electricity that is wasted by inefficient flash video playback. Adobe have made it plenty more efficient since I first developed this strong opinion, so its not quite the issue it was, and even on the mobile if Adobe can work with device/OS manufacturers on the right level then flash should be able to harness the video decoding chips present in many smartphones, as they now do to an extent with GPUs on the desktop. Still room for improvement in this regard though.
so here goes...I think the reason Apple dont go for flash on these mobile devices is just about every reason anyone can think of.
Performance, multitouch, battery, security, protecting their app-store revenue, getting developers to use the Apple developers tools (& buy mac computers as a result), and possibly some previous souring of the relationship between Apple and Adobe. I think its fair to have mixed feelings about some of these explanations, but again it comes down to Apple thinking that their winning formula is to craft the user experience to a very specific design, and whilst many users could be happy with flash even if it didnt perform amazingly well, anything better than nothing, thats not how Apple tend to work.
Whatever Adobe claim, the Flash experience on mobile devices up till very recently has been less than wonderful. Im slightly out of date but I suspect this is not really going to change until the feature-full version of flash for mobile devices becomes mature. One of the good things that come come from Apples stance is if it encourages others to do better.
Have Adobe got a decent multitouch implementation for flash yet?
From previous posts it should be clear that I want the reliance on flash for browser-based video to erode, and I believe it will because in many instances the transition is easy. The html5 video alternative is not without its teething problems and flaws, but it can provide a better user experience on certain devices. Its not at all hard to imagine that the transition will for many people be almost un-noticable, with sites simply serving the h264 video via html5 for some browsers/devices, and wrapping the same h264 video in flash for others. Its not very hard for sites to do this. Where it is trickier is with the addons they have put in their flash video players, eg adverts or additional functionality. This can mostly also be done with html5 & javascript but it will take a little while for equivalent functionality to be reengineered.
Games and other stuff will be much harder, and whilst browser technologies such as WebGL will probably be better for games than flash is, given time, the development tools and services to make WebGL, html5, canvas & javascript a joy for developers of all levels are not with us yet by a long-shot. There are also quite a lot of flash developers out there who arent going to be able to transition to alternatives without quite a learning curve, even once some of the alternative tech has matured. Adobe have provided a way for them to turn their existing flash games into native iphone apps but this does not help the 'flash game/app embedded in a web page' on devices like the ipad at all.
Its a shame Microsoft couldnt help themselves but to try to launch their own flash alternative, silverlight, and some pretty rich development tools to author that stuff. It doesnt go down well in an age where Microsoft dont garner much trust, and lots of people like cross-platform web standards. So the only useful purpose Silverlight ends up serving is to give developers who are already well versed in various microsoft (& other) languages/technologies a way to develop stuff on the client-side web, and its overcome some of the issues that sites that serve protected & nonprotected video in wmv format had with working on non-windows platforms. Its still been a failure overall, the wrong era to do it in, but time will tell if they get anywhere with silverlight by making it fairly central to Windows Phone 7. Personally Id rather Microsoft had tried to copy Google than Apple in various key ways relating to standards and control freakery, but its impossible to say which approach will successfully help them to reinvent themselves and deliver really good products.
If I had the resources and the skill I would be looking at starting to make rich development tools that work in a way similar to Flash authoring software & Microsoft Expression Blend, but deliver results that use html5/css/js/canvas/webGL. This is far easier said than done at this stage, likely we will get there in the end but it could be a very long road.
My original reason for disliking flash was the large amount of electricity that is wasted by inefficient flash video playback. Adobe have made it plenty more efficient since I first developed this strong opinion, so its not quite the issue it was, and even on the mobile if Adobe can work with device/OS manufacturers on the right level then flash should be able to harness the video decoding chips present in many smartphones, as they now do to an extent with GPUs on the desktop. Still room for improvement in this regard though.
Kid_Eternity
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Apple iPad is announced
Christ alive Apple threads have become boring as fuck these days...
Christ alive Apple threads have become boring as fuck these days...
elbows
Well-Known Member
Oh and the flash issue is already creating lots of work for Apple when it comes to the iPad, because they are feeling that they have to wave around a list of high-profile websites that are going to work on the ipad OK, mostly because they've managed to get the companies behind the sites to develop versions that work fine on the ipad by ditching flash for video.
Its one of the things Apple have done to promote certain standards (the other being h264 in a .mp4 wrapper) which Im really happy about, regardless of their motives. It is harming flash/Adobe, to what extent we wont know for some time. It certainly undoes some of the massive rise in flash use that the video-in-the-browser era gifted to Adobe. Adobe also shot themselves in the foot by enabling flash to play h264 video in the first place, because many videos of recent years have been done in h264 and flash is just a wrapper that can be discarded without having to reencode all the videos. Still they would have eventually ended up in woe if they had chosen not to support h264 as well, no easy way for them to avoid serious threats from rival tech.
Anyway my point was that its costing Apple effort and customers by not having flash, so they must be really convinced that it will yield them many benefits in the grand scheme of things. I assume they will probably succeed with this strategy, although its too early to completely rule out them being forced to change their flash stance one day if the device markets change a lot from where they are today.
In addition to the reasons for Apples flash stance that I speculated on previously, by getting developers to buy macs & use their dev tools & language to write native iphone & ipad apps, they are encouraging some more developers to start looking at writing apps for the mac as well, which of course Apple hope to profit from via hardware sales & also a possible app-store model for desktop/laptop OS's one day (shudder).
Its one of the things Apple have done to promote certain standards (the other being h264 in a .mp4 wrapper) which Im really happy about, regardless of their motives. It is harming flash/Adobe, to what extent we wont know for some time. It certainly undoes some of the massive rise in flash use that the video-in-the-browser era gifted to Adobe. Adobe also shot themselves in the foot by enabling flash to play h264 video in the first place, because many videos of recent years have been done in h264 and flash is just a wrapper that can be discarded without having to reencode all the videos. Still they would have eventually ended up in woe if they had chosen not to support h264 as well, no easy way for them to avoid serious threats from rival tech.
Anyway my point was that its costing Apple effort and customers by not having flash, so they must be really convinced that it will yield them many benefits in the grand scheme of things. I assume they will probably succeed with this strategy, although its too early to completely rule out them being forced to change their flash stance one day if the device markets change a lot from where they are today.
In addition to the reasons for Apples flash stance that I speculated on previously, by getting developers to buy macs & use their dev tools & language to write native iphone & ipad apps, they are encouraging some more developers to start looking at writing apps for the mac as well, which of course Apple hope to profit from via hardware sales & also a possible app-store model for desktop/laptop OS's one day (shudder).
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