HighlightsNew Years Eve 2009 Party at Paramount Studios. I'll post more later... but tickets are on sale, prices will go up as time goes on. buy now, prolly gonna sell out. http://wantickets.com/feelitout By: Gareth Because Apple is a bunch of spinster liars..
This is the press release that Steve Jobs put out for the public as the reason they refuse to support flash on their mobile platform. I've added my own comments to the document, which can be shown by mouseing over the highlighted sections. Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers - Mac users buy around half of Adobe's Creative Suite products - but beyond that there are few joint interests. I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven - they say we want to protect our App Store - but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain. ok let's make a checklist on these then... Adobe:
Apple:
First, there's "Open". Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, This is just word play here. The products that Adobe puts out for Flash are closed source projects. But the SWF format is an open source product, which many 3rd party software applications have been made for. In fact, you do not even need to own flash, nor any other Adobe product in order to make SWF projects. While with any Apple product, on the other hand, you can not even start a project without having a licensed version of Mac OSx. Also, the Flash editor application can use extensions which can be written by any 3rd party for use by developers of any level. Flash is a closed system Once again, the SWF format is an open source format, of which many 3rd party applications current create and edit from scratch. Try and make an iPhone application without using all every piece of Apple software that they make you use and buy. . Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript - all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member. Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit More mis-direction. This is a web project, not a mobile project. If they think WebKit is the end-all solution for web usage, then why would the browsers that use it allow plugins to be built for them? Why not just disable flash on their desktop based computers as well? Instead of hindering it like they do with their closed off GPU access. , a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android's browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers. Second, there's the "full web". Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access "the full web" because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264 It costs about $25k a year to license the rights to encode to h.264 format. So any medium sized business that has to abide by the laws, but cannot afford that license, is not going to have any h.264 video on their site. Instead they're more likley to use "On2 VP6" for flash delivery. Youtube started using h264 about 2 years ago, so no videos older than that will be able to play in a h264 reliant platform, unless & until they backlog their videos and start re-encoding them. Which of course, will lower the quality from the re-compression of the web-version files they have on disk. , and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web's video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren't missing much video. Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store Wow, 50k games... while there are about 500k game developers in the flash world, and who knows how many games out there! Does the "fart app" in the Apple store count in that 50k? Cuz I'm pretty sure I could do with that and the Beer pouring app. Maybe I should make sure to get that compass app, so I can find my way through the mountains when I get lost for less than 6 hours before my battery dies. , and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world. Third, there's reliability, security and performance. Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. Hah, that's hardly true. Although Flash movies do play videos slower on Mac than they do on Windows, because Apple has refused to let Apple in to use their graphics hardware acceloration. Could it be because Apple wants everyone to have to use Quicktime for their video player? You make the call. In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we're glad we didn't hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform? Fourth, there's battery life. To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power Flash on phones is not a new thing, it was just never a mainstream popular thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite If a phone in 2002 can handle flash, then surley any hardware created today could manage the same? And the obvious... why not allow software to utilize the hardware to handle the decoding? Instead of blocking the ability, open it up to software developers. Although Flash has recently added support for H.264 "recently"? Lets see here... If I started a job 2 and a half years ago ( that's 30 months ), would you say that I recently got that job? Who saw that fighting movie in the theaters recently? With all those Arabs and battle scenes? It was called.. 300. That was "recently" in the theaters right? Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 (version 9.0.115.0, codenamed Moviestar or Frogstar) (December 2007) I don't think anything over 2 years ago counts as "recent". Just more misleading wordplay by a rotten fruit. H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained. If this is the case, than Apple should open the access to software to allow it to utilize the hardware acceloration built into the device, instead of forcing applications to handle heavy processing on their own. They do the same thing on their OSx. When websites re-encode their videos using H.264 Which can cost up to $25k a year , they can offer them without using Flash at all Assuming that you only display video, not that you have any sort of Flash based chats or menu systems or interactions of any kind. . They play perfectly in browsers like Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Fifth, there's Touch. Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on "rollovers", which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Most HTML/JS/CSS based sites rely on mouseover capabilities, if not more-so than flash. And why not make it so that when your finger is touching/moving over an area, consider that a "mouseover"? I know already have that problem with normal HTML sites on mobile devices. Apple's revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn't use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If you can list me sites or games that are used based on mouseover events, you get a cookie! And in case I'm mistaken, there are several mobile device games that require you to maintain your finger touching the screen to move objects around. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites lets go with the hypothetical situation that I did indeed need to remove the mouseover functionality from my flash application. far be it for that to be more than 1% of any project in it's entirety. I'd rather spend half an hour changing things, than several months re-creating a project in another language. modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript? Modern? CSS/JS are over a decade old. That doesn't count as modern. HTML5 has still not been "standardized". So who knows what kind of changes and cross-platform nightmares are going to continue with that nightmare. Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. Sixth, the most important reason. Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary Again it is not. They keep re-stating a lie that they "establish" at the start of the article. major technical drawbacks If they had actually had a list of drawbacks, Apple would have posted it in here. doesn't support touch based devices Another lie. I worked on touch screen kiosks driven by flash in 1998. I doubt they forced the functionality to not work suddenly. Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices. Flash applications run on whatever device is able to play flash. Just like most websites will full work on any high end mobile device, same with Flash. We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools Be dependent on our tools! Not theirs! Even though... flash is already setup in a way where it could interact with any containing platform in any way. It has had external interaction abilities since version 2 in 1997, when it was still owned by Macromedia. Now you can open up live interactive sockets and perform any sort of XML or binary data interaction. Whatever the developer wants to do, they can do. , they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. As if cross platform tools are different from cross browser coding? Any high end web developer can tell you horror stories of dealing with the differences between Opera/Firefox/Internet Explorer/Chrome/Safarri. They are basically saying, if they make a feature, and noone else supports it, then that's your problem. But don't use flash features! Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe's goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple's platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X. Lets see... What else is not written in Apple's Cocoa platform... Firefox, Aol Instant Messenger ( partially owned by Apple ), oh and of course, iTunes! Apples biggest application, iTunes, is not written in Cocoa. If their lead application that helped save the company, does not need to be in Cocoa, why would anything else need to be? Our motivation is simple - we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins - we sell more devices because we have the best apps Exactly. They don't want to have applications able to be built on a medium that they can't have total control over and force to have partial revenue off of. , developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base Now this is just vanity. No matter how big Apple's hold on the mobile device world gets, it is not bigger than the rest of the entire mobile PDA/Smartphone world. Any platform that can be used on most devices, no matter what it is, will have more reach than a platform only available on one device. , and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform. Conclusions. Flash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short. flash 10.1 supports multi touch The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple's mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content Of course flash is not required in order to watch video on the web with a mobile device. More focus on video and flash, and ignoring the development environment that Adobe's flash application has, and how more people can develop high end games or interactive applications on that platform, than even own a iphone. Creating animations and games that are beyond just using a video player, is what gives Flash it's great appeal. The ease of use, and small file download, are even more ideal for a mobile world when speed is most important. . And the 200,000 apps on Apple's App Store proves that Flash isn't necessary for tens of thousands of developers Once again, listing their numbers but neglecting the fact that there are more flash developers than there are applications in the apple store. to create graphically rich applications, including games. New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5 HTML5 is not even completed being created into a "standard". And the software that supports it are going on their own accord. Not to mention the fact that there has never been a platform safe standard for HTMl or CSS or Javascript. HTML5 is no exception. , will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Steve Jobs April, 2010 Orig document found at: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ By: Gareth | ||