It is probably out of scope for the article, or maybe too much on the opinion side, but the Flash developer experience is pretty horrendous.
There are too many ways to mix UI created code, time-line/movie clip stuff, and actual ActionScript code. It can make for some nightmare projects. At least this was the case a couple of years ago when I unconditionally stopped working in Flash.
XCode is not perfect by any means, but way better than flash. It finds the right balance between interface building in a GUI and straight-up coding. Objective-C can be weird, but less weird than ActionScript. Oh, and XCode is free.
So, regardless of the business side, or even the end user experience side, I (and I think most developers) would choose XCode and Objective-C over Flash and ActionScript.
The crux argument is surprisingly cogent: Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion, the one mechanism that has never been shown to work in the past.
I think there's a huge amount of opportunity for Adobe here. Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever.
Pushing Flash because it's a dominant player in a legacy market is a little like going back to 1995 and arguing that people ought to be able to make web servers in PowerBuilder because that's the language everyone is using for business applications.
Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software, so I'm loathe to tell them what to do. I'll just say that it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices.
They told me to write web applications using open and free standards, and I listened.
Some other people called them up and begged to be chained to the oars of a proprietary slave galley, and they told them that if they wanted to be slaves they had to be Apple's slaves and not Adobe's slaves.
Many of these people are happy and well-fed, so I have no quarrel with their choice. But I point out that it's their choice and Apple have offered each and every one of us the right to write free applications for iPhone and iPad.
You can keep thinking like that. In Italy we say "di certo c'è solo la morte" (the only sure thing is death). When you base your business on somebody's platform you play with their rules and if they want to change them so be it.
Apple doesn't force anybody to develop for iPhone, if you don't like it, plenty of other platforms. Apple, like every other company, is a business, and they make business decisions, the ones they think are better for their company and profits. Apple didn't force you to learn "a specific approach/workflow" using Titanium. Next time spend those hours learning the native tools they give you and you'll be fine.
That's great rhetoric and philosophy, yet it's incredibly clear that the decision to eliminate other frameworks from compiling into iApps (the day of CS5 announcement, no less) is motivated by ignorance. Ignorance that costs developers unnecessarily.
The argument that Flash kills the battery is without merit if Apple is pushing canvas+js, which uses as much if not more CPU (based on personal findings as well as written testimony from neutral developers; ie: not Apple PR nodes).
"Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion."
They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.
OK, first, if you find that link unbelievable, which I assume from your scare quotes, there are many others, e.g. http://www.last100.com/2007/06/01/youtube-to-re-encode-video.... This was big news in 2007, when Jobs demoed (the now kinda defunct but may be due for a comeback) Apple TV. As the quote by Apple VP David Moody says, the transcoding was done purely for Apple.
Now, to the question whether Apple paid Google: I don't think anybody saw them writing Google a big check, "paid" in this sense is making concessions to Google, like having Google as the default search engine. This was of course in the good old days when Schmidt was on the board. If you think about it, transcoding all those videos into H.264 is a huge effort, something that Google wouldn't have taken lightly. Of course, at that time YouTube was (and still is) under intense pressure to make profits so that may have helped Apple's hand.
Google also controls Android, which benefits from being able to play h.264 youtube videos. Google has perfectly selfish reasons for undertaking such an effort as well.
Youtube has supported flash-free streams to mobile devices for a long time - long before the iphone came out, even. (I remember seeing this back when I was starting an internship at RIM, several years back)
The iPhone debuted on Jan, 2007, YT became publicly available mid-2005. When was your internship, I'm curious? Did they have a separate mobile version of videos? I thought they only had one version of videos, but maybe I missed it.
From the article:
"When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, ....
It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense.
But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits)."
There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.
They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.
I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.
Perhaps we are using the phrase killer product in different ways. When I use it, I don't mean that it's popular, I mean that it's so desirable to its customers that they subordinate all other considerations to it.
For example, Visicalc was a killer product: People bought computers to run Visicalc, rather than buying a spreadsheet to run on their computers. PageMaker was a killer product: People bought Macs to run PageMaker rather than choosing a desktop publishing program to run on their Macs.
For all its ubiquity, Flash is not a killer product outside of the video delivery realm: People obviously do not choose a phone to run their Flash games, and developers seem fine learning an entirely new language (Objective C) and framework (Cocoa) to build iPhone applications.
Flash is a killer product in exactly the same sense that J2EE is a killer product.
The problem for Adobe is that you can't win this battle with just any old killer product, only a killer application. It has to be software that does something people need, and does it significantly better than anyone else's software. Adobe doesn't want to write a killer application, it wants to control the killer platform.
And in the technology world today, I'm not sure there is any such thing.
Sure, it's ubiquitous... but it's also nearly as cruft-laden as Java, and the Flash tools definitely don't reflect the years of "effort" that have gone into them.
Seriously, you have to be a complete fool to CHOOSE to build an IDE on top of the bug-ridden warthog that is eclipse, do a bad job of implementing it, and then on top of that charge for it.
Given the choice, I would pick Silverlight over Flash without hesitation -- because as a developer I want the tools that will let me do my job most efficiently without forcing me to do it THEIR way, and the Silverlight toolchain does precisely that. Expression Blend + Visual Studio isn't perfect, but it blows the doors off of eclipse and Flash.
Agree with your points. They should probably concentrate on their second chance with android, which they can use to show their product potential(if they can only can make a great product experience for end user, not the memory hogging exp. we are used to on the desktops)
They should also try to win over application developers community which apple have mostly ignored/dictated upon so far.
...not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion, the one mechanism that has never been shown to work in the past.
But it has worked in the past. Popular opinion has already spoken, in the form of iPhone sales. Lack of Flash did not prevent the iPhone from being a success for the past 3 years, nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones. Or motivated Adobe to make a good version of mobile Flash, for that matter. Adobe just wants Flash on the iPhone because there's a big market of developers they can sell their tools to.
...which was only added recently to Android. The Blackberry's been around for a long time, Flash has been around for a long time, and they still haven't added it.
There are a lot of consumers who are perfectly happy using a smartphone without Flash. I'm willing to bet it does not give RIM or Google any major advantage in the market.
" Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever."
Except if they can't get it on the iPhone they may as well be Loki Games. They need to be on the dominant player to gain traction, and it doesn't look like the dominant player is willing to let them gain any traction.
What I mean is this: If they are over on Android and Blackberry and WebOs helping developers make the same kinds of applications that developers are making on iPhone, they're going to lose unless Android or Blackberry or WebOS find a way to win independently of Flash.
But if there is some new kind of application that I can't imagine that they facilitate, some new category that is so compelling for end users that they buy whatever phone runs the new application, then another phone can supplant iPhone the way PCs supplanted Apple IIs.
If Adobe's product is the dominant way to write the new kind of app, Adobe will ride this new market the way Flash rode the explosion of the web.
But fundamentally, it has to be something new that makes all of the existing apps seem like yesterday's news.
"... it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices."
Instead, Adobe went and bought Omniture for $1.8B. The acquisition has "completing the loop" written all over it. These are the actions of an incumbent who is more concerned with milking their position than maintaining it. We should be glad Apple lighting a fire under Adobe's feet; somebody needs to remind them to compete.
Can't help pointing out that shortly after Sean Connery's character derides Capone's men for "bringing a knife to a gunfight", they shoot him down in an alleyway into which he has chased them. Not that I expect anything similar in this particular case.
This latest ad campaign was poorly conceived. Adobe's prior response -- which was essentially "Ah well...fuck you Jobs. We'll be over there on Android and Blackberry and WebOS" was brilliant. It left it on the perfect note.
Now they've again gone back to pandering for sympathy. It's lame.
Nonetheless, this article is stupid. The author is hopping on the dogpile and saying all of the classic "talking points", hoping to pander to the audience with the right amount of fluffing.
With all this talk of flash you would be lead to believe that Adobe are the worst company in the world. I just isn't, they have some really good products that nobody in the industry has managed to copy yet. Let's face it, the reason for Apple's attitude is Adobe is a serious player with the resources that could change the nature of Apple's mobile computing platform and reduce mac sales (developers really have to buy a Mac to write apps).
I'm not for flash, but some of the authoring tools available from Adobe are difficult to copy. I'm thinking how would I do some of that key frame animation that's been in flash for years in html5? Tweening?
Is this another case where the competition is fended off for just enough time to build the software in-house or buy it in?
This guy from the headline forward doesn't get it. Adobe may not have had a hand in starting the DOJ or FTC investigations of Apple's new developer contract but they are determined to get in front of the parade to see them prosecuted.
This campaign is all about shaping public opinion and if they succeed Apple will pull down their artifical wall.
IMHO that's what this whole campaign is all about. Back fifteen years ago when Microsoft was playing a variation of this game by not giving equal access for outsiders to all their api you guys sided against Microsoft.
Now that it's Apple doing it why are you using Microsoft's old argument that the complainer needs to just go back and innovate? In case you haven't noticed Adobe is doing plenty of amazing things.
Outside of HN and the tech community, the general public doesn't give a SHIT about this kind of argument. Adobe can try to shape public opinion all day long, and it won't matter in the end. The only way they can survive is creating innovative products. Lately, they seem completely incapable of doing that.
The key difference is the monopoly issue. People have a choice today about what operating system they want on their computer and smart phone, and developers have a choice about which platform they want to develop on. This wasn't the case back in the bad old days.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] threadThere are too many ways to mix UI created code, time-line/movie clip stuff, and actual ActionScript code. It can make for some nightmare projects. At least this was the case a couple of years ago when I unconditionally stopped working in Flash.
XCode is not perfect by any means, but way better than flash. It finds the right balance between interface building in a GUI and straight-up coding. Objective-C can be weird, but less weird than ActionScript. Oh, and XCode is free.
So, regardless of the business side, or even the end user experience side, I (and I think most developers) would choose XCode and Objective-C over Flash and ActionScript.
I think there's a huge amount of opportunity for Adobe here. Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever.
Pushing Flash because it's a dominant player in a legacy market is a little like going back to 1995 and arguing that people ought to be able to make web servers in PowerBuilder because that's the language everyone is using for business applications.
Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software, so I'm loathe to tell them what to do. I'll just say that it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices.
Apple might though.
Some other people called them up and begged to be chained to the oars of a proprietary slave galley, and they told them that if they wanted to be slaves they had to be Apple's slaves and not Adobe's slaves.
Many of these people are happy and well-fed, so I have no quarrel with their choice. But I point out that it's their choice and Apple have offered each and every one of us the right to write free applications for iPhone and iPad.
Too bad you can't write any apps (preferred method for accessing information on the iPhone) using an open and free standard.
It's not just Adobe this effects, it effects any framework. Including the one built on free and open standards: http://www.phonegap.com/
But it's YOUR log cabin!
http://blogs.nitobi.com/jesse/2010/04/14/phonegap-and-the-ap...
Tomorrow it could also be a "fact" that PhoneGap violates the same 3.3.1 clause.
Truth is, the "facts" are flexible for Apple, and not so for the developers who dedicate several hours learning a specific approach/workflow.
Apple doesn't force anybody to develop for iPhone, if you don't like it, plenty of other platforms. Apple, like every other company, is a business, and they make business decisions, the ones they think are better for their company and profits. Apple didn't force you to learn "a specific approach/workflow" using Titanium. Next time spend those hours learning the native tools they give you and you'll be fine.
The argument that Flash kills the battery is without merit if Apple is pushing canvas+js, which uses as much if not more CPU (based on personal findings as well as written testimony from neutral developers; ie: not Apple PR nodes).
#2. Users.
#3. Developers.
You are last on Apple's list of priorities. If you are irritated by that, I empathize. Go write for a different device.
They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.
Now, to the question whether Apple paid Google: I don't think anybody saw them writing Google a big check, "paid" in this sense is making concessions to Google, like having Google as the default search engine. This was of course in the good old days when Schmidt was on the board. If you think about it, transcoding all those videos into H.264 is a huge effort, something that Google wouldn't have taken lightly. Of course, at that time YouTube was (and still is) under intense pressure to make profits so that may have helped Apple's hand.
Not sure making that point deserves a -4.
Fact of the matter is: Flash was necessary to access YouTube before Apple demanded the H.264 transcoding.
There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.
They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.
I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.
For example, Visicalc was a killer product: People bought computers to run Visicalc, rather than buying a spreadsheet to run on their computers. PageMaker was a killer product: People bought Macs to run PageMaker rather than choosing a desktop publishing program to run on their Macs.
For all its ubiquity, Flash is not a killer product outside of the video delivery realm: People obviously do not choose a phone to run their Flash games, and developers seem fine learning an entirely new language (Objective C) and framework (Cocoa) to build iPhone applications.
Flash is a killer product in exactly the same sense that J2EE is a killer product.
And in the technology world today, I'm not sure there is any such thing.
Seriously, you have to be a complete fool to CHOOSE to build an IDE on top of the bug-ridden warthog that is eclipse, do a bad job of implementing it, and then on top of that charge for it.
Given the choice, I would pick Silverlight over Flash without hesitation -- because as a developer I want the tools that will let me do my job most efficiently without forcing me to do it THEIR way, and the Silverlight toolchain does precisely that. Expression Blend + Visual Studio isn't perfect, but it blows the doors off of eclipse and Flash.
They should also try to win over application developers community which apple have mostly ignored/dictated upon so far.
But it has worked in the past. Popular opinion has already spoken, in the form of iPhone sales. Lack of Flash did not prevent the iPhone from being a success for the past 3 years, nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones. Or motivated Adobe to make a good version of mobile Flash, for that matter. Adobe just wants Flash on the iPhone because there's a big market of developers they can sell their tools to.
... except for all the ones using Android. RIM's supposedly also working on Flash for the Blackberry.
There are a lot of consumers who are perfectly happy using a smartphone without Flash. I'm willing to bet it does not give RIM or Google any major advantage in the market.
Except if they can't get it on the iPhone they may as well be Loki Games. They need to be on the dominant player to gain traction, and it doesn't look like the dominant player is willing to let them gain any traction.
But if there is some new kind of application that I can't imagine that they facilitate, some new category that is so compelling for end users that they buy whatever phone runs the new application, then another phone can supplant iPhone the way PCs supplanted Apple IIs.
If Adobe's product is the dominant way to write the new kind of app, Adobe will ride this new market the way Flash rode the explosion of the web.
But fundamentally, it has to be something new that makes all of the existing apps seem like yesterday's news.
Instead, Adobe went and bought Omniture for $1.8B. The acquisition has "completing the loop" written all over it. These are the actions of an incumbent who is more concerned with milking their position than maintaining it. We should be glad Apple lighting a fire under Adobe's feet; somebody needs to remind them to compete.
Now they've again gone back to pandering for sympathy. It's lame.
Nonetheless, this article is stupid. The author is hopping on the dogpile and saying all of the classic "talking points", hoping to pander to the audience with the right amount of fluffing.
I'm not for flash, but some of the authoring tools available from Adobe are difficult to copy. I'm thinking how would I do some of that key frame animation that's been in flash for years in html5? Tweening?
Is this another case where the competition is fended off for just enough time to build the software in-house or buy it in?
This campaign is all about shaping public opinion and if they succeed Apple will pull down their artifical wall.
IMHO that's what this whole campaign is all about. Back fifteen years ago when Microsoft was playing a variation of this game by not giving equal access for outsiders to all their api you guys sided against Microsoft.
Now that it's Apple doing it why are you using Microsoft's old argument that the complainer needs to just go back and innovate? In case you haven't noticed Adobe is doing plenty of amazing things.
Outside of HN and the tech community, the general public doesn't give a SHIT about this kind of argument. Adobe can try to shape public opinion all day long, and it won't matter in the end. The only way they can survive is creating innovative products. Lately, they seem completely incapable of doing that.
The key difference is the monopoly issue. People have a choice today about what operating system they want on their computer and smart phone, and developers have a choice about which platform they want to develop on. This wasn't the case back in the bad old days.