Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push 181
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timothy
from the here-are-your-new-buttons dept.
from the here-are-your-new-buttons dept.
nerdyH writes "Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface."
Life in the slow lane (Score:3, Insightful)
Noooo. It's bad enough that Flash slows down and eats system resources in Windows, Mac's and Linux, now they want to inflict the same on underpowered mobile devices. That's sick!
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:5, Insightful)
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5?
Tie yourself to a vendor
The possibility fo forks is necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes a maintainer refuses to give up a project, but refuses to continue meaningful development. Consider the X.org fork.
perhaps, but if not flash, Silverlight'll do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably, if Adobe doesn't establish Flash as a cross-platform dev environment for mobiles, then Microsoft will manage to foist Silverlight as it's own bloated slow lane for mobile devices. And the same devs that give us IE-only web apps will start producing Silverlight-only stuff for mobiles.
Now maybe Miguel would disagree, but I think it's better to have a truly cross-platform bloated enviroment than to have a single-platform bloated environment (I assume Silverlight/Mono is at least close to Flash in bloat). Sure, I'd take streamlined before bloat, but cross-platform trumps streamlined.
By the way, aren't Android apps based on Java? Since when is that a paragon of efficiency? Or does Google use some kind of 'compiled to machine code' Java variant? Likewise WebOS apps - aren't they largely Javascript? Who said mobile device platforms weren't bloated already?
This is a great idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the Adobe part.
And that Flash thing.
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:5, Insightful)
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5? Have your application run across many mobile devices, if Adobe has their way.
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web. We don't need a proprietary application such as Flash any more than we need one for displaying HTML.
However, Adobe has a lot of momentum and clout. Meanwhile, the browser developers can't even agree on a single standard for embedded video. The "Open" Screen Project is a big push to extend the life of a closed source, locked down technology. If most mobile devices support Flash, and html5 support is spotty, most developers will use Flash. If most developers use Flash, most mobile device makers won't be too concerned about fully implementing html5.
We have an opportunity right now to see html5 and other open standards take hold, but it is also an opportunity for Adobe to extend their grasp. I hope that real openness wins.
How about you get it right on the desktop Adobe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Life in the slow lane (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because all of the previous HTML implementations were so nice to use and performant.
Oh and you never have to test them individually in each browser to make sure things work... right?
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web.
Good post, but the most important factor isn't even a "technical" issue.
Flash's real strength is on the content-creation side, and the fact that most Flash is generated by "designers" not "developers". All the HTML5 specs in the world won't displace Flash if they require a team of Javascript/SVG gurus to use. There needs to be designer software on the same level as Flash, and that's not a trivial problem.
It's not the player, it's the upgrade cycle (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML5 is kindof awesome, but even the most awesome technology is limited by the number of people who can use it. Unless the W3C or Microsoft or Google or the Mozilla Foundation manage to convince the world to upgrade their browsers with the speed that Adobe can upgrade the install base of the Flash Player, HTML5 is always going to play second fiddle.
Now according to Adobe, Flash Player 10 is at 94% adoption in mature markets, and that's about... what, 10-12 months after release? The HTML 5 spec was formally named in January 2008, and the original started in 2004. Admittedly- corporate IT departments (the big evil) are as unlikely to upgrade the Flash Player as they are the browser, but if it takes that long for anything to make it into HTML, Adobe will have already had several upgrade cycles to react, improve, and move on.
Having said that: we can always return to the days of browser specific web sites, and that'd force people to upgrade: "This website is optimized for [Insert favorite browser here], please change your browser".
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:3, Insightful)
> Adobe is pretty much at the top of the list for exploits
Well duh. Flash is on, what, 95%+ of all desktop web-browsing systems. When Windows + IE ruled the web-browsing world, criminals looked for exploits there. Now that other browsers and OS versions are more popular, Flash is a more attractive lowest-common-denominator.
Not a threat - still waiting on x64 Flash... (Score:3, Insightful)
People have been complaining about the lack of 64-bit Flash for four years now. If Adobe develops this plan with just as much passion as they had for x64, it'll be 10 years before we have to worry about it.
Re:Er, it sounds like you haven't heard of canvas. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up (Score:3, Insightful)
Google ChromeFrame [google.com] will take care of recalcitrant IE. As far as Apple vs Mozilla goes, you can easily support both Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari with two seperate video encodes (ogg/h.264) and some browser capability detection. I know i've seen some very elegant solutions even with the current draft state of HTML5.
Photoshop for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
That's all I want from Adobe. Please please please please please!
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason SVG isn't/wasn't a workable solution is that IE doesn't support it. That's not an issue on mobile devices.
Re:More attractive for you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you, but Flash has vector graphics; if anything, it makes it easier adapting for different resolutions. The only real difference is the input method, but you can use System.Capabilities to see what's available - accelerometer, multitouch, pointer, etc. and fall back.
Flash 10 can play flash pre 1 content (Score:3, Insightful)
I was amazed when I saw current Flash player (10) could play "futuresplash" the original flash files all fine even with added hardware acceleration.
To have such backwards compatibility without adding bulk to a plugin which is in version 10 is the true secret why web designers love flash.
Here is the futuresplash demo from 1995 http://www.4dm.com/files/tech/blue.htm [4dm.com]
Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up (Score:3, Insightful)
2 seperate video encodes may mean petabytes and a gigantic grid of video transcoding devices/farms in certain cases.
All for? Mr. Open Source doesn't like patented codecs even if they are documented and were designed by AV industry themselves. While companies decide whether to go VP7 or stick with H264, they invite them to use VP3! It is amazingly similar to that Linux/Open phone which had the genius idea of not including 3G in this age because it was patented.
Besides "slogan like" names, it is damn VP3 an old abandoned codec which had no future and clever PR guys gave it free to open source stopping them from actually inventing something. I am almost glad Cinepak guys didn't have that neat idea, we would end up watching Cinepak vs. H264 comparisons all over the place.
Google's purchase of On2 may cause the true revolution if they actually do the right thing of moving it to complete open source, support every kind of platform (including chips!) out there. VP3 on the other hand and especially transcoding from already compressed to vp3 is a joke which they should never come up with. It just served to Adobe and nothing else.