Android Tablet Crashes during Flash Demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hqFTx8rLsg&feature=player_embedded

by rpledge • 16 years ago

43 48 16 years ago

youtube.com

mercury• 16 years ago

i can picture jobs big smug now.

pyre• 16 years ago

Because of a single video on YouTube? Or because that video is on HackerNews?

samps• 16 years ago

It's a prototype; of course it crashed. But I don't understand why mobile Flash demos usually entail watching a YouTube movie... isn't that a solved problem? Doesn't seem like a good selling point for Flash.

naz• 16 years ago

It's 2010. Apple decided Flash wasn't ready in 2007, and it obviously still isn't.

joubert• 16 years ago

I didn't know android or mobile flash are still prototypes...

czhiddy• 16 years ago

Agreed. It's not as if Android devices would switch to this Flash implementation to playback videos. Why not demo something like Farmville?

cscotta• 16 years ago

Alpha software is alpha-quality. It takes time to get things right.

My pre-release stuff is full of bugs...which is why it's pre-release. Seems like it's a bit early to judge the quality of their product.

CamperBob• 16 years ago

Seems like it's a bit early to judge the quality of their product.

Seems like an excellent idea to keep it in the lab and out of the public eye, then.

megablast• 16 years ago

This exposure partly might be due to Steve Jobs calling Adobe out last week.

And people do want to see flash running on a device, and now we have it. This is a huge step. I mean, sure, there are still a large number of questions, like battery, speed, but this is great.

malkia• 16 years ago

Zeta Software is Zeta-Quality :)

Fun aside, but we do extensive stress tests for our games before going to the E3, or even for just journalist visits. If we know that the game crash, a special person is playing it (usually some QA guy) so that it doesn't.

That's failure to DEMONSTRATE!

angstrom• 16 years ago

Yeah, I don't give them a by on this either. It's not on the level of a BSOD during a CEO demonstration, but it's not promising either.

catch233• 16 years ago

The flash video on youtube crashes for me at least once a day on my Mac... so nothing new here. Is the flash player for the mac also alpha quality too?

FluidDjango• 16 years ago

Short answer: Apparently.

The problem is: They pawn it off as v 1.0 or better :/

vtail• 16 years ago

Which reinforces Steve Jobs's point that there is no working mobile Flash implementation yet.

loire280• 16 years ago

Assuming that large portions of the Android Flash player are borrowed from the Linux version of Flash, I'm not very hopeful for the final product. Flash Player for Linux is by far the buggiest of the desktop implementations.

On the other hand, Linux users may get lucky and indirectly benefit from a renewed push to improve that code base!

DrSprout• 16 years ago

Flash hasn't crashed on me in over a year.

Firefox frequently refuses to run Flash, but I've pretty much given up on that, and when I want Flash, I copy the url into Chromium. It's actually a nice separation, since I've got one locked-down noscripted browser I go where I want on,and one that I use when I'm looking for rich media.

neonfunk• 16 years ago

I'll bet people are only interested in this because it (Flash on Android) was originally described as running "flawlessly". If they had just described it as alpha (and realistically, buggy), this would be a non-story.

catch233• 16 years ago

I'm guessing flash will still crash in the production version, the only difference is that Google will have an android browser similar to Chrome in that flash crashing will not cause the whole browser to crash. I really doubt Adobe can fix all the long standing bugs in Flash before the release if they haven't been able to fix them for the past 5 years.

apike• 16 years ago

If you look at the YouTube player UI in the demo, it appears to be YouTube's HTML5 player, not their Flash player.

Edit: I've been corrected here - for some Flash videos, they use the HTML5 style UI, and for some Flash videos they use the old style one. Presumably the demo really was Flash, although I'm not sure why you'd want Flash over HTML5 on a browser that supports it like the Android one.

talklittle• 16 years ago

Their Flash player now has the same UI.

zweben• 16 years ago

They just changed their Flash player interface; that is it. The HTML5 player looks like the older Flash interface.

catch233• 16 years ago

I'm guessing because their HTML5 one doesn't support annotations yet. Even in the chrome browser, the default is still the flash player.

stanleydrew2• 16 years ago

Yeah, they need to figure out how to show ads in the html5 player, then I think the switch will be fairly rapid with Flash being the fallback.

10ren• 16 years ago

The tablet looks pretty cool - though the multi-touch seemed a bit glitchy, not always picking up gestures. But it is alpha

Andys2• 16 years ago

In other words, its an accurate port of the Flash platform to this new device.

ramchip• 16 years ago

Amusing comment, but I don't really understand why Flash has this reputation of crashing. I don't remember seeing it crash my browser, at least in a very long time. Why is there a "flash is crap" meme? Is it because it's unstable on Linux?

windsurfer• 16 years ago

It's actually really stable on linux 32 bit. I haven't seen it crash... and i develop for it sometimes.

stanleydrew2• 16 years ago

I think it's mostly because it eats resources like it's the only thing running on my system. My fan spins up every time i try to watch a youtube clip. Oh and it does crash occasionally, although much less frequently as time goes on.

Andys2• 16 years ago

Amongst the half a dozen machines I regularly use, it crashes much more often than the browser. This includes a couple of Windows machines, where Flash is most at home!

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

It has that reputation because it does crash. Also, Steve Jobs mentioned that it's the #1 cause of Mac crashes, and I saw someone link the Firefox crash reports that seemed to agree, too.

Just because it works well fro you doesn't mean it does for everyone else.

wendroid• 16 years ago

"Flash is crap" because it's a cpu hog, browse the web with ads on an older PC and Flash dominates the machine.

edster• 16 years ago

Here's the bonus...

If you read the article that sourced this video the author claimed "It runs Adobe’s Flash and Air apps flawlessly." I actually laughed out loud reading that after seeing the video.

http://zedomax.com/blog/2010/05/04/android-multi-touch-table...

kylemathews• 16 years ago

I'm here at the web2.0 expo and played with the Android tablet for 10-15 minutes today as well as with their Droid phone that has flash installed.

A few notes. I didn't see any software crashes. The tablet, on the other hand, did have quite a few hardware problems. But that's because it was literally made just this demo. The tablet is encased in a clear plastic case that looked like it was hacked together in some lab. One of the Adobe employees told me it had "a motherboard and NVIDIA card". Some of the hardware connections were loose apparently because when I would set it down on the table a bit too sharply, some of the buttons would fire sometimes sending me back to the home screen. The touch screen didn't seem the best quality as someone else noticed. It wasn't very responsive. Not sure if that was a hard drive or software problem.

On the Droid, I watched a movie preview on Yahoo Movies and it played flawlessly.

So as for me, from what I saw today, I'm cautiously optimistic about flash on phones/tablets. I'd still prefer HTML5 of course but flash on phones will work as Flash is slowly replaced over the next 5-6 years.

dthakur• 16 years ago

I'm no fan of flash but if a user-mode app is crashing your OS, something is wrong with your OS.

darrenkopp2• 16 years ago

Are we sure it crashed? Didn't see a force close... More plausible he accidentally hit the home button.

iron_ball• 16 years ago

I have an Android phone and love it, but I have seen certain apps CTD.

darrenkopp2• 16 years ago

interesting. I have never seen an app crash without a force close. wonder if it's the difference between native applications and those that use java.

jgg2• 16 years ago

I've kept my mouth shut for a while now, but I have to be honest - I can't stand this fucking bullshit anymore. Do you realize how pathetic you look by posting this back-and-forth tech company drivel? I don't have or use an Android, an iPhone, a Palm or whatever other pointless gadget everyone here masturbates to, so I'm not saying this as a fanboy of anything. I'm just tired of seeing all this tech gossip posted to the front page. It's not interesting, it's not new and it makes Hacker News appear no better than Reddit - read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean.

astrec• 16 years ago

Dare I suggest you cast your vote for other stories? Whinging is (mostly) never constructive.

jgg2• 16 years ago

I do. There are so many of these as of late that it's become unbearable. I've been trying to ignore it, but I can't stand it anymore.

GR8K• 16 years ago

Those look like Tegra reference boards, not a product prototype.

more pics & video on Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/05/an-eyeful-of-adobes-andro...

loginx• 16 years ago

The author of the video posted the following comment on the video's page:

"zedomax @InfiniteStyleBlog Actually I pressed the home button, it didn't crash, Android OS gives u an error message if it does crash so just to clarify. I think I was trying to hit the Back button and hit the Home button."

buster• 16 years ago

Vote this up, Why the hell is someone making this up?

j79• 16 years ago

I'm calling bullshit on this excuse.

If you watch this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgFHGALMqK4) you can see the controls are located on the top of the device (appears the home button is on the left from his interaction with the tablet around 25 seconds in.)

However, if you watch the linked video, it's pretty clear the guy is holding on to the sides of the device. It's even more apparent when the browser crashes and you see his reflection (against the black background), that his hands/fingers are no where near the top of the device.

It's alpha software and crashes happen. No need to make excuses for Android OS or Flash. For alpha software, it runs remarkably well.

whalesalad• 16 years ago

Yep, I call bullshit too. I've had my browser crash dozens of times on my Nexus without a single message. Just poof, back to the homescreen. Relaunching the browser will show the homepage and no other windows open.

detst• 16 years ago

I hate to defend Flash in any way, but even it were a crash, how do we know Flash caused it? Yes, I have my own problems with Flash and love to hate it but it's really not being honest.

These other possibilities that should have been apparent from the beginning have me surprised by the reaction.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320269

Android Tablet Crashes during Flash Demo

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