Confirmed: Apple and Adobe Collaborating on iPhone Flash

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/confirmed_apple_and_adobe_coll.php

by fauigerzigerk • 17 years ago

43 20 17 years ago

readwriteweb.com

notauser• 17 years ago

This is only sort of good news.

On the one hand it provides Flash with a big advantage over silverlight, and Flash has _much_ better support for:

- End users not on Windows.

- Programmatic generation without a Windows back end.

But it also makes pure JavaScript less attractive, and that is one of the things that offers /real/ vendor politics free interoperability for rich web apps in the future.

blasdel• 17 years ago

So, not any more confirmed than the last five times an Adobe goon talked to the press on the subject!

flashgordon• 17 years ago

well atleast you didnt get rick-rolled this time. Clicked on the comments first just to be safe!

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

i don't believe it.

my guess is that adobe thinks that if they can convince everybody that flash on the iphone is a fait accompli, then apple will be forced to allow it.

reading between the lines, i think apple's objection to flash is more philosophical than technical. it's going to take more than this sort of PR stunt to make it happen.

icefox• 17 years ago

Not technical? Flash is a piece of junk that leaks memory, crashes and causes your cpu to spike (less battery life). How is this a good thing on a iPhone?

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

My impression is that Flash is pretty good (technically) on Windows, it's a CPU hog on Macs, and somewhat crashy on Linux. Still, it could be worse. Think RealVideo.

But that's kind of beside the point. I'm guessing that Apple's real objection to Flash on the iPhone is that they don't want Adobe to be in charge of something that important. Apple likes to be in control of their own destiny, and they're one of the few companies with the clout to get away with something like that.

iPhone is a whole new platform, in a sense. If Apple keeps Flash off of it for long enough, the developer community might make do with alternatives -- javascript, quicktime, etc -- so that Adobe's stranglehold on web media doesn't carry over to the newly burgeoning iPhone world.

I'm guessing Adobe is all too aware of this possibility, which is why they're lobbying so hard to get in there and assert their dominance.

StrawberryFrog• 17 years ago

But Apple does have philosophical objections to flash on iPhone. i.e. you can use it to run apps without going via the apple app store.

You might think "how much of an app will that be? it will be a flood of crapware". But then take a look at what people are willing to pay Apple $5 for.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

just one word: Standards.

Ok, a couple more: If everybody that does their very best to do the stuff they do today in flash would seriously try their hand at JavaScript the need for flash would be relegated to very few sites. And it wouldn't hurt to have browsers support H.263/H.264 natively either.

swombat• 17 years ago

If Javascript/HTML/CSS had the cross-browser support for scripting, display, formatting, etc that Flash/Flex does, I'm sure more people would consider it a serious option.

There are many things that can be done in Flex that are impossible or extremely hard and fiddly in Javascript (and I'm not talking about animations, but about user workflow tasks like uploading a bunch of files). There are many other things that can easily be done in HTML/CSS/JS but don't quite work across all major browsers. That last 1% really kills you by taking a huge chunk of time to fix.

Flex interfaces, on the other hand, work exactly the same no matter what browser you're using. Many of our clients are still stuck on IE6 because of corporate policies. Trying to reproduce our interface in Javascript would be very hard and wouldn't work properly for most of them.

To paraphrase you, if Javascript had more of the capabilities of Flash maybe Flash wouldn't be needed.

access_denied• 17 years ago

On word: typefaces. (translation: vector fonts).

ohhmaagawd• 17 years ago

What if the standards suck? Sorry but Javascript doesn't cut it for a lot of things (video for one).

Web standards unfortunately move at an insanely slow pace. So sometimes you have to go beyond them.

froo• 17 years ago

I'll believe it when I actually see it - this has been said so many times before its not funny.

homme2• 17 years ago

To hell with both of them. Javafx, to be open sourced...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=javafx+open+source&...

codeview• 17 years ago

http://opensource.adobe.com

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Not too bad . Right?

homme2• 17 years ago

Certainly not. I stand corrected, codeview.

Every time I read 'iPhone' I get a reflexive reaction to a closed, evil gatekeeper keeping me from doing what I want to on the plaform, and projected that onto Adobe. My bad.

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

adobe has opened up a little bit. enough to convince a casual observer that swf is an open format. but it's not.

for example, the open source flex sdk can't be used to create flash apps with gui controls. for that, you need adobe flash cs4. they haven't opened up the fla format, which means that nobody can create a product that competes with adobe flash cs4. so it's not very open at all.

axod• 17 years ago

If flash ever comes to the iPhone, and isn't absolutely opt-in, I will be getting rid of my iPhone. No question. Do not want.

Kitto• 17 years ago

Fixing Flash for Mac would be even better - it's sloooow

Confirmed: Apple and Adobe Collaborating on iPhone Flash

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