I've seen some funky things in my days, but downvoting of the above is just wow.
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Adobe Discontinues Development of Flash Player on Mobile Devices
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I've seen some funky things in my days, but downvoting of the above is just wow.
Flash is far less relevant today that it was four years ago. I'd say its relevance dropped ten percent in the last twenty-four hours.
Note that Adobe is actually finally embracing HTML5. Killing off Flash for mobile devices is their realization that they have been too attached to the past, to old irrelevant technology (it's not like they just started working on Flash for mobile devices -- they have been sucking at it for years).
Adobe has conceded that HTML5 is the future, not Flash. At some point in the not-too-distant future, they will stop development on desktop Flash, probably resulting in more layoffs.
Adobe held onto Flash too long and now they are paying dearly for their nearsightedness. They should have abandoned Flash a couple of years ago and transferred their Flash programming folks to other parts of the company.
While i agree, theres a clear difference between learning Java, and learning how to program using Java as a vehicle for learning.
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Given the quality of some Apps in the app store and the ease of developing web apps, the decision to lock Java out were hardly the reasons implied above. More likely, Java was too open and thus not in line with Apples overall approach (here we find tangents with Flash, though).
I don't think those were the reasons, but a case could be made. (In fact, I'd expect Java to be accepted before Flash...)
I find it hard to entertain any "too open" conspiranoics when HTML5 was the originally sanctioned medium, and when Apple has done so much to make it a viable alternative.
At least Android gave the choice on what you wanted with your phone. Apple choose for everyone, that's wrong. Maybe Adobe would have continued to support Flash had Apple supported it too. Who knows it could have been a really good product. Dumb Apple
It isn't just Apple. Microsoft has played their part by refusing to support the plugin in IE for Windows Phone or Windows 8's Metro interface. And even Google, though they have supported Flash in Android, is slowly migrating their services like Youtube away from it.
Perhaps you are unaware of what they say about those who _assume_ Furthermore it seems as though you've not spent much time on the web.
There is most definitely no lack of useful applications of flash on the web. Flash will eventually fade, but not in the immediate future.
Funny how it runs fast and cool on my Android, and PC laptops. It's not even an issue that is discussed.
The torrents of hate, rage, and flash bashing on Apple sites reveals just how successful Steve was in luring people into his web of propaganda.
And so many are thanking him as a result.
By far the largest mobile ecosystem (iOS) doesn't do Flash. Never did. That's A LOT of users who don't run Flash and apparently don't give a ****.
Actually, Steve wasn't doing iOS users a favour. We did fine without Flash. He was doing *everyone else* a favour. Maybe this will bring the Android user experience a little closer to iOS.
Adobe had been working on Flash for mobile devices for five years and never got it to run well on any mobile device. Five years is an eternity in the mobile software development world. This is an unmitigated failure on Adobe's part.
Remember, we're not talking about two guys pounding out code for Dodgy Brothers Software Startup in downtown Mountain View. We're talking about one of the premier software development companies in the world and a component of the S&P 500.
They had all the resources necessary (money, time, staff) yet came up short.
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1) Hardware acceleration of H.264 video didn't need an API, it was baked in. That was (and still is) the competitor to Flash video.
2) Adobe in my book (and many other Mac users) could hardly be trusted with such access to a generic hardware acceleration API. Especially when it came to Flash.
Look, we get that your ****hurt over Adobe's decision to cut bait w/r/t mobile Flash. But Adobe implementations of Flash on the OSX platform had consistently been crash-ridden, buggy pieces of s***. After the famous Thoughts on Flash open letter to Adobe, Flash on OSX did improve, but it took public embarrassment to get Shantanu Narayen to finally devote enough resources to get stability and performance fixes for Flash on OSX.
The good news for Flash developers (I'm assuming that's your dog in this fight) is that it looks like Adobe will continue to let you use their IDE to do designs while targeting more standards-compliant applications. How is that not a win for you?
I disagree. I think desktop flash is still fairly useful, just not for video. Like you said, flash is easy to block. So if it completely goes away, you're going to have to put up with a lot more annoying ads.
Oh, come off it. Anyone who's been subjected to Flash on OSX (i.e. Mac users) had a legitimate axe to grind with Adobe. It was s*** for years. We certainly didn't need propaganda to tell us how to feel about Flash.
BTW, enjoy "not quite all of the web" on that Android phone.
Yeah
MiniDVI
ADC
AppleTalk
How did those work out for ya?
Oh and I'm still waiting for a Thunderbolt device that can be plugged into my 2011 MBA (like a Firewire adapter, eSATA adapter, GbE adapter) - which incidentally has no FW port.
Still Adobe has handled flash so poorly in the past, I can understand the resentment. It's been ok on the PC side, but always insane CPU usage on the Mac. I wonder why...
Uh ?
1) The only hardware acceleration of video decoding prior to VDA being made available on limited hardware in 10.6.3 was through QTKit, which is a high-level API that doesn't permit manipulation of individual decoded frames to add overlays and other manipulations required by a run-time such as Flash. Adobe could not use this and thus had to fallback to a software decoder.
2) If you can't write a hardware acceleration API in a safe manner, it's not your partners and developers you should worry about, it's your programmers. The fact is, after Apple shipped VDA (finally!), Adobe implemented it and we got hardware acceleration of video decoding in Flash. It worked, it still works, and nothing got destroyed by it.
As the post directly above this explains, you have no idea what you're saying.
Why else did Apple spend time and money implementing the VDA API if it was already in Mac OS X? Care to explain that?
Apple said:
Apple said:
Source = http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/_index.html
The poor performance of Flash video playback disappeared when this API was introduced by Apple. How is that in any way Adobe's fault that it took so long for Apple to do that? Microsoft did it years before. NVIDIA did it on Linux before.
I don't particularly like Flash Player, and I look forward to the day when we don't need to use it, but I prefer to stick to facts about things rather than resorting to making up reasons why something is bad.
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<sigh>
Modern ad blocking works at the domain level. It's as easy to block ad-based javascript as it is to block ad-based Flash content, especially when sourced from the usual ad domain suspects. http://bit.ly/vGQHUD
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<sigh> You guys aren't really as daft as you're pretending to be.
Hardware acceleration of H.264 video has been baked into Macs prior to Snow Leopard. H.264, as you should probably already know, is the chief competitor to the Flash FLV video format. The VDA API has never been necessary to get hardware acceleration for H.264 video, only for Flash FLV.
Ergo, Flash video's primary competition on the Mac (and iOS devices) is a video standard that already had hardware acceleration out-of-the-box with any Mac/iPhone/iPod Touch of recent vintage.
Yes, through QTKit, but that's useless when you're not just doing Video Decoding in a video player. Flash is in a browser and it does a lot more than that. The same would apply for any developer making something like Flash. If you want to make a rip off of Flash that runs in the browser (Silverlight anyone?) you'd encounter the same difficulty.
If you're going to spout nonsense like this then YOU should probably know that:
a) H.264 is a video codec
b) FLV is a container (i.e. it is in itself not a video "format")
c) FLV commonly contains H.264 video
You're making claims that are wrong because you don't understand the technology involved. You've just demonstrated this clearly by confusing a codec and a container and using them as the basis of your argument.
Already covered above.
Further to this:
FLV files (remember, they can contain a wide range of codecs) can be hardware accelerated as long as the player that is playing them supports hardware acceleration of that codec on the system that it is installed on.
VLC media player can play an H.264 FLV file with hardware acceleration in places where the Adobe Flash Player might not be able to.
The hardware requirements for video decoding will be the same for Flash as they are for any other player (including the one in Safari). Both are decoding H.264
Your GPU will either have hardware that can decode the video or it wont. Assuming that all of the software is up to date and compatible with that GPU hardware, hardware accelerated decoding can occur.
The problem with Mac OS X prior to 10.6.3 is that it lacked the type of API that Flash needed. Other Operating Systems had APIs that did this, so you don't see as many complaints from users of those Operating Systems.
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1) A case could be made that the commonality is the inclusion of the letter A in the name aswell. Wouldnt make much sense though. Just like the case you made.
2) Key difference: The web doesnt run on your phone. Java do (albeit in a VM). Sure, they couldve done a Sony Ericsson anno 2003, and break J2ME/Java (by not supporting "it"). But that would be even more stupid than allowing it in first place.
Yeah, I figured you'd get pedantic about formats and containers....
The fact stands. What most Mac and iPhone users need from hardware acceleration for video was already in place, unless the video happened to be locked in Adobe's proprietary format. Which, thankfully, is now going the way of the dodo bird on mobile platforms. Sorry about the ****hurt, but it was Adobe that abandoned you guys. Maybe you should take it up with them. LOL!
Yeah, I figured you'd get pedantic about formats and containers....
The fact stands. What most Mac and iPhone users need from hardware acceleration for video was already in place, unless the video happened to be locked in Adobe's proprietary format. Which, thankfully, is now going the way of the dodo bird on mobile platforms. Sorry about the ****hurt, but it was Adobe that abandoned you guys. Maybe you should take it up with them. LOL!
Good, so you accept my original point then - Flash's poor performance on Mac OS X was entirely Apple's fault.
FYI, H.264 is a 100% proprietary format. It's not at all open. There's no benefit to consumers there.
An FLV containing H.264 is just as playable as a M4V file containing H264.
I'm not hurt by anything Adobe has done. I don't own an Android device that supports Flash. I have an old Android device that I use for testing, but it is not my main phone - I couldn't care less about the announcement.
The reality I know is that until open standards can replace Flash, it will still be with us. Once open standards take over, there will be no loss to me in companies using them. I will be able to enjoy the same content and functionality.