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Adobe Suggests Disabled Hardware Acceleration for Flash Player in OS X Lion

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The reverse scrolling comment is just snarky. It has nothing to do with Adobe's products. For a third-party to tell users to disable a feature that the actual OS maker thought should be default under the guise of "its confusing" is lame.
 
inlovewithi said:
So Apple disabled hardware acceleration?

Does it break other software that uses hardware acceleration?
Click to expand...

We don't know what is wrong obviously since Adobe has not provided details. The issue they are facing might be something in their VDA path, or it might be something at the framework level. If it is the framework, then it's going to be broken for every other piece of software that uses the VDA framework (there aren't that many though).
 
KnightWRX said:
Except Adobe uses VDA, an Apple framework, for the hardware acceleration. This suggests that somehow Apple broke their own VDA framework under Lion.

Why would Apple disable one of their own frameworks ? It's not like Adobe is directly accessing the hardware here, this is what frameworks are for!
Click to expand...

Apple does not need to disable the framework.

The new sandboxing model requires applications (and probably plugins) to declare the resources they need, before they use it (so, for example, if you need to access the file system, just calling the APIs to access the file system isn't enough. You need to also request the permission to do this. This is new in Lion).

Read Siracusa's review for more information on this.

Also, Adobe must have known this was broken for months. Lion DPs have been out for a long time.

Unless Apple went out of its way to block Adobe Flash from accessing the Graphics card (why would they do this? It only makes the mac look bad. And Apple is not going to change the world's Flash usage by affecting mac usage, since the mac is barely 5% of global PC sales). In the meanwhile, its safe to assume its just a consequence of a new OS. MANY apps break when you move to a new OS, even the simplest ones (which is why they release DPs so many months in advance). Its not shocking that low level access to Graphics HW might have broken, without attributing any malicious motive.
 
Good riddance!

Adobe's Flash is a complete piece of outdated crap. It's a technological antique. We were using the same Flash app in the 1990s. It's a joke. Let's move on already.
 
OS X isn't done until Adobe won't run.

Is Apple copying the playbook of Microsoft circa mid 80's?

(I joke, because we all know this is Adobe's fault for not being a team player. Also, any guess how long it will be before Microsoft Office supports Lion's new features?)
 
Probably Silverlight is broke as well - Netflix suddenly became too choppy and CPU usage was through the roof watching SD content. Works well under SL. :mad:
 
I love how they state "possibly" because of hardware acceleration being disabled. Seriously, could this not have been tested and realized by Adobe before now with all the developer seeds going out. If they realized that HW acceleration was disabled, they should have brought it to Apple's attention, or re-written the application to "enable" HW acceleration.

What we haven't seen is any evidence that Apple had revoked the HW acceleration access in the API framework. For all we know, they may have made modifications to how that API works, and it just isn't compatible with the current Adobe program code.

But... "let's just wait and see what happens" seems to be Adobe's way, and if the backlash is bad enough, maybe they will kick it in gear and actually patch or re-write portions of the code, or release a totally new version.
 
addicted44 said:
Apple does not need to disable the framework.

The new sandboxing model requires applications (and probably plugins) to declare the resources they need, before they use it (so, for example, if you need to access the file system, just calling the APIs to access the file system isn't enough. You need to also request the permission to do this. This is new in Lion).
Click to expand...

That's madness to suggest. If every application that needs to call open() and close() required a full rewrite for Lion, we'd have had 0 applications that worked during the previews.

I think you're looking way too deep into this. Heck, some people have had some amount of success with VDA under Lion from what I've seen, but mostly it either segfaults or throws an error that the decoder is already in use.
 
BJMRamage said:
Flash slows down my PC laptop as well.

Though so does Picassa and even Windows Explorer. and Internet Explorer slows down the PC.

We need to have software reduce the strain on the computer and be more efficient.
Click to expand...

Why not just not run any applications? That should keep the strain on your computer pretty minimal. :rolleyes:

I am all for efficiency, and Flash is certainly far from being efficient, but at some point do we also need to realize that running software will naturally take CPU cycles? I kind of find the mention of Picassa here a proof-in-point: Of course a photo editing/library application is going to need to spend CPU cycles!
 
So, Adobe, one of the biggest software houses in the world couldn't be bothered to release a flash player update for Lion despite having months a pre-releases

I'm lost for words.
 
eliehass said:
I'm sorry, but this is just sad. Adobe is not some small no name developer. Apple has put out pre-release development builds of Lion for a while before its release. Adobe had plenty of time to put out a Lion compatible update. These comments make it sound like Adobe is just thinking about the implications of Lion now, after it's official release. They seriously dropped the ball here...
Click to expand...

This has been exactly Apple's issue with Adobe for a long time now. Yes, Flash performance is terrible, especially in the mobile space, and Apple doesn't want to support it. But the bigger issue is that Adobe has a history of being extremely slow to adopt new software technology.

Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 and until very recently had made no performance improvements. They seriously dragged their feet supporting OS X, then Intel Macs, then 64-bit in Photoshop.

But as you say, they also seemingly ignore all pre-release development of even major platforms until well after release. This is barely acceptable on a mature OS like OS X, and would simply not work on something like iOS. If it takes a year for Adobe to pick up on new APIs and start integrating them into Flash, then developers using Flash would be a full OS version or more behind the state-of-the-art. This ties software advancement to Adobe's whims, and is not something Apple would subject itself to.
 
I'm sure Adobe will fix all the Lion incompatibilities

And they'll include them in CS6, available in six months for a hefty upgrade price.
 
thatisme said:
What we haven't seen is any evidence that Apple had revoked the HW acceleration access in the API framework. For all we know, they may have made modifications to how that API works, and it just isn't compatible with the current Adobe program code.
Click to expand...

The Framework itself has not been updated according to the documentation, it's still the same it was and is supported as long as you're running 10.6.3 and later according to Apple :

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/

The framework itself is not overly complicated. Something is amiss here. It could be this broke in the GM and it could just be a bug, let's not start name calling either Apple or Adobe here, bugs happen.
 
Where has Adobe been?

I get the sinking feeling that Adobe didn't have access to any of the beta releases...or maybe they just ignored them.
 
The Adobe bashers just assume there is a way for Flash to access hardware acceleration on Lion, but what if this is not the case anymore? It's easy to assume that Adobe is too lazy to fix this newly introduced problem, but what if it can't be fixed because of certain changes made by Apple? Wouldn't surprise me if Apple did this on purpose, either.

One thing is certain, though. Adobe is terrible at communication. You can blame them for not bringing out this information before release date. I also blame them for not providing more insight into the situation. The current info is utterly useless.
 
longofest said:
Worst. Feature. Ever.
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It's actually not that bad, especially if you use a track pad or magic mouse.

I've actually gotten used to it, and have to correct myself when booting to Windows for games.

What would be nice though, is if the system would have an automatic mode similar to the scroll bars. When I connect my magic mouse the scroll bars disappear (with the auto setting enabled), and re-appear when I disconnect it and use my regular mouse. It would be nice if the reverse scrolling could enable/disable itself based on what kind of device your using. Or even better, only work on "touch" input devices (magic mouse, magic trackpad, laptop trackpad, etc...) and leave normal scrolling on for regular mice.
 
KnightWRX said:
Something is amiss here. It could be this broke in the GM and it could just be a bug, let's not start name calling either Apple or Adobe here, bugs happen.
Click to expand...

I think this is the key comment here. We simply don't have all the facts so it's time to ratchet down the condemnation. Let's wait and see what caused this before we start name-calling companies.
 
It amazes me how quickly people jump to defend Adobe. Don't get me wrong, Apple is not perfect either, but Adobe has had months to fix these issues. And a company as big as Adobe surely could have spared the resources to do so.
 
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