Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Adopting SproutCore for Web Applications
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
But no matter how you rate it, how many sites have you come across where this stuff is implemented properly and not an annoyance? I'd say very few.
Anything that can be skipped is superfluous and should never have been there in the first place.
Ok, I guess I get the point some of you are making, but I still can't see the hate associated with flash. There are many sites where it is not overkill and it is done tastefully. Because of that I see it as an enhancement not a hindrance. The sites where it is not, simply stay away from if you are that perturbed by it. Flash is here to stay though, it's about moving forward not backward. I wonder how some would like to have all text and no pics. Hmm . . on second thought, maybe we should just go back to reading books.
It's always the same "small" group of fascist Flash haters that spew their hate of the plug-in while citing frivolous events about how Flash ruined their day by killing their dog. You guys probably also hate dogs, because one of them barked too much, so they must all be bad, therefore no one should have dogs... Do you guys really hate dogs?
I'll use a good friend as reference of a typical Flash hater. He told me the woes about how Yahoo's move towards more Flash was causing a 10-30 second delay for the page to load on his MacBook Pro each time and that it would bring his entire system to a crawl, so he was forced to disable the plug-in in a dramatic fasion as if his life depended on it. Anyways, he ended up being a fool, considering my G4 from 2002 loads Yahoo in a couple of seconds, which I showed to him and his coworkers. Well maybe he wasn't a fool, maybe his Intei is just slower than my ancient G4? Well that's not true, he was being a fool.
I thought that maybe there's an issue with the Intels and Flash, because it seems that the early Intel adopters complained the most. Well this isn't the case, I'm using a MacBook Pro 17" along side my G5, G4, and PC(of course) and its performance for Flash is excellent.
I read posts about how all Flash sites are revving up the comp's fan and that this is causing global warming. Have you guys gone to Apple's Start Page. It revs up the fans on all my systems and it does not have Flash. Have you guys actually used the internet for something other than reading a blog or PORN? Have you guys visited Quicktime.com? Have you guys actually used the internet as a multimedia portal, something besides displaying text? Have you guys heard of AJAX? Haven't you noticed that anything beyond text requires more CPU usage? Haven't noticed that simply scrolling a window takes processing power?
If you don't like Flash, you have the CHOICE, YOU CAN TURN IT OFF. At least download a Flash blocker and STOP whining to others about how it ruined your day years back and you were force to abandon the internet. My friend's blocker allows him to kill the unwanted adds, but still view the Flash sites he likes. He can still view sites like YouTube, or this other site that customizes his music stream based on what he likes to listens to. It's his own personal radio station. Ge, last I check you can't do that with just old plain HTML or even the precious AJAX. Oh and it doesn't effect his system's performance, nor does it cause his fans to go into a frenzy -- it's called good Flash development.
Any ignoramus that believe HTML + CSS + JS can match Flash in capabilities is just plain silly. Do your freaking research before making such naive assumptions. A good Flash site will be HTML + CSS + JS + Flash. Hey, that's kind of similar... Yes it is, but the Flash version offers a massive advantage when put in the hands of a competent developer.
If Flash goes away, do you monkeys honestly think that the ADDS will go away? Do you think they'll magically disappear? Do you honesly think that some other replacement tech won't take its place, that when put in the hands of a poor developer, won't suck? Do you imagine a fascist utopia of just text on the internet? If this is the case, you're living in in a whimsical world. Imagine the alternative, something you can't turn off, or if turned off disables 99.9999% of all sites. That would be great. At least with Flash we can target the areas that annoy us, while leaving on the plenty of good it offers.
If you hate Flash, YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT. Leave the rest of the internet to progress as you people fester in your fascist pool filled with ideals of the past. Anyone that cites the iPhone will be the end of Flash needs to grow up.
<]=)
I'll use a good friend as reference of a typical Flash hater. He told me the woes about how Yahoo's move towards more Flash was causing a 10-30 second delay for the page to load on his MacBook Pro each time and that it would bring his entire system to a crawl, so he was forced to disable the plug-in in a dramatic fasion as if his life depended on it. Anyways, he ended up being a fool, considering my G4 from 2002 loads Yahoo in a couple of seconds, which I showed to him and his coworkers. Well maybe he wasn't a fool, maybe his Intei is just slower than my ancient G4? Well that's not true, he was being a fool.
I thought that maybe there's an issue with the Intels and Flash, because it seems that the early Intel adopters complained the most. Well this isn't the case, I'm using a MacBook Pro 17" along side my G5, G4, and PC(of course) and its performance for Flash is excellent.
I read posts about how all Flash sites are revving up the comp's fan and that this is causing global warming. Have you guys gone to Apple's Start Page. It revs up the fans on all my systems and it does not have Flash. Have you guys actually used the internet for something other than reading a blog or PORN? Have you guys visited Quicktime.com? Have you guys actually used the internet as a multimedia portal, something besides displaying text? Have you guys heard of AJAX? Haven't you noticed that anything beyond text requires more CPU usage? Haven't noticed that simply scrolling a window takes processing power?
If you don't like Flash, you have the CHOICE, YOU CAN TURN IT OFF. At least download a Flash blocker and STOP whining to others about how it ruined your day years back and you were force to abandon the internet. My friend's blocker allows him to kill the unwanted adds, but still view the Flash sites he likes. He can still view sites like YouTube, or this other site that customizes his music stream based on what he likes to listens to. It's his own personal radio station. Ge, last I check you can't do that with just old plain HTML or even the precious AJAX. Oh and it doesn't effect his system's performance, nor does it cause his fans to go into a frenzy -- it's called good Flash development.
Any ignoramus that believe HTML + CSS + JS can match Flash in capabilities is just plain silly. Do your freaking research before making such naive assumptions. A good Flash site will be HTML + CSS + JS + Flash. Hey, that's kind of similar... Yes it is, but the Flash version offers a massive advantage when put in the hands of a competent developer.
If Flash goes away, do you monkeys honestly think that the ADDS will go away? Do you think they'll magically disappear? Do you honesly think that some other replacement tech won't take its place, that when put in the hands of a poor developer, won't suck? Do you imagine a fascist utopia of just text on the internet? If this is the case, you're living in in a whimsical world. Imagine the alternative, something you can't turn off, or if turned off disables 99.9999% of all sites. That would be great. At least with Flash we can target the areas that annoy us, while leaving on the plenty of good it offers.
If you hate Flash, YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT. Leave the rest of the internet to progress as you people fester in your fascist pool filled with ideals of the past. Anyone that cites the iPhone will be the end of Flash needs to grow up.
<]=)
I rarely step into these web browser fights but in this case I'll make an exception.
Let me start off by saying I support whatever works, not any company, technology, etc. However as of late, I mostly do Flash/PHP development. I do love javascript,and the simplicity of a CSS, HTML environment, but I'm obviously still biased. So I'll break this down into three sections.
1. Why we hate Flash.
a) We hate Flash because it attracts the worst of developers. Many of these people, have no prior experience in web development and want to see something and make something the same way millions of users sign up for blogs and choose a pre-made format. As a UI designer and programmer, I know that 90% of people are not meant to develop user interfaces. This sort of development is significantly more complicated to do well then most people realize.(And I am not talking about making a simple tabbed out, div based css vertical scrolling website that make up most of the web.) I'm talking about understanding true user interaction and figuring out custom solutions to user interface that don't break the public's established web perception and still offer. When Flash gives you the tool to make everything how you want it to look, most people are bound to mess it up. This is and is not Flash's fault. If Flash were to disappear and be replaced with something else "easy" all of the terrible designers and developers would flock to the new hated format of the web.
b) It's a resource hog. I agree, that it is but until someone find me a way of doing all of interactive multimedia features of flash, including interactive video, 3d interactivity, physics, and animation, I might have to say it's irreplaceable.( And yes you can use all of these things subtlety without making a mess).
Also this will most likely change, whether it's with Adobe's new player coming out (currently in beta finally offering full hardware acceleration and GPU support) or in newer versions.
c) Myths...Flash breaks the back button, Flash doesn't get search engine indexed(ah the mythology of SEO)....SWFObject and SWF address are two wonderful javascript additions handle these problem pretty well(nothing is 100 percent but still...), and SWFaddress also has javascript support as well for the same issues. I'm not an expert and I don't claim to be but I know I can make a Flash site that has interactivity you can't get anywhere else in one package, and supports all of the standard advantages of HTML CSS so much so that on most* computers you would have to check the source to see if it was Flash. And I'm no expert.
2. The war ...on Adobe*cough* I mean web standards...
Is Adobe a company set on making a profit by any means, however cunning? Yes. Duh. You knew that. So is Apple, Google, Microsoft and the self-touting open source companies you love. It's widely known Flash is Adobe's 'trojan horse'. But why do we want standards? So everyone can access the most information the most efficiently with transparency and freedom for all. Yeah that's what we want but are these standard giving us features to get the speed and compatibility or just telling us to forget about them. Also do companies want open standards for the good of all? Apple wants their software(quicktime player, etc) and languages everywhere so they can run their hardware fast so people buy more of their computers and make your iLife complete(This might be a good time to point out I am an apple fanboy with multiple macs), microsoft wants the same(replace software to better running hardware to dollar signs with just straight dollar signs) and google simply wants the web everywhere and to replace software with web software entirely. To what end...I won't even get into that one. I'm not trying to make all of these companies sound evil but they all want to succeed, to thrive. So some of these things are in some way in their plans even if I sound overly dramatic.
3. Sproutcore's potential or not?
I don't know if Sproutcore is any good. I looked quickly and wasn't impressed. I think other tools like Jquery and others have far more potential than this sproutcore. I find it suspicious that apple backs javascript so strongly and has such a great relationship with google when I still can't get my brand new(uncorrupted by clogs, and time) mac pro's safari to load gmail consistently without failing, despite google's best efforts to fix the problem. I know, I know, a new javascript engine that is much faster is coming to safari 4. Just don't forget that if you turn off Flash there are other people who also turn off javascript. It's only one click away from that Flash disable button. If you do this you may not be the average internet user.
In the end I'd love to see and open source multimedia rich internet experience that can natively be supported by any browser but until HTML and CSS do more than simply act as placeholders for real programming languages I might have to stick with Flash's current penetration( at least 80% though I know they say nearly 100% on their sites) and rapid development capabilities. If someone can direct me to that tool, I'll gladly look into it. But just remember it has to be able to give me HD video, 3D gaming, full database/ASP/PHP access(not necessarily built in), rapid prototyping(the list goes on) all in one IDE and someone to teach me to use it!
Remember the days before Flash and how awesome everything was and how much everybody loved all the sites that emerged from those days~ These issues migrate, they don't disappear.
Let me start off by saying I support whatever works, not any company, technology, etc. However as of late, I mostly do Flash/PHP development. I do love javascript,and the simplicity of a CSS, HTML environment, but I'm obviously still biased. So I'll break this down into three sections.
1. Why we hate Flash.
a) We hate Flash because it attracts the worst of developers. Many of these people, have no prior experience in web development and want to see something and make something the same way millions of users sign up for blogs and choose a pre-made format. As a UI designer and programmer, I know that 90% of people are not meant to develop user interfaces. This sort of development is significantly more complicated to do well then most people realize.(And I am not talking about making a simple tabbed out, div based css vertical scrolling website that make up most of the web.) I'm talking about understanding true user interaction and figuring out custom solutions to user interface that don't break the public's established web perception and still offer. When Flash gives you the tool to make everything how you want it to look, most people are bound to mess it up. This is and is not Flash's fault. If Flash were to disappear and be replaced with something else "easy" all of the terrible designers and developers would flock to the new hated format of the web.
b) It's a resource hog. I agree, that it is but until someone find me a way of doing all of interactive multimedia features of flash, including interactive video, 3d interactivity, physics, and animation, I might have to say it's irreplaceable.( And yes you can use all of these things subtlety without making a mess).
Also this will most likely change, whether it's with Adobe's new player coming out (currently in beta finally offering full hardware acceleration and GPU support) or in newer versions.
c) Myths...Flash breaks the back button, Flash doesn't get search engine indexed(ah the mythology of SEO)....SWFObject and SWF address are two wonderful javascript additions handle these problem pretty well(nothing is 100 percent but still...), and SWFaddress also has javascript support as well for the same issues. I'm not an expert and I don't claim to be but I know I can make a Flash site that has interactivity you can't get anywhere else in one package, and supports all of the standard advantages of HTML CSS so much so that on most* computers you would have to check the source to see if it was Flash. And I'm no expert.
2. The war ...on Adobe*cough* I mean web standards...
Is Adobe a company set on making a profit by any means, however cunning? Yes. Duh. You knew that. So is Apple, Google, Microsoft and the self-touting open source companies you love. It's widely known Flash is Adobe's 'trojan horse'. But why do we want standards? So everyone can access the most information the most efficiently with transparency and freedom for all. Yeah that's what we want but are these standard giving us features to get the speed and compatibility or just telling us to forget about them. Also do companies want open standards for the good of all? Apple wants their software(quicktime player, etc) and languages everywhere so they can run their hardware fast so people buy more of their computers and make your iLife complete(This might be a good time to point out I am an apple fanboy with multiple macs), microsoft wants the same(replace software to better running hardware to dollar signs with just straight dollar signs) and google simply wants the web everywhere and to replace software with web software entirely. To what end...I won't even get into that one. I'm not trying to make all of these companies sound evil but they all want to succeed, to thrive. So some of these things are in some way in their plans even if I sound overly dramatic.
3. Sproutcore's potential or not?
I don't know if Sproutcore is any good. I looked quickly and wasn't impressed. I think other tools like Jquery and others have far more potential than this sproutcore. I find it suspicious that apple backs javascript so strongly and has such a great relationship with google when I still can't get my brand new(uncorrupted by clogs, and time) mac pro's safari to load gmail consistently without failing, despite google's best efforts to fix the problem. I know, I know, a new javascript engine that is much faster is coming to safari 4. Just don't forget that if you turn off Flash there are other people who also turn off javascript. It's only one click away from that Flash disable button. If you do this you may not be the average internet user.
In the end I'd love to see and open source multimedia rich internet experience that can natively be supported by any browser but until HTML and CSS do more than simply act as placeholders for real programming languages I might have to stick with Flash's current penetration( at least 80% though I know they say nearly 100% on their sites) and rapid development capabilities. If someone can direct me to that tool, I'll gladly look into it. But just remember it has to be able to give me HD video, 3D gaming, full database/ASP/PHP access(not necessarily built in), rapid prototyping(the list goes on) all in one IDE and someone to teach me to use it!
Remember the days before Flash and how awesome everything was and how much everybody loved all the sites that emerged from those days~ These issues migrate, they don't disappear.
I could have made millions ;-)
More than a year ago I played around with YUI and iPhoto and created a small quick & dirty prototype:
http://www.fastforward.ch/projekte/iPhotoWEB/iPhotoWEB.html
Man, if I had shown this to Apple, I'm sure I would have made millions
Cheers,
Will
More than a year ago I played around with YUI and iPhoto and created a small quick & dirty prototype:
http://www.fastforward.ch/projekte/iPhotoWEB/iPhotoWEB.html
Man, if I had shown this to Apple, I'm sure I would have made millions
Cheers,
Will
Awesome news/roadmap for web developers
This could be a huge step actually. Apple has for quite some time now, in my opinion, had some of the best user experiences for smooth, fast, responsive and interactive product information websites without having to use flash (and industry-standard for some types of applications, I really prefer a fast site that does not need Flash*. If they release a great framework for these types of user interaction/presentation, notonly do they push for more standards-compliant sites and web applications (and besides being easier to scale, they are usually far more user-friendly for visually impaired users etc - with Flash you're usually stuck to one font size / contrast level for example...), but also could develop this into a fantastic pro application for web development... based on open standards and open source technologies and databases.
Very excited about this!
J.
(*even waiting for Adobe's special fancy menus to load when all I wan't is a developer plugin for ColdFusion/Dreamweaver/something like that, is annoyingly slow! And you'd think they wold get it fast and smooth.. no)
This could be a huge step actually. Apple has for quite some time now, in my opinion, had some of the best user experiences for smooth, fast, responsive and interactive product information websites without having to use flash (and industry-standard for some types of applications, I really prefer a fast site that does not need Flash*. If they release a great framework for these types of user interaction/presentation, notonly do they push for more standards-compliant sites and web applications (and besides being easier to scale, they are usually far more user-friendly for visually impaired users etc - with Flash you're usually stuck to one font size / contrast level for example...), but also could develop this into a fantastic pro application for web development... based on open standards and open source technologies and databases.
Very excited about this!
J.
(*even waiting for Adobe's special fancy menus to load when all I wan't is a developer plugin for ColdFusion/Dreamweaver/something like that, is annoyingly slow! And you'd think they wold get it fast and smooth.. no)
This is a silly argument. The web is whatever becomes ubiquitous. Since when is javascript part of the web?. or Java, or anything other than html?.
Why is javascript more legitimate than flash?.. just cause the iphone supports javascript or that Jobs hates flash?.
I agree. For the most part, all the 'standards' do is wrap company plugins into the web and none of the companies that have these plugins want adobe to be an all in one solution for various reasons. The funniest part about all this is that javascript and actionscript are essentially the same thing. It's all ECMA...in fact...actionscript 3.0 is basically ECMA 4th edition while spider monkey, rhino and gecko, jscript, IE and all the others are still only ECMA 3rd edition...when all of these engines update to 4th edition( which is much larger and more complex) we are all going to see some very funny, probably equally unjustified,javascript backlash.
I hate to break it to you mate, but dig out some stats on what the most commonly used mobile web browser is.... iPhone has the market already.
And to thow another thing in the Flash vs. JavaScript on "BUSINESS WEBSITES": jsut the load times of Apple.com and Adobe.com - it's somethinglike 5 seconds vs. 20 seconds. And it drives oyu nuts as a developer quickly wanting to access their developer documentation for something like ColdFusion (which I love, it's is great!) and the silly menu-frame thingy takes 5 seconds to find itself in the right spot. Thank you, but a pure html with a bit of fast-loading ajax calls would have done nicely.
J.
video without flash - how?
Well this development certainly highlights the benefits of ajax/js/SproutCore/whatever.js, vs the flash plugin. Apple I guess might have opted for flash, but instead they chose the js framework, because it's closer to common web code than all the flash guru wizardry, it's not Somebody Inc - so it's more suited to the UI emulation. Certainly my first thought is that the SproutCore frameworks must have a pretty extensive and neat array of functions to do all that IU. But I'm confused with all this H.264 stuff: how does it do web video without flash, like next month?
Well this development certainly highlights the benefits of ajax/js/SproutCore/whatever.js, vs the flash plugin. Apple I guess might have opted for flash, but instead they chose the js framework, because it's closer to common web code than all the flash guru wizardry, it's not Somebody Inc - so it's more suited to the UI emulation. Certainly my first thought is that the SproutCore frameworks must have a pretty extensive and neat array of functions to do all that IU. But I'm confused with all this H.264 stuff: how does it do web video without flash, like next month?
Bravo, bravo, bravo. Good-bye, Flash. You were fun for a while, like a lion cub. Then you grew up and we realized that it wasn't wise to keep you that long.
Flash is fine for supplementary material I guess but really I'd rather do without it. It doesn't interact properly with proper content in browsers and encourages web developers to make unnecessarily annoying UIs.
Apart from YouTube and Homestar Runner, there is no site that I visit that needs Flash. YMMV. And those can either go all h.264 or dual format.
Mind you, the Flash application is great for rendering video titles etc. and making vectors of scanned graphics.
My point is that Flash should always, always be an option, never compulsory.
Well, just my 2c.
Flash is fine for supplementary material I guess but really I'd rather do without it. It doesn't interact properly with proper content in browsers and encourages web developers to make unnecessarily annoying UIs.
Apart from YouTube and Homestar Runner, there is no site that I visit that needs Flash. YMMV. And those can either go all h.264 or dual format.
Mind you, the Flash application is great for rendering video titles etc. and making vectors of scanned graphics.
My point is that Flash should always, always be an option, never compulsory.
Well, just my 2c.
More than a year ago I played around with YUI and iPhoto and created a small quick & dirty prototype:
http://www.fastforward.ch/projekte/iPhotoWEB/iPhotoWEB.html
Man, if I had shown this to Apple, I'm sure I would have made millions
Cheers,
Will
thats pretty awesome!
Well this development certainly highlights the benefits of ajax/js/SproutCore/whatever.js, vs the flash plugin. Apple I guess might have opted for flash, but instead they chose the js framework, because it's closer to common web code than all the flash guru wizardry, it's not Somebody Inc - so it's more suited to the UI emulation. Certainly my first thought is that the SproutCore frameworks must have a pretty extensive and neat array of functions to do all that IU. But I'm confused with all this H.264 stuff: how does it do web video without flash, like next month?
All the UBER web fundamentalists that believe only text belongs on the internet and nothing else and that things should only work properly on their browser, but none of the rest, have their hopes in this video abomination.
If they believe Apple, the father of digital video, Mr Quicktime himself, is going to adopt this PRIMITIVE CPU hog, they're greatly mistaken. MS certainly won't adopt it, they have their resources invested in Quick Silver, which is their means to spread the infestation that is WMV. This right here is why Apple is focusing on AJAX. If Flash didn't have such a massive share of web video, you can be assured that Apple would have no problems using it.
Flash speaks JS fluently BTW. Flash can call a JS function and vice versa. When used properly and in the hands of a competent developer FLash can provide a better UI --a more capable UI -- that uses less resources than AJAX on its best day.
<]=)
Well this development certainly highlights the benefits of ajax/js/SproutCore/whatever.js, vs the flash plugin. Apple I guess might have opted for flash, but instead they chose the js framework, because it's closer to common web code than all the flash guru wizardry, it's not Somebody Inc - so it's more suited to the UI emulation. Certainly my first thought is that the SproutCore frameworks must have a pretty extensive and neat array of functions to do all that IU. But I'm confused with all this H.264 stuff: how does it do web video without flash, like next month?
H.264 is a way of encoding video designed to scale between tiny mobile platforms and full production digital movie projection. pretty much any device you are going to play video on is going to have a native video engine either program or hardware or a combo for this standard.
The reason websites used flash is that in web-standards there was no reliable way to take advantage of the user own video engine.
With HTML 5 standard adding tags for video and audio then the browser can take the info enclosed in those tags and pass it to the native engines. So on the iPhone the browser can pass video in a video encoded in a way it understands to the video hardware (it is a iPod after all), saving battery and bandwidth (the flash wrapper) on the device.
Flash is as likely to disappear as the internet itself.
I am however amazed at the possibilities that these frameworks may provide. All the new desktop like applications that will be accessible simply by visiting examplesite.com .
I am starting to see the possible hurdles to creating such apps though. I guess there's an advantage to being able to install local libraries, plugins, engines, and being able to access other application local libraries etc. Not sure how that will all play out through a web browser .
I am however amazed at the possibilities that these frameworks may provide. All the new desktop like applications that will be accessible simply by visiting examplesite.com .
I am starting to see the possible hurdles to creating such apps though. I guess there's an advantage to being able to install local libraries, plugins, engines, and being able to access other application local libraries etc. Not sure how that will all play out through a web browser .
I dunno about all the Flash-bash going on here, but I did download, install, and play with SproutCore itself. I'd never seen or heard of it before, but if this is something that Apple is contributing real employees time into - I'm all in! This framework is 100% more accessible and easier to work in than I ever expected. I've played with Rails and other similar frameworks, but their end-user UI is no where near as nice as this.
From a desktop-app style UI perspective, this blows away Silverlight at the moment, and you really don't leave than much behind with Flash either. Of course Flash is much richer, but you pay a price for that as well - and if all you are looking to do is build top notch desktop-app style UIs, there isn't than much wanting here. Both Flash and Silverlight have the advantage in sex-appeal (animation, deep-zoom, etc.) and they sure as heck aren't going anywhere (well, Flash isn't anyway). But Apple seems to have identified a set of apps that are less than Flash and more than HTML/CSS and have found a pretty impressive framework for dealing with it.
So anyway, color me impressed. I'll be following this little project with anticipation to see how much faster it evolves if Apple decided to pour some manpower into it.
From a desktop-app style UI perspective, this blows away Silverlight at the moment, and you really don't leave than much behind with Flash either. Of course Flash is much richer, but you pay a price for that as well - and if all you are looking to do is build top notch desktop-app style UIs, there isn't than much wanting here. Both Flash and Silverlight have the advantage in sex-appeal (animation, deep-zoom, etc.) and they sure as heck aren't going anywhere (well, Flash isn't anyway
). But Apple seems to have identified a set of apps that are less than Flash and more than HTML/CSS and have found a pretty impressive framework for dealing with it.So anyway, color me impressed. I'll be following this little project with anticipation to see how much faster it evolves if Apple decided to pour some manpower into it.
All those who think you need Flash in order to animate and create snazzy interfaces on the Internet, need to take a chill pill and stop drinking the Flash-kool-aid. I'm not a "Flash-hater" (which is a silly word invented by Flash-evangelists... also a silly word), but Adobe themselves have agreed that Flash should not be the primary navigation for a website.
Moreover, it is NOT spiderable by search engines. It's entirely OPAQUE and useless with screen-readers. It is not a panacea of web goodness, and YES, people should be moving away from Flash as anything other than a modular component used to do games or video-playback.
Remember when people used Java to do rollovers and menus? Some places its THAT BAD. People are forgetting to use Javascript to conditionally replace components in their web page when Flash isn't present. Apple is helping people reclaim the web with open standards.
Until Adobe bought Flash, they were pushing SVG.
Well, let's keep that going.
Look here. Believe it or not, this shows up on the iPhone.
3D walk-through. No flash.
http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/textures.htm
Here is the game "Lemmings" without Flash! Watch it play on your iPhone.
http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
The biggest obstacles to moving with open web standards, is adoption, performance, and good APIs that save programmers extra work and reinventing the wheel. Flash in an impediment to that.
Sproutcore is a great step.
~ CB
Moreover, it is NOT spiderable by search engines. It's entirely OPAQUE and useless with screen-readers. It is not a panacea of web goodness, and YES, people should be moving away from Flash as anything other than a modular component used to do games or video-playback.
Remember when people used Java to do rollovers and menus? Some places its THAT BAD. People are forgetting to use Javascript to conditionally replace components in their web page when Flash isn't present. Apple is helping people reclaim the web with open standards.
Until Adobe bought Flash, they were pushing SVG.
Well, let's keep that going.
Look here. Believe it or not, this shows up on the iPhone.
3D walk-through. No flash.
http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/textures.htm
Here is the game "Lemmings" without Flash! Watch it play on your iPhone.
http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
The biggest obstacles to moving with open web standards, is adoption, performance, and good APIs that save programmers extra work and reinventing the wheel. Flash in an impediment to that.
Sproutcore is a great step.
~ CB
Fluently, consistently and across browsers? Right. Those Apple media banners were no small achievement for it to work in so many browsers. You're misguided on that point.
~ CB
Because JavaScript (aka ECMAScript) is a standard. Not "standard" as in that's what everybody uses, but "standard" as written down, in the books. As in I can look it up, and see its guts. It is a standard because an open group sat down and hammered it out and gutted it and honed it into something usable, workable, and ... standard.
Flash was made by one company, its guts are hidden, and any other company that tried to reverse engineer it would get sued. The opposite of a standard. Java also, is not a standard, but HTML XHTML CSS JavaScript, are all standards.
I completely agree. I tell anyone who starts out in web development ... design in Firefox (because of the Web Developer toolbar), check in Safari/Opera, and fix the crappy bugs in IE6/IE7. This is the way respectable, cutting-edge web developers work. Of course, I think we're off topic a bit here so I think I'll unsubsribe from this thread now ...
These other web applications, say Sprout core for example. If they are to perform similar functions comparable to the likes of Flash, i.e. moving pics and/or animations, would they not take the same amount of time and cause the same delays that so many seem to hate, or is that the whole premise that Sprout core boasts?
I hate flash load times.
Love flash games.
Hate some Graphic Design INSTRUCTORS who think Flash is how all websites should be developed and want me to teach a Flash class to do that (they don't have time to teach it, can barely teach InDesign). I would like the extra cash but just can't bring myself to teach college students to design sites entirely in Flash.
I do like Flash video. Like how it can more easily stop the average person from saving video I post on my website.
I don't like Flash not being an open standard.
I will vote for Flash over Silverlight, largely because I don't trust MS to do anything open.
There are times where I love and hate flash. Right tool for the right job. Just please don't design entire sites in flash! And those load times really suck!
Love flash games.
Hate some Graphic Design INSTRUCTORS who think Flash is how all websites should be developed and want me to teach a Flash class to do that (they don't have time to teach it, can barely teach InDesign). I would like the extra cash but just can't bring myself to teach college students to design sites entirely in Flash.
I do like Flash video. Like how it can more easily stop the average person from saving video I post on my website.
I don't like Flash not being an open standard.
I will vote for Flash over Silverlight, largely because I don't trust MS to do anything open.
There are times where I love and hate flash. Right tool for the right job. Just please don't design entire sites in flash! And those load times really suck!