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Apple Promotes HTML5, First iPhone Game Demo in HTML5, and More
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I dont know whats up with other people's iphones but on my 3GS the demos all work beautifully. The complex typography and transition demos are very fast and smooth. Everything works well with the touch-screen here.
Anyone saying this is unimpressive.. I don't get it at all. Apple aren't claiming to have invented this stuff, they're just trying to prove a point and inspire people to give it a proper chance.
Anyone saying this is unimpressive.. I don't get it at all. Apple aren't claiming to have invented this stuff, they're just trying to prove a point and inspire people to give it a proper chance.
TBF it doesnt crash for everyone in Safari. It has been known to here, but it's hardly common on my Macs. I haven't seen a flash crash in months. I don't know what you could really hate Safari for so much either.. ?
I've had Flash crash Safari before on even a popular site such as Youtube so there's no doubt Adobe has dropped the ball and it's a bit buggy on Macs, but I think Steve Jobs uses Flash as a Safari crutch far too often because I've had Safari crash on several Tribune owned newspaper websites while posting comments and that's not Flash driven. That's simply Javascript, so that's completely Apple's fault. It's easy to blame Flash for every Safari problem and most people here do, but it's not always the case.
I'm not against standards or HTML5, but it's clear it's still a work in progress more so than Flash, which is a virtual standard by the common persons' perspective.
For this reason, I don't think I'll crave an iPad until either HTML5 matures or Flash is added.
The lack of Flash doesn't really bother me on a phone, but on a tablet, I think it would annoy me.
Well, as a web designer, I have these views...
1. HTML5 isn't a case of reinventing the Flash wheel - its a whole new wheel that may do many similar things, but crucially it is native HTML and not relying on a plug in.
Caveats aside, this has to be a good thing.
2. HTML5 may not do everything that Flash does, but the main issue people have is the inability to view Flash video. HTML5 can display video, from demos I've seen with more elegance and flexibility than Flash, and again natively.
Caveats aside, this has to be a good thing.
3. The demos on the Apple site are exactly the sort of things that I would commonly do in a website - eg use a wider range of fonts without having to use images and CSS workarounds to provide a text alternative under the image. Also web galleries - at the moment I usually use Lightbox, but the HTML demo there looked pretty good.
So in conclusion, I'm not convinced by the idea that Apple is necessarily being awkward just to stick two fingers up at Adobe - I think HTML5 has enough going for it for Apple (or indeed anyone) to see it as a viable, and potentially better, alterntative to Flash.
Although clearly for it to be viable, it needs to be as commonplace as Flash is now, across all modern browsers.
And having said all of that, I can appreciate it is frustrating not to have Flash support, but arguably there's long term benefit to be had by the widespread adoption of HTML5 standards.
Its not as though Apple have any financial gain in HTML5 after all.
1. HTML5 isn't a case of reinventing the Flash wheel - its a whole new wheel that may do many similar things, but crucially it is native HTML and not relying on a plug in.
Caveats aside, this has to be a good thing.
2. HTML5 may not do everything that Flash does, but the main issue people have is the inability to view Flash video. HTML5 can display video, from demos I've seen with more elegance and flexibility than Flash, and again natively.
Caveats aside, this has to be a good thing.
3. The demos on the Apple site are exactly the sort of things that I would commonly do in a website - eg use a wider range of fonts without having to use images and CSS workarounds to provide a text alternative under the image. Also web galleries - at the moment I usually use Lightbox, but the HTML demo there looked pretty good.
So in conclusion, I'm not convinced by the idea that Apple is necessarily being awkward just to stick two fingers up at Adobe - I think HTML5 has enough going for it for Apple (or indeed anyone) to see it as a viable, and potentially better, alterntative to Flash.
Although clearly for it to be viable, it needs to be as commonplace as Flash is now, across all modern browsers.
And having said all of that, I can appreciate it is frustrating not to have Flash support, but arguably there's long term benefit to be had by the widespread adoption of HTML5 standards.
Its not as though Apple have any financial gain in HTML5 after all.
Where's Safari in your link ? I see a search for Webkit based browsers on Linux...
If you stopped fanboying a second, you'd notice Apple sniffs for Safari, not Webkit. Chrome gets the Safari pop-up even though it uses Webkit also. Same would go for every Webkit browser.
The fact remains, there is no Safari on Linux.
Uh ? You'll be sad to learn the Canvas tag is just that, 1 tag. It requires Javascript to do anything, you know, as in real coding. No drag and drop here. Maybe you'll need to actually learn a thing or two to make Canvas apps.
Same with Flash really, games require the use of Actionscript and code. Programming visually with drag and drop is lame and really counter productive. This isn't meant to be easy and accessible to every 2 bit dolt.
Nope, they don't technically, but let's face it, Steve Jobs is a huge grudge holder and he's got it in for Adobe right now for a variety of reasons.
That much is obvious.
My complaint is that the ultimate end user is paying the price of this silly grudge match.
Went to view the demos, but it won't let them be viewed on anything but Safari. That's plain stupid. I've got Safari, but Firefox will handle html5 as well, correct? Really lame, Apple.
Well you need at those things. At the time they came out things were need/wanted that there is no standard for. ActiveX is a very powerful tool that allows the browser to tap into the OS. Problem is people started making trojans and people would stupidly install them. It is a great Enterprise level tool and allows things that no browser can do. For example Dell can install an ActiveX plug in that can quickly scan your system and grab info on it to make downloading drivers easier. A browser with out that can not do that. That is just one example.
Flash back then there was no way to do animeation. Flash video was something flash was never designed to do but it worked better and allowed for DRM that the quicktime and WMP plug ins could not do. They could embeds ads and on top of that it just easier for the user to do.
Silver light I know very little about but I know it has things that HTML 5 can not do yet. It allows things to be done that currently just can not be done.
I also believe that apple refeses to give the tools needed for flash to work better on OSX. There is no hardware support for decoding videos. Apple blocks that.
Yeah but programing anything has gotten that way and over the years programers have gotten lazier and lazier. Reason for it is we have so much extra computing power more bloated code is not really an issue. Our CPU can chew threw it in no time, storage is dirt cheap and we have a ton on memory for our computers.
i thought the Tron trailer was pretty smooth. rather nice, actually. didn't check out it's CPU usage, though. everything else, however, feels a little... um... javascripty, for lack of a better word.
Really ? Even the 4GLs out there that offer some form of "drag and drop programming" require the use of a text editor and the writing of code. Visual Basic, Delphi and every .NET language are like this. Heck, even Access and things like Oracle Forms/Reports are the same. Otherwise, you get a bunch of controls that don't do all that much on screen.
Programming IDEs are mostly being made into the ultimate text editors, not any kind of hiding of the code. Generic templates/auto-completion/Goto references, etc, you're still knee deep in text.
Chrome actually can't handle all of it. Chrome works with most CSS3 things but some still don't work right. Also chrome's javascript performance isn't all there yet. (Getting better, but not on par with safari) So a lot of this stuff would perform poorly in chrome.
As a web designer my self, I pretty much agree with you.
HTML5/JS/CSS3 doesn't have to do everything flash does to kill flash because what it does (Specifically right now) it does so much better then Flash. And for the most part performs much better. And as soon as more browsers support it properly, flash will be pushed off the cliff.
My only gripe with HTML5 is the performance of HD video. H264 video doesn't always play at a watchable frame rate on low - mid level computers. That is going to have to get fixed before more sites make the switch.
Thats not true at all in the web world. Maybe somewhere in the VisualBasic world but not with javascript/CSS. Things have gotten so much more complex and it has to work on more then 1 browser now so your forced to write your code more efficiently because it has to work in that crappy slow IE7/8.
When it comes to complex JS your CPU can't chew through it in no time because browsers JS engines are SLOWWWWWWWW.
You have the source, it's not rocket science to spoof a user agent. And if you could get it into your thick skull that this is a demo or a presentation of what HTML 5 can do for you.
Do you seriously believe that Apple will be responsible for every webpage using HTML 5 in the future? As you know it's up to the web page creators to put limits on their pages.
There are currently four major rendering engines avaliable (that i know of) IE, Opera, Gecko and webkit and since webkit is open source, NO browser will be locked out feature wise unless they don't give a ****.
I'm not talking about coding games! I mean when you want to put two things next to each other, like a piece of text with a photo, and you want to know whether it looks good, or whether the photo should be tiny bit higher or lower. Are you seriously going to have to type in the X and Y position of the photo, then export, see if it worked, then change it again, export, see if it worked, change again, pixel by pixel, until you give up and say "whatever it's almost good anyway"... I don't think that's the future of web development... In today's world, I seriously expect some environment like Flash, with a timeline and visible objects that you can click and drag to arrange them the way it looks best. Then of course there's coding, but that's reserved for all the stuff you CAN'T do visually. What's the point of typing in coordinates when you can use the very new and modern device called a MOUSE?
The reason Flash is successful is because not only people who have a degree in programming can make something cool with it. Some people have real things to do in their lives, and don't have time to learn coding. That's why you have applications. They help you create content, making it faster and less painful.
Why do you think the command line computer evolved into a GIU computer? Maybe because people thought that creating anything but a novel with just a keyboard is boring and slow? Why was the mouse invented? The webcam? The tablet? The GIU? It's all because we're humans and not machines, and the way we think is easier to translate into images than text. The problem with machines is that they understand text better, but as technology evolves, we can create machines that adapt to US, so we don't have to adapt that much to THEM. Doesn't that make sense?
Of course there's stuff that will always need coding, but seriously, designing a website with buttons, colors, panels, images and animations, why the hell does that need so much coding? I would expect links and databases to be coded, but if I want to nicely align two images and see what looks better, why the hell should I fiddle with typing? I'm not a programmer because I have other things to do, but I need a cool website and with Flash I can do that. I'm not paying some programmer to do this for me, because there's Flash. If Flash didn't exist, I would have to hire some guy for loads of money who studied programming all his life to make me a website. And if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself. As a photographer, I can make myself a simple website with 10 lines of code in Flash, and concentrate on being a photographer, not a web designer, and all this for free!
No they don't, the tools have been avaliable for quiet a while to speed up rendering in flash (i'm NOT talking about video), Adobe simply didn't care.
As for hardware support video wise, Apple added as an API in march this year and a pretty darn simple to use one at that, and Adobe had *no* HW accelerated flash video on any platform before that.
Performance on Mac and Linux have been terrible cause of Adobe not caring or not willing to spend the effort.
HTML5 works on a variety of browsers, not just Safari. My thick skull understands that, maybe yours should.
Spoofing user agents ? This is what standards are supposed to prevent. They could've easily just not drop in their little advertisement. This isn't a tech demo, it's an Ad for Safari.
Why use Canvas for that ? There's the perfectly good IMG and P tags for what you propose. CSS should float your IMG in the proper place next to your text.
You're not making any sense... Canvas is a programmable surface. It requires code. Deal.
Yes and maybe they required a specific version of browser becuase the rest doesn't conform yet, how about that? HTML 5 isn't set in stone just yet.
Also the user agent string is needed and will forever be, as granny with her windows 95 box and netscape 3.0 or whatever won't be able to view webpages made with HTML 7.0 in mind and the site might want to redirect her to a simpler site or advice her to upgrade?
I'm only saying that there are quite complex things (no, not everything obviously) that you can do in Flash without much (or any) coding, so I see HTML5 as a step back from Flash since it does those complex things with coding only, nothing visual...
I like to think of future technology as visual and interactive, if HTML5 is so modern, how come only people with special skills can have any access to it? In that sense, it's quite closed compared to Flash: Flash allows anyone to do quite cool stuff without skill, while HTML5 requires a university degree for the same stuff. For example, Photoshop is becoming easier to use for people who don't know how to edit photos. Final Cut Pro is making video editing easier than when we had two tape decks and a record button. Programming languages are becoming more automatic, higher-level, and more focused on a specific area. Visual developer environments are replacing notepad, and making an application is much easier today than before, because you can concentrate on the important stuff instead of "damn that button doesn't look right there, let's try to edit the code" instead of dragging it somewhere else.
The world is going towards easier to use, higher-level technologies, that allow normal people (not scientists and people with some special degree/skill) to do stuff that was only possible for skilled people before.
You're right. Chrome's JavaScript performance is not on par with Safari's. Chrome is about 15% faster.
I just tried each demo while turning the iPad in landscape and portrait. The only thing that happened is it took about a half a second to scroll down, which is usual on any website when the orientation is turned.
Sorry, I am impressed with the performance of these demos and I hope websites start to take advantage of these type of things.