I'm watching an archived MLB game right now and they only stream via Flash. So how am I watching it? Because I bought a Galaxy Tab and it has Flash and it works quite well. So you can beat your head against Apple who, if they ever give on Flash, will do it when they damn well please, not because of tirades on some generally obnoxious geek site. OR you can get something that does allow you to use Flash right now and out of the box. Here's something else I discovered: All that yap about how Android is so inferior and "fragmented" and all the rest of that nonsense? Yep, that's exactly what it is. I haven't had any trouble with mine, it's run everything I've put on it and the only thing...the ONLY THING....my iPad can do that my Tab cannot is access two Exchange servers from the same mail app. I use two mail apps. Ooooooooooooo! So seriously, if you're just bored and feel like bitching about nothing, keep making these posts. If you actually give a rat's arse about using Flash, get something that works and move on. They're out there and available right now with more and better to come soon.
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iPad 2 with support for Adobe Flash, is it possible?
- Thread starter flexengineer
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You misunderstand. Flash on the Mac has problems well beyond hardware acceleration. VLC and other apps have been able to play video on the Mac for years without taking all the CPU or crashing and they did not use hardware acceleration. Why couldn't Adobe? Flash also has problems with their animation engine too. Flash on the Mac is just slow and buggy - Adobe could have done better but they didn't. Apple is right to keep it off iOS until Adobe does a better job.
I seriously wish my iPad/iPhone would handle notifications like my gfs galaxy tab. If there is one single thing I would ask for, it would be that.
I hope I didn't imply that they could. My stance is that if they aren't doing everything possible to get Apple on board, then they will only have themselves to blame if Flash for mobile fails to gain traction. If their plan is to dominate mobile like they have in the full-featured computer realm (i.e. 90% or more penetration), it is a safe bet that they will need to get into bed with Apple.
I think Apple has had H.264 hardware decoding for some time. AFAIK, Many flash movies are just packaged H.264 encoded files, so the hardware is there.
The Quicktime APIs for hardware accelerated video have been there for awhile. Adobe wanted an easy button, and Apple eventually acquiesced in this case.
It seems to me the real issue was that Adobe wanted to keep the Flash Player code base Windows centric and just do cursory ports to other platforms. I think when it came to mobile they realized that just wasn't going to cut it.
All of which have 0% marketshare (or close to 0% if you want to include hacked Nook Colors running HC) in the tablet space as of this moment. Right now they can all be considered underdogs. If they can't deliver the goods (great performance, great battery life, easy to use), then Flash is the last thing that is going to save them. The iPad is already a proven device, and 14 million+ people are surfing the web with it. If you're Adobe, isn't that where you want to be now, as opposed to hoping that's where the late-arrivals can get you?
There are some Android 2.2 tablets out there, but the knock-offs don't have the chops for Flash, the hidden gems usually don't run well enough out of the box for the average consumer, and the would-be contenders haven't yet set the world on fire compared to the iPad. The Galaxy Tab is the only one that I believe can run Flash out of the box reasonably well. And rumor has it that it won't be getting Honeycomb, so for the average Joe that doesn't want to play hacker ROM roulette it may be good as dead.
The first part is what amuses me, and should give hope to those that want Flash in iOS.
The second part can really be read two ways
If the other platforms gain traction, then yes, Flash will survive the fight. But if the contenders don't crush Apple, I still believe the considerable volume of iOS users are going to eventually force the hands of many content providers. Nobody wants to lose 50% of their potential audience when there's a solution that can get them 100%.
Technology is almost like religion or politics these days. Very polarizing stuff. I think that's unfortunate.
As an aside, I realize a lot of what I say may have a slant towards Apple, but I was actually very interested in the TouchPad before it was announced (I love WebOS). When I saw that it wouldn't be available until Summer, that was the nail in the coffin, much like the leaked price tag of the Xoom (and "WiFi fee") put a nail in the Honeycomb coffin, and the virtually required BlackBerry phone buried the PlayBook for me. Apple got the model right the first time with iPad v1, and these upstarts are mucking around playing games when they are already late to the fight. That's primarily why I don't have much hope for them propelling Adobe Flash in the tablet arena.
Well, European Union laws might make it. They say it's "competitive" and not right because it's locking out other companies from using it's software.
Completely agree. I remember the news article where Jobs claimed there would not be a 7" iPad. Half the thread was filled with the Apple faithful saying how stupid a 7" iPad would be or how only fandroids and M$ idiots would buy a 7" tablet, as if some arbitrary size like 10" were universally accepted as the best tablet size mankind can make.
But it is the reality. Nearly ever single site in the UK top 25 offers very significant amounts of content that is not available if you don't use Flash.
But they still cover the extreme minority of content on the BBC website. And note that none of it is available as HTML to non-iOS platforms, so it's hardly a sign that Flash is going away. The BBC might be willing to pay to keep two platforms going, but there is really no long term scenario where that will be the case for most websites.
Phazer
Just like the reality that iOS devices don't use Flash. Apple made a choice the same way each of those websites did. Why do we accept one choice and bitch about the other?
Is it me or is Apple Painting themselves in a corner concerning Flash.
Dont get me wrong .. I'm a big HTML5 supporter ... but wasn't the original reason that Apple didn't want Flash was because of battery life, with Flash being too CPU Hungry ?
Well now that Flash version 10.2 is out ... people are seeing amazing new bench test showing only 10-15% CPU usage while using Flash. http://www.9to5mac.com/51370/flash-10-2-makes-monster-improvements-in-cpu-optimization
Cant iOS offload some tasks to the GPU to help?
Now with all these dual core tablets coming out this year ... and the Rumored A5 processor from Apple that is supposed to be dual core too ... with maybe a dual core GPU ... Isnt 10-15% CPU usage on those new cores acceptable for battery life ?
Competition sure seems to think so !
Is it all politics Apple ? Why cant we have all the web ?
Dont get me wrong .. I'm a big HTML5 supporter ... but wasn't the original reason that Apple didn't want Flash was because of battery life, with Flash being too CPU Hungry ?
Well now that Flash version 10.2 is out ... people are seeing amazing new bench test showing only 10-15% CPU usage while using Flash. http://www.9to5mac.com/51370/flash-10-2-makes-monster-improvements-in-cpu-optimization
Cant iOS offload some tasks to the GPU to help?
Now with all these dual core tablets coming out this year ... and the Rumored A5 processor from Apple that is supposed to be dual core too ... with maybe a dual core GPU ... Isnt 10-15% CPU usage on those new cores acceptable for battery life ?
Competition sure seems to think so !
Is it all politics Apple ? Why cant we have all the web ?
More and more sites are leaning away from flash, anyway.
As a photographer, when building our websites, the first "rule" you always hear is NO FLASH.
It's shown that sites with Flash annoy people because they're slower to load.
When I was building my photography site, I read a stat (not sure exactly how true it was, as I can't remember where I read it) that said that if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load due to Flash, people often close out of it before it even loads.
I love Adobe (I'm a photographer, I own and use a ton of Adobe products). But I do hate any website that uses Flash.
As a photographer, when building our websites, the first "rule" you always hear is NO FLASH.
It's shown that sites with Flash annoy people because they're slower to load.
When I was building my photography site, I read a stat (not sure exactly how true it was, as I can't remember where I read it) that said that if a page takes more than 5 seconds to load due to Flash, people often close out of it before it even loads.
I love Adobe (I'm a photographer, I own and use a ton of Adobe products). But I do hate any website that uses Flash.
Technical and philosophical arguments are just tools Apple uses to justify a decision that is now obviously motivated by corporate agenda and business strategy. I am impatient to see how Apple is going to deal with Flash working on virtually every new device but iDevices. It is one thing to trash Flash when it was not ready for mobile, it is another now that it is ready indeed.
"Motivated by corporate agenda and business strategy." You make it sound like this is something unreasonable? Aren't all decisions by corporations "motivated by corporate agenda and business strategy." Or did you really mean something else?
And yet they haven't trashed flash "now that it is ready indeed." Even though only one of their many stated concerns actually appears to have been addressed.
No, that is what I meant and believe it is unreasonable otherwise Apple would tell us "we don't allow Flash because it is a threat to iTunes and AppStore and we ask our customers to deal with it and get over it", public reaction to that would be interesting!
What is left then? If it is not about being open, if it is not about being proprietary, if it is not about being a CPU hug, if it is not about battery life, if it is not about touch screen, if it is not about Steve Jobs personal feelings, then what is it?
They don't say that because it is not true. How is the Flash Player a threat to iTunes and the App Store? Most Flash content is free!
It is about being open. It is about being proprietary. It is about battery life. It is about touch screen content. It is about being a CPU hog. Read "Thoughts on Flash." Don't skim or paraphrase or summarize in your own words using your own bias. The only thing that has changed is that Adobe may be shipping a version of Flash Player that performs well enough on mobile devices.
It is not about Jobs personal feelings.
That's debatable. Jobs knows that the copyright industry is sufficiently complex that most professional video can't be delivered without content protection. The best way to do that on the market is Flash, as it works nearly everywhere. On iOS, you now have to write an app to develop any security at all. And if you distribute an app? - why! You have to give 30% of your revenues to Apple now - http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110215005900/en/Apple-Launches-Subscriptions-App-Store.
If Flash was allowed on the iPhone, this simply wouldn't work, as secure web streaming services that took payment would just be launched instead of apps.
And Steve is very keen to kill off this competition to iTunes sales of video - either give a third of your revenue (which is likely all of your margin) to Apple, or simply drop iOS.
Several of Jobs thoughts were entirely wrong, or entirely hypocritical. For instance, the touch screen criticism ignores that HTML5 has mouseover events that are already supported (somewhat clumsily) in mobile Safari.
Phazer
I'd agree with this argument to some extent, with the qualification that Apple's revenue from video is not currently significant to their bottom line. I'd also argue that "security" of the video stream is not currently needed on iOS devices. There is no way to save the stream from Mobile Safari. Put it behind a paywall, and you could easily stream content to iOS devices for a fee. I'm probably missing something here.
None of what Jobs actually said was "entirely wrong." What people inferred from what he said, as opposed to what he actually said is where the arguments arise. As far as hypocritical, I suppose that depends on your bias or mine.
I think it's more correct to say that "fanboy" or "hater" interpretations of what Jobs said were wrong. For example, the touch screen criticism did not ignore that HTML5 has similar issues to Flash with mouseover events. Jobs actually said that a lot of Flash applications will need to be re-written to support touch screen devices better, so why not re-write them using open standards. This suggestion does not preclude the fact that they could also be rewritten in Flash.
That is not accurate, Flash allows full content protection required to stream feature movies from studios or stream music on subscription basis for example, by banning Flash Apple ensures that the browser will be of no competition to iTunes and AppStore for quite a while. Flash can monetize content in the browser very efficiently and in accordance with studios and labels requirements, HTML5 can not.
Then it's BS because most of Flash is open source, the formats, the VM, Flex SDK, anyone can develop and sell a Flash Media Server (Wowza does and there are a couple entirely open source), anyone can build authoring tools for Flash and Flex (FDT and others do), anyone can build its own Flash player, all of the above without to ever ask permission to Adobe or pay a penny to Adobe. They contributed the VM to Mozilla and more recently the contributed two new frameworks or technologies (can't recall the names).
Adobe Flash is just open enough to benefit from the community contribution, shared development efforts and wide adoption in exchange of allowing free and paid tools and technologies competing with its own products to be made available, but Flash is also just proprietary enough to shield itself entirely from all the problems and downfalls of HTML5, there is no such thing as half the industry having to agree before an innovation or new feature is implemented in Flash or any related technologies, there is no such thing as getting caught in the H.264 war or any other war where giants use standards to block each other or serve corporate agendas that are most of the time if not all the time contrary to the public interest, and there is no such thing as browser vendors able to manipulate how Flash is rendered creating cross browser and cross platform incompatibility or discrepancy that are cumulative and rapidly become the nightmare of any enterprise application developer.
The battery life is directly related to CPU and the problem has been addressed with Flash Player 10.2, which I spent time testing and believe to be the most significant performance improvement in the history of Flash.
Touch screen issues are a problem of the past as well considering that 10.2 takes advantage of native device capabilities, including support for multitouch, gestures, mobile input models, and accelerometer input.
So tell me again, what is left exactly?
Yes you are missing something indeed, the fact that content is not protected. You say you can't save the video from Mobile Safari but if it is not streamed from a server (it's HTTP streaming which is progressive download) and is not protected at the file level then it would be very easy to use an iPhone to save all movies from studios in HD format with no protection that can be streamed over the web from servers in Russia or China for free.
Studios do not allow their movies to be streamed using HTML5 therefore they do not allow their movies to be streamed on iDevices, which is why Hulu do not allow Skyfire to stream their content and they have no choice but to get in business with Apple and give away 30%. I would not be surprised if someone like you likes the idea but I can guarantee you that it is unfair practices in the US and even more in EU.
Come on now, Steve Jobs has an armada of publicity, communication and social specialists without to mention the lawyers so he will say just enough to start the fire but not enough to have his game uncovered in obvious manner and he will leave the PR office do the rest with the support of the armada of fan boys. Most media now refer to the war as Steve Jobs personal affair and it is also clear in the mind of the public, all the theatrical dramas of Steve Jobs on stage did make an impression, for the best and for the worst.
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What part of what I actually said is not accurate? All of what you said is true, but where is the current threat to iTunes created with Flash to deliver video for a fee that Apple is currently blocking with iOS? Surely iOS's 1.5% of the browser market hasn't prevented such a competitor from arising!
As a Flash developer, you should know better. The flash format is not open source. It is an open spec developed completely by Adobe. And it is only mostly released. That "content protection" that you mentioned earlier is not part of the spec (which you pointed out is a significant advantage of Flash). No Hulu for any open source players. Speaking of open source players, they only completely support Flash 8. If you open the spec, and no one uses it, is it still a significant selling point that it's open?
And the Flash Player is proprietary.
No serving corporate agendas. Well, except Adobe's! Good one.And how did it resolve the issue for all the legacy Flash content that isn't updated to allow for hardware accelerated video or stage video? You know, the actual content that Jobs talked about.
Again, if you ignore all the legacy content.
Saying that most Flash content is free is not accurate, it is not because it is free to the user that it is not monetized and fully protected, Hulu is a good example it's free everywhere but you have to pay for it on iPhone. How much money would Apple lose if Hulu would just work on iPhone like everywhere else?
I do not understand what you are saying, the threat to iTunes is obvious, all the money from the sale of applications and in app advertising related to application that would not bring any revenue to Apple if they could operate on iDevices like they operate everywhere else. That applies to Youtube, Hulu and most movie distribution channels.
The core engine of Flash Player (AVM+) is open source and was donated to the Mozilla Foundation, the file formats supported by Flash Player, SWF and FLV/F4V, as well as the RTMP and AMF protocols are freely available and openly published. What do you mean by "flash format" exactly and how does the claim, assuming it hods true, hurt the developer community, competitors and or consumers?
Once again, how does that hurt the developers community, competitors and consumers? Adobe made extensive contribution to the open source community with Flex SDK, Open Source Media Framework, Adobe Media Gallery, Adobe Source Libraries, Text Layout Framework, Webkit, Flash-Ajax Video Component, BlazeDS, Cairngorm and Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) among others. They are nurturing an healthy ecosystem of free and paid technologies and products and they provide us developers with products and frameworks, like most of the above, most of which is free, that streamline the development of solid enterprise class applications. Apple does not provide anything but some code definition, a big HTML5 PR campaign and a lousy authoring tool for ads. Only someone who is totally foreign to what the Flash Platform is about for programmers could imagine Apple to be a serious alternative, yet alone a substitution.
That is correct, Flash Access is a commercial product from Adobe and it has no reason really to be open source, it is up to Adobe. However I am confident that as soon as Google open source its recently acquired DRM technology Flash Player will fully support it and developers will be free to use Google's offering or Adobe's offering, which is going to result in more innovation since Adobe will have to bring something new to keep having customers paying for a service they could get somewhere else for free as far as the protection is concerned. The difference will probably be like with any Adobe's commercial product: doing it better than anyone else.
I do not believe that is true, the Open Source Media Framework support all features all the way up to Flash Player 10.1, Flex SDK 4.5 and Flash Media Server 4 and there are tons of open source and commercial players out there that support the latest of Flash Player, I never even heard of a player that only support entirely Flash 8.
Once again how does that hurt the developers community, consumers or competitors? Is not iTunes, AppStore, iOS and most of Apple's technologies proprietary with an equal share of open source products or platform as Adobe's?
Explain what you mean, what agenda does Adobe have that is hurting or contrary to the interest of the developers community, competitors or consumers?
The propagation of Flash and its latest advances is probably going at a faster rate than any other piece of software on hearth, the adoption on mobile is beyond expectation, 6 million consumers actually went to the Android store to download Flash Player which is one of Android's top applications by now. It takes about 6 months for a new version of the player to reach the 90%+, the Flash developers community is dedicated and quick to implement latest updates, video portals are already implementing Stage Video. It's really not that much work and can probably be done within an hour in most cases, I doubt Flash developers will spare themselves an hour at the cost of depraving their users of a dramatically improved experience.
But what about all the HTML legacy websites that have never been optimized for mobile or HTML5 or even Web 2.0 for that matter, and are still displaying content in tables with depreciated tags? That content is not going to be updated anytime soon (old school developers are not as committed to change and advances as Flash developers are). That content and pool of websites, which account for the large majority of all web entities, have been pulling HTML back for as long as it existed, and will probably forever.
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Please stop making stuff up because it sounds good to you. Do you have any evidence to support your claim that most Flash content is not free? It seems like common sense to me. Just a published percentage somewhere would be nice.
Because Hulu chooses to charge for it. They could just as easily have released a free app.
Probably close to none. Hulu obviously thinks they can make MORE money on the iPhone by charging for the service. Hulu making more generally means Apple making less.
What's hard to understand? If Flash is a large threat to iTunes, than surely this threat would exist on the desktop. Flash is on 99% of traditional PCs and traditional PCs are 95+% of web traffic. What is the threat? Or is it some imaginary threat that could only dominate iTunes through the 1.5% share of web traffic that iOS holds?
What does the "core engine of Flash Player" have to do with the Flash spec? The "flash format" is the specification for creating flash content. Is that not obvious?
How does it hurt the community and competitors? It's counter to the fundamental principles of the web. The web is based on open standards developed to prevent control by any single company.
And, despite Adobe's PR move to open the spec, no one has made or can make a viable implementation of that spec. As I pointed out, Gnash full supports Flash 8. How old is that? And no competitor to Flash Player can play Hulu videos, for example, because the part of the spec that allows for "content protection" is not published.
That's a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the fact that the Flash spec is completely controlled by Adobe. How does it hurt competition? Changes are made only if Adobe deems them worthy. Why should they control content on the web? Heck, you may trust Adobe completely today. But what about their management 5 years from now? Especially if they manage to knock out all competition as you are promoting.
What does stuff that you made up about Apple have to do with the fact that the Flash spec is completely controlled by Adobe?
There is no such thing as open source DRM.
Gnash is the leading open-source Flash Player. It only completely supports Flash 8. Do you know of any open-source flash player plugins that support 9 or 10 completely? OSMF is only a video player, but you probably knew that.
Can you not acknowledge the difference between using open standards for web content and using proprietary technology for non-web applications. It's not really hard to understand. Different priorities for different situations.
I don't know Adobe's complete corporate agenda. And neither do you. And you surely don't know what it will be in 5 years. But, for one example, the years that they neglected (by your own admission) the Flash Player on non-Windows platforms was certainly anti-consumer, if not anti-developer as well.
Super. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about whether the reason's that Jobs gave for not supporting have been resolved.
Your arguments in this entire post have been nothing but shifting goalposts. I say the sun rises in the east, and you respond by saying "You're wrong, the sky is pretty."
Hah, that's actually a very good point!
The only counter-point I'd make is - site developers don't tend to care which technology they use, they just are interested in delivering quality content to as many users as possible. Since Flash was (more or less) the de facto standard for web video and animated content, that's what a lot of such sites adopted. Apple - justifiably or not - unilaterally moved away from this standard.
Despite all the arguments, I can guarantee you one thing.
If there was a free app on the app store that fully enabled Flash on the iPad, despite what all the haters may personally feel, it would, without question rocket to the top, most downloaded app, probably of al time on the app store on the very 1st day.
That alone would be an example of public opinion on the subject.
If there was a free app on the app store that fully enabled Flash on the iPad, despite what all the haters may personally feel, it would, without question rocket to the top, most downloaded app, probably of al time on the app store on the very 1st day.
That alone would be an example of public opinion on the subject.