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Apple teams up with Adobe for iPhone Flash

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Jan 27, 2008
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http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/31/apple-teams-up-with-adobe-for-iphone-flash-at-long-last/

Apple teams up with Adobe for iPhone Flash at long last

by Paul Miller, posted Jan 31st 2009 at 9:41PM

With Android getting all Flash-ey, Apple's "Goldilocks" position on Flash -- the full Flash player is too hefty, Flash Lite is too weak -- seemed pretty untenable. Now Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has revealed that Apple and Adobe are "collaborating" on making Flash a reality on the iPhone, citing the technical challenge it presents. What's clear is that with all this work to do, it doesn't seem they're going the watered-down Flash Lite route, but we're trying not to hold our breath for a full-on, Hulu-friendly version that will finally help us get that Doogie Howser fix on the go. Naturally, there's no word on when this will hit.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aFYb.P__vEfY

Adobe’s Narayen Says Flash on IPhone Is a Challenge (Update2)

By Rochelle Garner and Erik Schatzker

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Adobe Systems Inc. faces a challenge in creating a version of its Flash video software for Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen said.

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” Narayen said today in a Bloomberg Television interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

Adobe’s Flash, used to view online video and animation, is installed on 98 percent of the world’s personal computers. While the software is on more than 800 million handsets, it isn’t available on the iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said last March that Flash runs too slowly for the iPhone, and a slimmed-down version, called Flash Lite, “isn’t capable enough to be used with the Web.”

Jobs called on Adobe to write a third version of Flash, in addition to the software already available for PCs and phones.

Adobe, based in San Jose, California, fell 74 cents to $19.31 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares declined 50 percent last year.

Economic ‘Funk’

Spending on information technology will help the global economy pull out of the recession, Narayen said.

“In the short run, there’s limited visibility in technology spending,” he said. “But when we look at the macro spending, we think tech spend will be one of the ways we get out of this funk.”

Technology spending has changed in the economic slowdown, Narayen said. Companies’ chief information officers want products that will help them quickly cut overall costs. “You have to show a return on investment,” said Narayen. “That’s where CIOs are looking.”

Adobe is facing a new challenge in the mobile-video market from Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker. The Redmond, Washington-based company is trying to persuade more Web-site owners to use its Silverlight in place of Flash. Microsoft introduced Silverlight in 2007.
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theres been tons of "apple and adobe are 'finally' working together for flash blah blah blah" stories for the past while and still nothing solid has come to fruition. so meh.
 
All this has been said before but what is new is the statement that "Steve Jobs asked us for a 3rd version of Flash"

Adobe already announced at MAX that they were bring the full flash player to other devices. Hopefully they're really doing it soon.
 
map1978 said:
I don't see what's the big deal of having Flash Lite. Works fine on my Nokia devices. Stevie needs to put down his pipe and just let it happen.
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Why? What's so great about Flash, and especially Flash Lite?

What we have with the iPhone SDK is miles beyond what Flash is capable of, and it can do it without bringing a system down to its knees.

The only "advantage" is all of the Flash hacks could just their existing skills without having to learn anything new to make iPhone "apps".
 
Yah!! One of the reasons for me not buying the iphone in its current state could soon be removed :)

The next hurdle is allowing more than one app to run at once and to have apps run in the background (after all this isnt the 1980's :) ).
 
beg_ne said:
Why? What's so great about Flash, and especially Flash Lite?

What we have with the iPhone SDK is miles beyond what Flash is capable of, and it can do it without bringing a system down to its knees.

The only "advantage" is all of the Flash hacks could just their existing skills without having to learn anything new to make iPhone "apps".
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Ummm... There is more to Flash than just crappy web games, and crappy Flash based sites...

Its the format on which most online video is delivered (although, by not having Flash on the iphone, Apple has been quickly changing that). This will mean that sites like Hulu.com (which allows you to watch movies and TVshows for free legally) will now be accessible from the iphone. It will mean that all Youtube videos will now be accessible to the iphone.

I am not fond of Flash, but its a distinct disadvantage for the iphone since it does not have it.
 
No one is talking about replacing the SDK with Flash, they're talking about being able to see flash players in the browser.

Also check this:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/01/27/clicktoflash-rentzsch

ClickToFlash was/is a plugin for WebKit that disabled all flash until you click on the area it's supposed to be in to selectively enable that flash piece.

The project was open source but the author disappeared and the someone else runs it now.

What if Adobe or Apple bought that guy out and use this technology to make a compromise on flash in Safari. This could be why he stopped working on the public project.
 
dazed said:
Yah!! One of the reasons for me not buying the iphone in its current state could soon be removed :)

The next hurdle is allowing more than one app to run at once and to have apps run in the background (after all this isnt the 1980's :) ).
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How many PHONES are running multiple applications at once? Thats right! those phones running on the FAILED Windows Mobile platform.

Multiple applications at the current stage of battery power, and processor power consumption is a nightmare. Wait a year or so and it will happen. Right now is not the time.

Although, Apple REALLY NEEDS to get the freaking Push updates delivered already... Its over 5 months late.
 
map1978 said:
I don't see what's the big deal of having Flash Lite. Works fine on my Nokia devices. Stevie needs to put down his pipe and just let it happen.
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You don't know the difference between the Flash Lite and Regular Power hungry CPU eating, newbie flash dweeb writing cruddy "scripts" that hog up a 2.6gigz desktop proc Flash do you?

I'll let others explain it to you because it is a BIG DEAL.
 
Battery drain...

In other news, the iPhone's battery life is now reported to be 30 minutes! Should be interesting.
 
Finally! Can't wait, but I've gotten used to not having Flash. Just hope battery life isn't dramatically lowered.
 
When?!?!?!? I want it. I need it. Give it to me!

Seriously, the battery better last more than 2 hours. I want to be able to watch hulu movies.


I call this will be tied to some type of hardware enhancement for this June's iPhone.
 
I have a hard time believing this.

1) Allowing flash will allow developers to circumvent the apps store and offer many iPhone-targeted flash programs online. Losing App-store revenue (and making the App store less important) are not things Apple wants.

2) When Apple updates the iPhone hardware, app-store programs will continue to work, so people go out and buy the new phone. But if flash-programs become popular, it's probable that many flash programs won't work perfectly on new hardware without a re-write. You know how a new Mac OS comes out and many people won't update until the new Phtoshop/Word/whatever comes out? That doesn't happen with the iPhone right now. If flash-programs become popular, watch and see that "I'll buy it later" philosophy come to new iPhone launches.

Obviously, there are advantages, but I think these 2 facts are HUGE drawbacks for Apple which is why they've resisted flash thus far.

So, what's changed now? Why would they suddenly work with Adobe on this? Are they losing sales of phones? Dunno...that's the only reason I can think of, but I have no idea if it's true or not.
 
To all the people complainging of battery life

though Adobe announced in November that they were partnering with ARM to create an optimized implementation of Flash specifically for the ARM11 family of processors. Apple's iPhone is based on these processors so may be seeing the benefit of this collaboration.
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I suspect this will drain the battery the same as (or only marginally more so) than if you were to run a youtube video, or native application/game.

EDIT: small white car, I think Flash is being embedded so that people can watch flash content, rather than create flash apps, I think these "flash apps" are going to be like the web 2.0 apps apple first touted about, they're not natively installed, a pain to make and severely limited (performance wise) compared to being able to run native, does anyone still actually use any of those anymore!?
 
Small White Car said:
I have a hard time believing this.

1) Allowing flash will allow developers to circumvent the apps store and offer many iPhone-targeted flash programs online. Losing App-store revenue (and making the App store less important) are not things Apple wants.
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But people can make web apps for the iPhone already?
 
TheSpaz said:
Please keep flash off my iPhone... Please. I hate it on the desktop too.
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Let me disable Flash - not uninstall, just disable.

Give me a simple browser indicator that a site that I'm at is trying to run Flash but can't because I've disabled it.

Let me click on the indicator, and get a dialogue that lets me enable Flash for that site for this session - if for some reason I'm interested.

IE8 gives me 1 and 2, but for 3 no joy. Enabling Flash enables it for all sites for all time (until I go in and globally disable it again).

If Flash did not exist, I would not miss it. If I could vote to eliminate it from the web, I would say "get rid of it".

I don't want to run a proprietary adware-delivery system on my computer.
 
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