I think the opposite - I actually see that Apple are slowly making a difference across the web. It's been a while since I saw a brand new web startup using Flash at all on their website, and I'm seeing major websites recoding in HTML5 so they work on the iPhone. You want probably the biggest indication Flash is dying? How about Youtube switching to HTML5?
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Why is it ok for other Apple products to use Flash?
- Thread starter aarong50
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HTML5 still doesn't really have the ability to replace interactive advertising and games though. This is the area that flash is being used the most these days.
Everything will eventually be replaced by something newer/better. Why not just turn off the internet until we all have gigabit connections at home? I mean, it's coming sometime in the next X years.
Why can't we use what's available now and phase it out as it fades away.
This is phasing it out. Sooner or later there'll be a product that doesn't support flash (the iPad), just like sooner or later someone made a stereo without a tape deck.
Following your argument, every computer should have had a 3.5" drive right until people stopped using 3.5" disks.
No Flash = More $$$ for Apple.
It's obvious dudes. It's a business model. If you buy an iPad / iPhone to use internet Flash sites, how is Apple going ot make $$$?
Every Flash-like 99 cent game you buy earns appple 30 cents. Multiply that by millions...
It's not a technical challenge to make flash work on small devices. You just don't make it that big. Plus, for the carrier, they don't have to send you that much Flah data. But that's not the real deal. The real deal is that "no flash" = "apple flash" (which you pay extra for).
You don't like it, don't buy it! No one is forcing it down your throat. You can get a HP Windows 7 thingamajig (prolly get more for your money too) or something and your problems are sovled.
Just get an apple sticker and paste it on your tablet if the logo means that much to you! haha
It's obvious dudes. It's a business model. If you buy an iPad / iPhone to use internet Flash sites, how is Apple going ot make $$$?
Every Flash-like 99 cent game you buy earns appple 30 cents. Multiply that by millions...
It's not a technical challenge to make flash work on small devices. You just don't make it that big. Plus, for the carrier, they don't have to send you that much Flah data. But that's not the real deal. The real deal is that "no flash" = "apple flash" (which you pay extra for).
You don't like it, don't buy it! No one is forcing it down your throat. You can get a HP Windows 7 thingamajig (prolly get more for your money too) or something and your problems are sovled.
Just get an apple sticker and paste it on your tablet if the logo means that much to you! haha
Silverlight is creeping in as a viable Flash alternative as well. But watch...if Microsoft makes a product that supports Silverlight but not Flash...Anit-trust case! LOL! Apple gets away with murder.
According to you.
Apple "bent over backwards to support flash in SL safari". That may have something to do with Snow Leopard and safari. It runs fine on pcs. A resource hog yes, but when you have an i7 and 6gb of RAM there's not going to be any slow down.
@GorillaPaws
You think they only break even in digital distribution? That's why they're introducing iBooks now... And even if it were in the slightest bit true, allowing Flash onto an appstore OS will DEFINITELY cut into revenue.
It certainly does. I've created interactive HTML5 'visuals' and there are lots of nice demos out there. Even some 3D demos, and they all work today in Safari and Chrome, and in some cases Firefox and Opera as well.
I'm talking about currently. There really aren't any very mature tools for the masses to develop these interactive ads or games. It will be a long time before they will be used by the mainstream. Ad companies can create flash based ads in just a few minutes with the multitude of tools out there. They don't even need any flash experience. Until this can be done with HTML5, you aren't going to see flash go anywhere.
Actually it does have something to do with SL and Safari. They transitioned to a 64-bit architecture. Flash is 32-bits and closed-source so there's no way for Apple or anyone else to help it evolve faster than Adobe wants to. Because flash has become a De Facto standard, there is little pressure to encourage them to do anything but take their sweet time.
This left Apple in a very awkward position because they wanted to offer a 64-bit Safari but weren't able to while still supporting "old-tech" 32-bit plugins (i.e. flash). The solution they came up with was engineering a multiprocessing sandbox that can host 32-bit plugins in separate processes (this is why when a plugin fails it doesn't crash the browser). While this solution is pretty nice, if a bit resource heavy, it would have been a heck-of-a-lot easier to either (1) not support flash in Safari, or (2) ideally modify Flash's code to bring it to 64-bit, but since Adobe keeps its code closed this was impossible.
So yes, Apple bent over backwards to accommodate Adobe's lousy plugin.
I do think that digital distribution is only a very small percentage of Apple's profit. Think about how many apps in the App store are free? Each one of those required a small team of Apple employees to review at least once, and more likely for several rounds of rejections and/or updates. Each one of those downloads costs Apple bandwidth--requiring more hardware, human resources and infrastructure to support it.
Next you factor in the income which has credit-cards, customer service, refunds, legal costs, and other payment processing related expenses and that 30% slice starts to shrink quickly, especially if it's expected to make up for the cost of the overhead for all of those free apps.
I believe the story is probably similar with Apple's other offerings such as music, movies, tv--even books, as you've mentioned. That's not to say that Apple may be trying to kill off flash and then one day jack up it's commission when there's no competition, but I highly doubt that they're in it for the 30% cut of mostly $0.99 apps as the store exists today. Nor do I think it's likely that Apple believes it can kill off flash. I think Apple (as well as myself) hope that it can exert enough pressure to encourage websites to provide alternatives to flash as a standard option, and/or get Adobe to open source it.
Web developers now test their sites under a variety of browsers, ensuring universal access. I remember well the days when it somewhat common for sites to be designed to only work with IE. I fear the web has slipped into this same mentality with flash, and has stopped ensuring universal access through the open, globally accepted, standard interfaces. Without external pressure to encourage change, we will see flash become even further entrenched into the web, and as a result, it will become even more difficult to pressure Adobe to improve it's product (photoshop is still CARBON--just an example of how motivated they are to improve things).
But who is going to make all of this stuff? There is a huge interactive designer community and industry that is used to certain productivity tools. If there are no design tools for HTML 5 how are they going to use it? As far as I know nobody is making a HTML 5 animation design tool. I'm not talking about writing code in a text editor but an actual animation tool with keyframes, bones, motion paths and so forth. Only when there is a tool of professional build quality and features that outshine Flash will designers decide to make the move.
HTML 5 needs a heck of a lot more then a few geeky show off samples and Steve Jobs to sell it to the designer community.
Heck Silverlight is a pretty impressive tool but designers still will not switch to it.
by far the dumbest reasoning i have ever heard. are you seriously trying to convince anyone that apple is bending over backwards for adobe? true sign of a complete mac-brainwashed sheep.
another horrible argument. html 5 design tool? are you trying to say that all the good websites out there are only made in dreamweaver or something?
Interestingly, having upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, the Flash plugin seems for Safari seems to have gone from using 80% of the CPU while playing Texas Hold'Em on FaceBook to between 50 and 60%.
Firefox for Maemo RC3
"Weve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didnt meet our standards."
http://blog.pavlov.net/2010/01/27/firefox-for-maemo-rc3/
Not really. An Opteron 165 CPU would be recent enough to be equipped with PowerNow - akin to Intel's SpeedStep technology.
During periods of moderate use, where the system is consistently under lighter load than normal, the core voltage and operating frequency are actually throttled back automatically to reduce power consumption.
It's a trade-off: sometimes, the maximum advantage comes from occasionally idling without adjusting the operating frequency. Sometimes it might be better to slow down the operating frequency without going idle at all. Most often, the best result comes from a combination of both.
This is why Adobe is working on flash 10.1 for mobile devices. It will be in almost every mobile browser except mobile Safari by the end of the year.
On the topic of flash there is one interesting sidenote... I was doing some online shopping @ IKEA last eve and usually my core temps are around 40 while browsing. I just happened to look up at the top of my screen and noticed my temp spiked to 90c. I quickly navigated away from their site and they dropped like a stone. I never realized how intensive flash based sites were. Kinda got me thinking of why this technology is not being utilized on the new iPad and on the phone. If it's that hard on stuff imagine what it would do to battery life of a small device if used for long periods of time.
Well, let's talk about common use cases. Probably about 80% of what Flash is used for these days is video. Moving video from Flash to HTML5 is pretty easy.
About another 15% of what Flash is used for is stock effects -- side shows, transitions between different parts of sites, etc. This stuff is relatively straightforward to do in modern browsers (even Internet Explorer) with libraries like JQuery UI. Anyone who has ever done the slightest bit of ActionScripting in Flash and knows HTML can figure these things out. CSS3 Animation will makes this stuff even easier.
That leaves maybe the last 5%, which is complex vector animations and Flash games. The guys doing the games certainly have the programming chops to move to JavaScript + SVG or Canvas. I'm not sure the performance of either of those is good enough for action games just yet, but there's a lot of work being invested in this sort of thing, and it will be before too long.
The vector animation guys really are sort of screwed with SVG until someone releases a user-friendly tool that outputs SVG animations.
IMO, Adobe's best path forward, if they want to help the web advance instead of holding it back, and they want to be relevant to web media in five or ten years, is to build that tool. Adobe has extensive in-house SVG experience and would be almost uniquely positioned to do it. Conceivably they could even modify Flash to output SVG + JavaScript instead of generating SWF files.