Dont want Flash

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/?mod=wsj_share_digg

What I find interesting after watching this video, most of it is the Adobe CEO yapping on about how “innovative” and “wonderful” CS5 is. I realised that the CEO has missed something…

He’s talking about how Flash bridges the gap between multiple OS’ and device platforms but that always requires the Flash Plugin to be available. This is also mentioned with the now over used word “open” but I dont see how have a proprietary plugin is any form of open.

Delivering a rich multimedia experience usually means video and animations but doesn’t HTML5 provide this? So why do we need Flash? 

Surely all devices need to do is keep up with the HTML5 spec and that will be the most open and efficient tool available that is available on all platforms, plugin or not.

It’s an interesting oversight by Adobe that they aren’t using these actual open standards that are truely multi-platform without the need for a plugin. Where’s the Publish tool to go to HTML5?

In the end, Adobe is a business and they are in it for the money. Flash costs considerably more to buy to be able to author multimedia content when HTML5 is free.

After all the hype this morning and the delivery of the iPhone OS 4.0 preview there were some interesting posts and comments made about the Apple v. Flash debate.

Conspiracy theories and thoughts about why Apple don’t want Flash on the iPhone range from the rational to the big company domination points of view. I see myself being more rational about these theories. Some I have come across don’t seem right.

Adobe want to lock developers into Flash and commoditize everything else as Flash-delivery devices. Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs.

via YCominator Comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946

I put this comment in the “big company domination” conspiracy category. Sure Apple is a big company that has a lot of control over technology and the mobile space. However, just because they are big doesn’t mean they are evil.

Iv’e said it many times why Flash and the iPhone OS don’t mix, it comes down to performance. In the keynote this morning Steve made a key point of why they don’t use Flash, in an indirect manner.

Whilst demoing the iAd service he mentioned that the Ad’s when you opened them are HTML5 and are animated with effects. The preview showed off some pretty good animations with effects like shadows and light sources. I believe this is the reason that Flash isn’t on the iPhone, HTML5 does it better.

Why would Apple go and get in bed with Adobe when it can use true open standards and use a language that the native OS can support and optimise. Plus lets not forget that to generally build Flash executables you need Flash CS5 and that costs money when a text editor and some knowledge can get you a HTML5 page for free.

In closing, what Apple is doing is supporting HTML5 which is a more open standard plus it’s free to develop and can be controlled by the system for better performance. Simple as that.

Edit: I skewed off at the end a little bit. When mentioning HTML5 I was talking about why the iAd service uses HTML5 for making Adverts. I combined 2 bits of rage I had at the time of posting this. But at the beginning I think I was clear in saying that the views that Apple is trying to dominate are the ramblings of idiots. Its more a case of Apple looking after the user and making sure their experience is free of flaws and bugs in turn selling more devices thanks to verbal referrals from HAPPY users.

Doherty notes that by December 2009, as many as 7 million iPhone users had tried to download Flash. Figures had reached 3 million by June of that year.

Source: iPodNN

I found out about this statistic about a month ago, didn’t think much of it. This morning @bjango tweeted some perspective on this statistic that I wanted to share.

Perspective:
7mil = ~10% of all iPhone/iPod owners attempting once.
7mil = ~0.02% of all app downloads.

Source: @bjango

Those figures add up pretty well when you combine iPhone and iPod Touch sales.

I know I have gone to that page, by accident. I wanted to see if a site had a Quicktime version of a video and in the process I clicked on a “Please install Flash” badge. I didn’t want to go there but I did. There’s no way of determining how many of those 7 million wanted to go to the Adobe site. Im sure you could kill a few 10-100 thousand visits because of misdirection or a forced redirect.

10% in comparison to the whole iPhone OS base is not much. It would look like 90% of iPhone OS user’s are either informed about the Flash and iPhone OS situation or just don’t need Flash on their mobile device. Knowing that most, if not all, Flash embed objects on the web have some type of “Download Flash here” fallbacks in place. This is a low figure and actually may show that people maybe don’t care about Flash?

Just an example of how information can be hidden from you. When you know the proportion of the metrics at play then you will know the truth.

An interesting conversation broke out on twitter between a co-worker @keithpitt and a user @JarZ.

@JarZ: But breaking compatibility with many, many websites by omitting flash is just silly and unnecessary, imo.

We’ll thats not the devices fault. As a web developer myself, whenever I have to use Flash I always have a fallback. Since recently everything had Flash some people got slack and didn’t set these fallbacks. It’s not the fault of the device but of the web developer, the lack of foresight and testing.

@JarZ: Because plenty of web pages are broken without flash. Even apples launch of the ipad suffered from that when showing NYT page

Suffered? I wouldn’t call a blue Lego suffering. Im pretty sure Steve knew that would happen, because they do rehearsing. Plenty are broken? Not really, plenty may have components or bits that are broken but please see the comment before regarding fallbacks.

@JarZ: but making up other excuses is bullshit. It’s not crashy/slow/etc on other mobile devices. Why is apple so different?

Sure other devices have Flash, although this being Flash Lite. Hey and you cant deny the stats. Apple reported that on Safari, most crashes were by plug-ins including Flash.

@JarZ: seriously, it’s a business decision, nothing more. Apple are welcome to make that decision on their own products.

Apple is a Business. Im sure it was a business decision. I detect a little emotion in this tweet. Probably trying to make Apple feel like this juggernaut exterminating technologies in its wake. Including Adobe in the development cycle of the devices a) would have cost more time b) meant a 3rd hand in the pie c) possible agreements and contracts which will fall through when we switch to HTML5.

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