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.

The web has grown up in terms of multimedia. It started off with video files just rawly linked in a page, download to view.

Then came the in-browser plug-ins and depending on what you did or didn’t have plugged in you may or may not have been able to see what the website had to offer. I particularly remember stupidvideos.com and having to use the Quicktime plug-in.

Enter Flash. Although it was around for a while it didn’t enter the video space until it was mature enough. Soon every site was serving up our hilarious cat videos with a Flash video player.

Now this is where we stand. Flash is serving up our video content. Being pushed from a variety of different services. Services like the Adobe Flash Streaming Server and others using FLV files stored in CDN’s. It’s probably the best media distribution that has reached the majority of web users to date…

HOWEVER…

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It has become the multimedia Swiss army knife of the Internet, until now.

Flash is just not needed any more. Nor is it needed to be supported by mobile devices. Here’s some quick points why mobile devices or tablets dont need Flash.

1. For most Flash objects there is an alternative. Exhibit A: revision3.com has multiple video encodings that dont require Flash to be able to use the site.
2. Flash can be slow, memory hoging and is not controllable by the system. With Flash running its own code there is no way the browser can manage what it’s doing. This leads to slowness, jittering and crashes.
3. Flash requires the Flash plug-in on the device. One thing extra that takes up space on a device limited on available disk space.

And here comes the main kicker.

Flash is on the way of being out-dated and replaced. Yes, using Flash for video playback will slowly disappear. Why?

HTML 5. The new HTML 5 schema includes the lovely <video> tag. This tag doesn’t need Flash or even a Quicktime plug-in. No all it needs is a web browser and the rest is taken care of.

The browser will use its own player to play the media it is given. Optimised for the browser, built by the browser or OS developers and 100% jitter and flawless playback.

That’s the focus on video. Check back for more information why Advertising and Games will soon be bailing from the Flash boat.