<story><title>Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right</title><url>http://blog.laptopmag.com/mobile-flash-fail-weak-android-player-proves-jobs-right</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IdeaHamster</author><text>I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn&apos;t to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5?&lt;p&gt;How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn&apos;t belong?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wtallis</author><text>Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that&apos;s not how Adobe likes to do business.&lt;p&gt;Adobe is lazy. If there&apos;s a problem with their software, they&apos;ll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn&apos;t work, they&apos;ll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It&apos;s a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software:&lt;p&gt;CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). Prior to CS5, they were still using the Mac OS 9 GUI APIs, which, though they weren&apos;t officially totally deprecated until June 2007, were obviously always just a transitional compatibility environment. Even prior to the official deprecation of the Carbon UI APIs, Adobe had plenty of reasons to port to Cocoa. Number one was to provide a truly OS X native look-and-feel, which is pretty much impossible to emulate via Carbon.&lt;p&gt;Adobe&apos;s approach to dealing with Flash performance on OS X has been similar. When people complained that video playback was unreasonably slow (ie eating up 5x the CPU time that a standalone player would use), they blamed Apple for not providing them with direct low-level access to the video decoding hardware. When Apple called their bluff and gave them exactly what they asked for, Adobe released a flash player that used those APIs but wasn&apos;t noticeably faster for anybody, and introduced several new glitches that made it a step backwards for everybody who&apos;s Mac predates the NVidia 9400M chipset.&lt;p&gt;On the Windows side of things, Adobe&apos;s PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog that third-party PDF readers have garnered significant market share in spite of their lack of support for most of the recent advanced features of PDF. If Adobe would take better care of their PDF implementation, it would be good for the progress of the format overall.&lt;p&gt;Further back, Adobe kept their font format (PostScript Type 1) proprietary and expensive so long that Apple had to create TrueType, and Apple ended up licensing it to Microsoft. Several years later, Adobe abandoned Type 1 in favor of co-developing a TrueType-based successor (OpenType) that is finally re-unifying the font market.&lt;p&gt;Adobe seems to think they&apos;re playing it safe by being the last rat off each sinking ship, but one of these days, they&apos;ll be too slow.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right</title><url>http://blog.laptopmag.com/mobile-flash-fail-weak-android-player-proves-jobs-right</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IdeaHamster</author><text>I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn&apos;t to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5?&lt;p&gt;How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn&apos;t belong?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cookiecaper</author><text>HTML5 is cool but it&apos;s not the end-all. You have a whole set of new issues to deal with when you use HTML5. You have to worry about cross-browser compatibility and specific rendering bugs, whereas Flash authors don&apos;t. You have to rely on the slow JavaScript VMs included in even the fastest browsers (even the &quot;fast&quot; JS VMs are still rather slow), and then you have IE, which is still used by &amp;#62; 50% of internet users, of which much is IE 6 or 7, which are outdated and _extremely_ slow. You have audio synchronization issues. There is no ready-made IDE like Adobe&apos;s Flash IDE, meaning HTML5 development is much harder for many people. There are other issues too.&lt;p&gt;The fact is that HTML5 is not a reasonable general replacement for Flash. If you want your thing to work for most people, you are going to have to write in Flash anyway. Realistically, only a relative handful of people could run a HTML5/JavaScript program at Flash-equivalent speeds. And that assumes that you just want something in Flash that HTML5 could do; there&apos;s still RTMP and significant swaths of other stuff that Flash does and HTML5 doesn&apos;t.</text></comment>