6 ms·

It is true that some of these links are from evangelists. But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we? Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't wa

by tomlin 16y ago

It is true that some of these links are from evangelists. But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we? Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours. Touch/Scroll: Another sidestep. A Flash issue? With that I answer: a:hover {} I just don't get this argument from Apple. Steve Jobs pioneered high usability mobile UI because Apple took the reigns. Now we have Android UI taking a cue from Apple and "unlocking the mobile market" Flash and HTML5 have a similar relationship. HTML5 opens it up a bit. That's great. But what about HTML6? Flash is Area51 for implementation study. We don't need to implement a marquee tag and then take it away once we realize it sucks. How could we market test video conf. or canvas-based visuals if we had no way to benchmark them? Flash is good. The VS. argument is a misnomer.

potatolicious 16y ago
> "We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours." We do other things on the iPhone. I don't want to make the choice between watching a video and then restricting my own usage just so my phone has enough juice to make a call. I'd rather watch videos and use my phone, and the more power efficient everything is, the more the user can do this. To put it in perspective, if Apple's numbers are to be believed, running Flash alone doubles the power consumption of the device. That's insane. > "With that I answer: a:hover {}" a:hover is no longer (it certainly used to be) a common tool used for site navigation. Which is to say, rollover dropdown menus are out like parachute pants - it's a non-issue on the web today. Just about every site works with "clicks", which is Apple's primary form of interaction with websites on touch devices. The most compelling argument made though we've already been aware of for some time: cross-platform toolkits encourage lowest common denominator design. In Apple's world of pixel-perfect mockups and obsessive attention to detail this is abhorrent - and I'm inclined to agree. The iPhone's chief strength is its remarkably polished user interface - which for the most part remains true across its 3rd party app sphere, thanks in no small part to Apple's obsessive HID enforcement. A Flash-compiled-to-iPhone app destroys this in the same way that a Linux Qt app hastily ported to Windows is the same.
- tomlin 16y ago
  > a:hover is no longer (it certainly used to be) a common tool used for site navigation. Which is to say, rollover dropdown menus are out like parachute pants - it's a non-issue on the web today. Just about every site works with "clicks", which is Apple's primary form of interaction with websites on touch devices. This is precisely what I am talking about. We slice the pear in the middle and somehow end up choosing one side over another. True, a:hover is a deprecated form of menu control in HTML, but it is in Flash, too. Again, how you use the tool. Damning an entire developer base based on miscreant use is not a compelling argument. Sorry, but it isn't.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    > "based on miscreant use" That's being a bit generous in favor of Adobe - the majority of the Flash development sphere is practically what one would consider "miscreant use". Here's my impression of the different sorts of Flash use, based on my journeys on the web: - Videos/Audio: Easily replaced by HTML5, and better too. More readily hardware accelerated, behaves as part of the core browser instead of a hijacking addon (e.g., Ctrl+T while focused on a Flash applet = no new tab), and much better battery life on mobiles. - Crappy restaurant websites and other crimes against humanity: These should just die, and HTML5 will hopefully inspire better design ethic than this. I don't buy the argument that hovering is no longer common used as a critical navigation feature in Flash - I see it everywhere, especially for crappy restaurant websites. Flash is also impossible to crawl which reduces the usefulness of the web overall. Hell, you can't even LINK to content in a Flash site. IMHO the "full Flash site" (as opposed to Flash being a component of a page) needs to die a fiery, painful death. - Games: The only place where Adobe has even a remotely legitimate claim that Flash is an empowering product rather than a crutch. When I think of Flash these keywords come to mind: slow, buggy, crashy, badly designed, usability nightmare, gimmicky, unprofessional, and just plain bad.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomlin 16y ago
heimidal 16y ago
When it comes to battery life, you must consider the affect on the total user experience. If the iPhone can play video for 10 hours, that means a 2 hour movie brings my battery life to 80%. If the iPhone could play Flash video for 5 hours and I watch a 2 hour movie, my battery life is reduced to 60%. Given other things I do with my phone battery life is important beyond "how much video can I watch?" If the repercussions of watching a two-hour video are so much less severe, I am more likely to watch the video in question knowing I won't wind up with a dead phone after a half day of traveling.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
evgen 16y ago
Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours. If a phone can watch 4 1/2 hours of flash in software before the battery is drained this means that watching a two hour movie will eat half of my battery. By comparison I can watch a two hour movie using hardware decoding and still have 80% of my battery left.
- Terretta 16y ago
  About Job's remark of hardware vs software decoding of video: In both cases, he's talking about H.264. An end user might not even realize there's a difference. But some encoders produce H.264 that can hardware decode, and some encoders do not. Not all H.264 is created equal, and this is one area that really matters. You want an H.264 encoder that produces hardware decoder compatible video.
danudey 16y ago
"But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we?" I would argue that that's a reasonable point to make. Steve Jobs doesn't have a vested interest in seeing Flash die, he has a vested interest in seeing the iPhone platform succeed. If he saw any way Flash could help that, I'm sure he'd be all for it, but he's seen how Adobe's behaved in the past (late with PPC versions, late with OS X versions, late with Intel versions, late with 64-bit versions, crashy Flash, slow Flash, etc.), and he has no interest in subjecting the iPhone to the same issues that the Mac platform has had to endure at the hands of a slow-moving corporation who has little interest in being a good citizen. I would argue that Jobs is 'neutral' in the sense that he's not supporting anyone else's agenda. He's made his choice based on the facts before him, and while you may not agree with how he got there, I would say that he got there from an initial position of neutrality.
- kevinh 16y ago
  The very moment flash was not included in the iPhone, Steve Jobs had a vested interest in seeing Flash fail. If Flash expands, user satisfaction with the iPhone goes down. If Flash fails completely, one of the strongest negative components of the iPhone disappears.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Why does he have a vested interest in making it fail? Could he not change his mind and allow Adobe onto the platform? It's not like he's never changed his mind in the past (the Intel vs PPC 'Megahurtz Myth' comes to mind).
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    I would argue that it was even sooner that that. The Steve has probably hated Flash for a long, long time.
    - dejavidor 16y ago
      Yes, this goes back to 1989 fight over fonts, and the 1993 fight about Display Postscript and the 1999 fight about Photoshop on Windows, and the 2007 withdrawal of 64-bit Carbon toolkit at the last minute.
modeless 16y ago
Apple modified WebKit to support most uses of a:hover by changing how touch interaction works when a :hover style exists on an element. Apple cannot do this with Flash, which means Jobs's argument here is right on the money.
ErrantX 16y ago
We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. No, but you might watch a film and a couple of music videos and then the battery is getting awfully low. My iPhone lasts a day on one charge (with heavy web use & lots of calls). Halving that with a 2 hour film could be a big problem.

by tomlin 16y ago

potatolicious 16y ago

> "We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours." We do other things on the iPhone. I don't want to make the choice between watching a video and then restricting my own usage just so my phone has enough juice to make a call. I'd rather watch videos and use my phone, and the more power efficient everything is, the more the user can do this. To put it in perspective, if Apple's numbers are to be believed, running Flash alone doubles the power consumption of the device. That's insane. > "With that I answer: a:hover {}" a:hover is no longer (it certainly used to be) a common tool used for site navigation. Which is to say, rollover dropdown menus are out like parachute pants - it's a non-issue on the web today. Just about every site works with "clicks", which is Apple's primary form of interaction with websites on touch devices. The most compelling argument made though we've already been aware of for some time: cross-platform toolkits encourage lowest common denominator design. In Apple's world of pixel-perfect mockups and obsessive attention to detail this is abhorrent - and I'm inclined to agree. The iPhone's chief strength is its remarkably polished user interface - which for the most part remains true across its 3rd party app sphere, thanks in no small part to Apple's obsessive HID enforcement. A Flash-compiled-to-iPhone app destroys this in the same way that a Linux Qt app hastily ported to Windows is the same.

tomlin 16y ago
> a:hover is no longer (it certainly used to be) a common tool used for site navigation. Which is to say, rollover dropdown menus are out like parachute pants - it's a non-issue on the web today. Just about every site works with "clicks", which is Apple's primary form of interaction with websites on touch devices. This is precisely what I am talking about. We slice the pear in the middle and somehow end up choosing one side over another. True, a:hover is a deprecated form of menu control in HTML, but it is in Flash, too. Again, how you use the tool. Damning an entire developer base based on miscreant use is not a compelling argument. Sorry, but it isn't.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  > "based on miscreant use" That's being a bit generous in favor of Adobe - the majority of the Flash development sphere is practically what one would consider "miscreant use". Here's my impression of the different sorts of Flash use, based on my journeys on the web: - Videos/Audio: Easily replaced by HTML5, and better too. More readily hardware accelerated, behaves as part of the core browser instead of a hijacking addon (e.g., Ctrl+T while focused on a Flash applet = no new tab), and much better battery life on mobiles. - Crappy restaurant websites and other crimes against humanity: These should just die, and HTML5 will hopefully inspire better design ethic than this. I don't buy the argument that hovering is no longer common used as a critical navigation feature in Flash - I see it everywhere, especially for crappy restaurant websites. Flash is also impossible to crawl which reduces the usefulness of the web overall. Hell, you can't even LINK to content in a Flash site. IMHO the "full Flash site" (as opposed to Flash being a component of a page) needs to die a fiery, painful death. - Games: The only place where Adobe has even a remotely legitimate claim that Flash is an empowering product rather than a crutch. When I think of Flash these keywords come to mind: slow, buggy, crashy, badly designed, usability nightmare, gimmicky, unprofessional, and just plain bad.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomlin 16y ago

heimidal 16y ago

When it comes to battery life, you must consider the affect on the total user experience. If the iPhone can play video for 10 hours, that means a 2 hour movie brings my battery life to 80%. If the iPhone could play Flash video for 5 hours and I watch a 2 hour movie, my battery life is reduced to 60%. Given other things I do with my phone battery life is important beyond "how much video can I watch?" If the repercussions of watching a two-hour video are so much less severe, I am more likely to watch the video in question knowing I won't wind up with a dead phone after a half day of traveling.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

evgen 16y ago

Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours. If a phone can watch 4 1/2 hours of flash in software before the battery is drained this means that watching a two hour movie will eat half of my battery. By comparison I can watch a two hour movie using hardware decoding and still have 80% of my battery left.

Terretta 16y ago
About Job's remark of hardware vs software decoding of video: In both cases, he's talking about H.264. An end user might not even realize there's a difference. But some encoders produce H.264 that can hardware decode, and some encoders do not. Not all H.264 is created equal, and this is one area that really matters. You want an H.264 encoder that produces hardware decoder compatible video.

danudey 16y ago

"But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we?" I would argue that that's a reasonable point to make. Steve Jobs doesn't have a vested interest in seeing Flash die, he has a vested interest in seeing the iPhone platform succeed. If he saw any way Flash could help that, I'm sure he'd be all for it, but he's seen how Adobe's behaved in the past (late with PPC versions, late with OS X versions, late with Intel versions, late with 64-bit versions, crashy Flash, slow Flash, etc.), and he has no interest in subjecting the iPhone to the same issues that the Mac platform has had to endure at the hands of a slow-moving corporation who has little interest in being a good citizen. I would argue that Jobs is 'neutral' in the sense that he's not supporting anyone else's agenda. He's made his choice based on the facts before him, and while you may not agree with how he got there, I would say that he got there from an initial position of neutrality.

kevinh 16y ago
The very moment flash was not included in the iPhone, Steve Jobs had a vested interest in seeing Flash fail. If Flash expands, user satisfaction with the iPhone goes down. If Flash fails completely, one of the strongest negative components of the iPhone disappears.
- pyre 16y ago
  Why does he have a vested interest in making it fail? Could he not change his mind and allow Adobe onto the platform? It's not like he's never changed his mind in the past (the Intel vs PPC 'Megahurtz Myth' comes to mind).
- slantyyz 16y ago
  I would argue that it was even sooner that that. The Steve has probably hated Flash for a long, long time.
  - dejavidor 16y ago
    Yes, this goes back to 1989 fight over fonts, and the 1993 fight about Display Postscript and the 1999 fight about Photoshop on Windows, and the 2007 withdrawal of 64-bit Carbon toolkit at the last minute.

modeless 16y ago

Apple modified WebKit to support most uses of a:hover by changing how touch interaction works when a :hover style exists on an element. Apple cannot do this with Flash, which means Jobs's argument here is right on the money.

ErrantX 16y ago

We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. No, but you might watch a film and a couple of music videos and then the battery is getting awfully low. My iPhone lasts a day on one charge (with heavy web use & lots of calls). Halving that with a 2 hour film could be a big problem.