4 ms·

Lots of people unimpressed here for some reason. I bet if this was an HTML 5 demo we'd all be falling all over ourselves to talk about how awesome it is, and we

Lots of people unimpressed here for some reason. I bet if this was an HTML 5 demo we'd all be falling all over ourselves to talk about how awesome it is, and we'd see some copies by the end of next week. But because it's using flash... I find this attitude kind of sad, this guy is demonstrating something that is the holy grail of cross platform development.

nanairo 16y ago
But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere. Remember though what happened when Apple told developers that they could only use web app for the iPhone? There was an uproar because developers---good developers at least---want to be able to make use of all the features that make a platform unique. That's why we live Cocoa + HTML5, or Android SDK + HTML5, etc... If you want a common cross platform target use HTML5, if you want to make an app that feels like a good citizen on the platform and makes use of the latest innovations in said platform, you use the native SDK. It's all about the right tool for the right job. And Flash is inefficient, controlled by one company while at the same time not being a good native framework. Basically you got the worst of native SDK and the worst of HTML5 and put them together... and you expect people to be impressed by that???
- elblanco 16y ago
  > But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere. I think you mean, "HTML is open and will be a standard." For now it's not much of a standard, is poorly implemented on the target platforms, and most certainly does not behave exactly the same across platforms.
philjackson 16y ago
But why do you think the anti-flash sentiment exists in the first place? When I bought my HTC Sense based phone, Flash was forced on me. I'd be generous to say I can play half the flash based videos I meet on the web. When I do manage to play something my phone heats up to a few degrees cooler than the sun and my battery drains at a rate of knots. My desktop is a 64-bit, quad-core monster running Linux. Can I play full screen Flash videos? No. Throw a HD video at mplayer and it's runs as smoothly as silk and creates hardly a bump on my processor graph. Holy grail of cross platform development? You must be kidding.
- elblanco 16y ago
  I wasn't aware that he was demonstrating a video in an flv wrapper. He was demonstrating an interactive app running on 6 different platforms running on a very wide variety of form factors. I also can't play blue ray rips on my phone. Does that mean video isn't cross platform? Thank you for exactly demonstrating my point above. I really don't understand why everytime somebody brings up flash the response is "well video in flash sucks!" So what?
  - philjackson 16y ago
    Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform and so this video isn't in the slightest bit exciting. Asking why people always bring up Flash video in these debates is like a robber asking why the breaking and entering has to be mentioned in his court case.
    - elblanco 16y ago
      > Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform... I think my counter question is then "doesn't perform compared to what?" Compared to a natively compiled piece of software written in C or ASM? Yeah, it doesn't perform well at all. Compared to Java? I'd say modern Java runtimes are faster in general. Compared to Javascript? I'd like to see some benchmarks with modern runtimes like v8, but I'd wager that Flash (Actionscript) performs better. Here's a rather old comparison benchmark. http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/ http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/ According to this, ActionScript 3 and Flash Player 9 were approaching Java Applet speed in many of the tests. Here's a newer one http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/232 http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/232 In this test, Safari, FF 3.5.2 and AS3 all have about the same runtime. Every other browser tested run 2-9x slower. And another followup http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/534 http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/534 The results are about the same. Here's a very recent one (March 2010) with similar results. http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/ http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/ Flash performs about as well as the very best Javascript implementations out there, and far far better than most implementations of Javascript that live in the browsers that are actually being used in the world. I understand your point, Adobe has provided some rather abysmal ports of Flash to platforms other than Windows. But on the platforms it has been ported to (no matter how flawed) it runs about as well as the best available implementation of Javascript on that platform. As for video, Adobe, for some reason isn't offloading video decoding to your GPU. That could be problem of your platform, or a problem of Adobe. But just the same Javascript isn't rendering the video on your Linux box when you watch a video...you certainly wouldn't want that. Talk about bad performance! But we aren't talking about video when we talk about HTML5 and Flash. Video is a separate and distinct problem. Flash didn't even support video until quite late in it's life cycle, it's an "oh yeah let's toss this in too" feature. We're talking about making interactive applications in those respective environments. And we're talking about those applications being cross platforms, running on multiple systems, on multiple platforms, in multiple form factors. And for that, right now flash is the better platform, it performs about as well in raw computation as the very best Javascript engines, has a better development environment, is currently more cross platform than a similarly complex Javascript HTML 5 app, and is generally a more mature technology. I can't even get a complex HTML 5 app to run the same on 3 different browsers on the same machine! Imagine targeting every major browser that run under Windows, OSX, Linux, iPhones, the iPad and Android devices with HTML5 technologies! It's simply not there yet.
ugh 16y ago
I don’t think many people would be very impressed by HTML5 Reversi.
stevenwei 16y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that it us using Flash - a HTML5/JS demo of the same app would be equally unimpressive (although I think people generally have lower expectations when it comes to HTML/JS apps vs supposedly 'native' apps). The entire point is that it's not the holy grail of cross platform development because in a real world application you would never be able to truly build-once and and deploy everywhere. Hell, if you've ever tried to deploy a Flash app across Windows/OS X/Linux you'll come across slight differences between those platforms (Windows is generally the best supported/least buggy, with OS X and Linux being second and third class citizens, respectively.) I would rather have seen a demo where they took the same application logic (which admittedly for Reversi is very limited), and hooked it up to different versions of the user interface, demonstrating how much code you could reuse in a cross-platform manner while presenting native interfaces designed for each type of device.

nanairo 16y ago

But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere. Remember though what happened when Apple told developers that they could only use web app for the iPhone? There was an uproar because developers---good developers at least---want to be able to make use of all the features that make a platform unique. That's why we live Cocoa + HTML5, or Android SDK + HTML5, etc... If you want a common cross platform target use HTML5, if you want to make an app that feels like a good citizen on the platform and makes use of the latest innovations in said platform, you use the native SDK. It's all about the right tool for the right job. And Flash is inefficient, controlled by one company while at the same time not being a good native framework. Basically you got the worst of native SDK and the worst of HTML5 and put them together... and you expect people to be impressed by that???

elblanco 16y ago
> But you see you are comparing oranges to apples. HTML 5 is open, and it is a standard... _because_ people want it to look the same everywhere. I think you mean, "HTML is open and will be a standard." For now it's not much of a standard, is poorly implemented on the target platforms, and most certainly does not behave exactly the same across platforms.

philjackson 16y ago

But why do you think the anti-flash sentiment exists in the first place? When I bought my HTC Sense based phone, Flash was forced on me. I'd be generous to say I can play half the flash based videos I meet on the web. When I do manage to play something my phone heats up to a few degrees cooler than the sun and my battery drains at a rate of knots. My desktop is a 64-bit, quad-core monster running Linux. Can I play full screen Flash videos? No. Throw a HD video at mplayer and it's runs as smoothly as silk and creates hardly a bump on my processor graph. Holy grail of cross platform development? You must be kidding.

elblanco 16y ago
I wasn't aware that he was demonstrating a video in an flv wrapper. He was demonstrating an interactive app running on 6 different platforms running on a very wide variety of form factors. I also can't play blue ray rips on my phone. Does that mean video isn't cross platform? Thank you for exactly demonstrating my point above. I really don't understand why everytime somebody brings up flash the response is "well video in flash sucks!" So what?
- philjackson 16y ago
  Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform and so this video isn't in the slightest bit exciting. Asking why people always bring up Flash video in these debates is like a robber asking why the breaking and entering has to be mentioned in his court case.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    > Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform... I think my counter question is then "doesn't perform compared to what?" Compared to a natively compiled piece of software written in C or ASM? Yeah, it doesn't perform well at all. Compared to Java? I'd say modern Java runtimes are faster in general. Compared to Javascript? I'd like to see some benchmarks with modern runtimes like v8, but I'd wager that Flash (Actionscript) performs better. Here's a rather old comparison benchmark. http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/ http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/ According to this, ActionScript 3 and Flash Player 9 were approaching Java Applet speed in many of the tests. Here's a newer one http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/232 http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/232 In this test, Safari, FF 3.5.2 and AS3 all have about the same runtime. Every other browser tested run 2-9x slower. And another followup http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/534 http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/534 The results are about the same. Here's a very recent one (March 2010) with similar results. http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/ http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/ Flash performs about as well as the very best Javascript implementations out there, and far far better than most implementations of Javascript that live in the browsers that are actually being used in the world. I understand your point, Adobe has provided some rather abysmal ports of Flash to platforms other than Windows. But on the platforms it has been ported to (no matter how flawed) it runs about as well as the best available implementation of Javascript on that platform. As for video, Adobe, for some reason isn't offloading video decoding to your GPU. That could be problem of your platform, or a problem of Adobe. But just the same Javascript isn't rendering the video on your Linux box when you watch a video...you certainly wouldn't want that. Talk about bad performance! But we aren't talking about video when we talk about HTML5 and Flash. Video is a separate and distinct problem. Flash didn't even support video until quite late in it's life cycle, it's an "oh yeah let's toss this in too" feature. We're talking about making interactive applications in those respective environments. And we're talking about those applications being cross platforms, running on multiple systems, on multiple platforms, in multiple form factors. And for that, right now flash is the better platform, it performs about as well in raw computation as the very best Javascript engines, has a better development environment, is currently more cross platform than a similarly complex Javascript HTML 5 app, and is generally a more mature technology. I can't even get a complex HTML 5 app to run the same on 3 different browsers on the same machine! Imagine targeting every major browser that run under Windows, OSX, Linux, iPhones, the iPad and Android devices with HTML5 technologies! It's simply not there yet.

ugh 16y ago

I don’t think many people would be very impressed by HTML5 Reversi.

stevenwei 16y ago

I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that it us using Flash - a HTML5/JS demo of the same app would be equally unimpressive (although I think people generally have lower expectations when it comes to HTML/JS apps vs supposedly 'native' apps). The entire point is that it's not the holy grail of cross platform development because in a real world application you would never be able to truly build-once and and deploy everywhere. Hell, if you've ever tried to deploy a Flash app across Windows/OS X/Linux you'll come across slight differences between those platforms (Windows is generally the best supported/least buggy, with OS X and Linux being second and third class citizens, respectively.) I would rather have seen a demo where they took the same application logic (which admittedly for Reversi is very limited), and hooked it up to different versions of the user interface, demonstrating how much code you could reuse in a cross-platform manner while presenting native interfaces designed for each type of device.