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"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on ea

by soup10 7y ago

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.

fastball 7y ago
Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
- redisman 7y ago
  That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
  - fastball 7y ago
    HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.
    - koonsolo 7y ago
      So basically any AAA game has bad performance.
      - fastball 7y ago
        There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".
ken 7y ago
> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.
- soup10 7y ago
  Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now. Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps."" ""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
  - mthoms 7y ago
    You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here: > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) : >... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008 You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-reason-steve-jobs-didn-202507266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r... Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed. Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.

by soup10 7y ago

fastball 7y ago

Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.

redisman 7y ago
That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
- fastball 7y ago
  HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
koonsolo 7y ago
That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.
- fastball 7y ago
  Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    So basically any AAA game has bad performance.
    - fastball 7y ago
      There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".

ken 7y ago

> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.

soup10 7y ago
Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now. Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps."" ""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
- mthoms 7y ago
  You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here: > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) : >... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008 You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-reason-steve-jobs-didn-202507266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r... Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed. Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.