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Yes, they put some effort into mobile Flash (specifically flash lite) development when they could justify the cost with the revenue they were receiving from han
by 9999 15y ago
Yes, they put some effort into mobile Flash (specifically flash lite) development when they could justify the cost with the revenue they were receiving from handset manufacturers that licensed it. Then the iPhone came out without Flash. Then Steve Jobs slammed Flash (approximately half of which was true) and told Adobe to go back to making tools to help people make shit.
And Adobe actually listened to jobs. I feel like Flash was an end in itself for Macromedia. It was, in part, Macromedia's great tilt at the "write once, run anywhere" windmill, and Adobe just carried that on (and I would say it's the public that loses out now that that's over). In the end, it doesn't matter to Adobe that the Flash runtime isn't in the iOS browser. Or in any browser from here on out.
Adobe sells tools to make shit. Jobs gave them a way to sell a new tool (Edge) and reminded them what they're actually in the business of doing.
That being said, I greatly appreciate everything the devs that worked on the Player have accomplished over the last few years (particularly Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason, and Matt Kaufman). Thanks for tilting at the windmill.
- YooLi 15y agoOut of curiosity, which half was true and which wasn't?
- 9999 15y agoBullshit: "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary." Well, except for the SWF format, the mxmlc SWF compiler, the Tamarind interpreter, most of the popular video codecs, the FLV container format, AMF, RTMP... And I could go on. Huh. Okay, I guess the only things that are "proprietary" are the authoring tool (although you're welcome to make your own) and some very important parts of the actual Flash Player (if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation). "The full web." Flash is still an important part of the full web. There's a lot of stuff that you will just never be able to do with the browser alone (capture video, do p2p networking, etc.) or that will be so difficult to implement amongst the many competing browsers that it's only economically feasible for giant companies to develop web applications. But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store. "Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications. Not particularly hard (compared to porting a flash game to Obj-C anyway). True: "reliability, security, and performance" Enough said. "Battery life." Software based rendering of graphics and decoding of video is obviously going to be way harder on battery life. Middleman lock-in Apple was burned in the past by this, but it doesn't seem like that much of a threat now.
- YooLi 15y agoHmm... Where can I download a full Flash plugin made by another company? Not the partial open-source implementations that only do a small part of everything that is 'Flash'. It's like saying Mac OS X isn't proprietary because it uses a lot of open-source pieces. "(if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation)" But they didn't, that's the whole point. Did you read 'the full web' part? Jobs says that most of the videos Adobe argues one won't be able to see are also available without the Flash container and other things like games just won't be available, but there are nice games in the app store to make up for it. He's admitting not 100% will be available, but it's not as bad as Adobe is making it sound. As someone who removed Flash from my desktop browser about a year ago, I agree. "But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store." Why do people keep repeating this? Do they think if they repeat it enough, it will actually be true? How much does apple make if the app is free? Why is iOS Safari consistently the most standards compliant mobile browser? What percentage of Apple's profit was contributed by the App Store? So allowing Flash would have killed the app store? No way because Flash performs so badly on mobile devices, which is why it isn't on iOS devices. ""Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications." Well, then that does nothing to help the 'full web' argument now, does it. That's great if the APIs work pretty well, but what about the thousands (millions?) of flash apps that probably won't be upgraded to those pretty nice APIs. Not much of a 'full web' experience then.
- joezydeco 15y agoHaving seen the Flash Lite source code back in the days before iPhone, I'd say there wasn't a lot of effort there at all. The code was pretty bad.
- cpeterso 15y agoFlash Lite was a hack-n-slashed fork off the venerable (and briefly open-source!) Flash Player 4. The portability and modularization of the Flash code has improved since 1999.