7 ms·

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standard

by gumby 3y ago

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG, mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid the danegeld for .rtf. Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again. The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. You still get H.264, matter/threads, and other standards they don't control, where they don't have market power.

colechristensen 3y ago
> "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." Everyone does. AMD is the same. The market leader focuses on features, the runners up try to take them down with openness. The competition is good for consumers, but the motivation is one of self-interest, not the common good.
i_am_jl 3y ago
>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome. The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again. This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.
  - gumby 3y ago
    > more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them. Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control. As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
  - dimator 3y ago
    Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
    - wsc981 3y ago
      Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
      - pmarreck 3y ago
        I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
        irvinej00 3y ago
- photonerd 3y ago
  Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap. There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either. Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.
  - xp84 3y ago
    Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)
- _jal 3y ago
  I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment for the phone. I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform. So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen. It's more about control and all the other reasons. Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account. And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while authors would have bristled at having to give up their favorite hacks. Flash was a fractal of bad programming and UI design, and there was no way to get that community to improve since Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. People wrote Click-to-Flash plugins to keep it from crashing your browser, every browser had to change their architecture to handle Flash crashing, the plugin & authoring tools had tons of performance, stability, and security issues – and Adobe just kept snoozing, waking only enough to cash the royalty checks, and claim the next version would be totally better. Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue. There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.
    - amluto 3y ago
      > Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way. I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now. Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  I remember my old Samsung Galaxy Note (or was it the Note 3?) could actually sense when your finger was near the screen but not touching, for mouseover events. I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.
- girvo 3y ago
  That, and even if you somehow fixed that, Flash on mobile sucked. I had Flash on my Windows Mobile handset. It was horrible!
foobiekr 3y ago
You might actually expand "Apple likes open standards when it is weak" to "companies likes open standards when they are weak." Generally speaking you get standards consortiums when there is a clear winner that is mopping up the space. Here's an example that's happening right now: Nvidia-NvLink-Infiniband. Nvidia owns the highspeed interconnect inside the chassis (HGX), the NICs (Mellanox), the inter-host interconnect (Infiniband), the high performance inter-host interconnect (switched NvLink), the and the ethernet network (Mellanox has the same 52.1Tbps switch performance that everyone else has now). GPU training is RDMA heavy and this is a place where both NvLink and Infiniband shine, ethernet much less so. Retransmissions are very bad, in global-performance-terms, for ROCEv2 transfers. Right now Nvidia is just crushing it and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by introducing new Infiniband ASICs. So what happens? You have a consortium spun up by all of the companies in the Ethernet space - Ultra Ethernet Consortium - to try and use "standards" to push back on customers who don't want to make big investments in "non-standard." UEC is pretty vague but seems to be promising Broadcom-style cellized fabrics, the whole point of which is to have an ethernet-like standard that avoids ECMP-induced flow collisions and retransmissions - that is, get Ethernet into the same territory as Infiniband. If you look back in time in the tech industry, you see this over and over and over and over. Standards are great, they make certain kinds of multi-sided markets and markets that need broad participation to be viable possible - but they are also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Same for adaptive sync. Gsync was first to market by a country mile, the adaptive sync standard wasn’t even approved until like 6 months after the first gsync stuff showed up and if nvidia hadn’t gone first it would have taken much longer if it happened at all. Freesync wasn’t really market-ready until at least 2015 and the early products were mostly junk, it’s not until the gsync compatible program that any vendors really cared about LFC or flickering issues.
- SergeAx 3y ago
  > losers joining together to compete You are saying it like it is something bad. Competition is good for consumers, and I cheer any means to spin up, sustain and heat competition.
JohnBooty 3y ago
Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again. I don't know if I can agree. On the software side, MacOS supports all those things. On the hardware side, it's still (edit: almost) nothing but industry-standard ports.
- gumby 3y ago
  I didn't say they necessarily denigrated the open formats but added and preferred their own proprietary image, audio etc formats as they gained market strength. On the hardware side I'm delighted by Apple's USB C/TB push (and Apple contributed a lot to those standards, esp based on what they had learned with Lightning) but note they revived the proprietary "magsafe" connecter on recent laptops (though you can still use USB C PD). Apparently enough customers wanted it. And as others have pointed out, Apple is hardly alone in this
  - als0 3y ago
    > Apparently enough customers wanted it. Magsafe is genuinely a nice innovation that users missed. It solves the cord yank problem. But I do like having the option to use USB-C if I don't have the MagSafe cable.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      Also USB-C absolutely sucks. The socket seems to attract dirt and dust in a way that prevents its proper working like no other.
      - brokenmachine 3y ago
        I have lots of USB-C devices and never had that problem. I'm careful with my stuff though.
        Unfrozen0688 3y ago
        Phones are very sensitive to it as they are in a pocket. Pocket lint -> pushed in USB cable -> after some years the connector wont connect anymore
mattl 3y ago
NeXT had RTF support. It was used everywhere including NeXTmail
simonh 3y ago
Or even “Apple doesn’t like open standards that are weak”. OpenGL was just no longer fit for purpose. They were competing against DirectX, needed to do ML acceleration, and at the time Vulcan didn’t exist. They had to do something, and especially given their chip strategy that must have been in full swing at the same time, Metal must have been a no brainier.
nixpulvis 3y ago
Big tangent, but can someone tell me why matter/threads doesn’t suck ass? I have one of these devices and frankly I have no idea what I expect it to be doing.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." > [...] > Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again. Just four words: embrace, extend, and extinguish > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

by gumby 3y ago

colechristensen 3y ago

> "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." Everyone does. AMD is the same. The market leader focuses on features, the runners up try to take them down with openness. The competition is good for consumers, but the motivation is one of self-interest, not the common good.

i_am_jl 3y ago

>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome. The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

tomjakubowski 3y ago
Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again. This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.
- gumby 3y ago
  > more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them. Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question
jjoonathan 3y ago
That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control. As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
- dimator 3y ago
  Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
  - wsc981 3y ago
    Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
      - irvinej00 3y ago
photonerd 3y ago
Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap. There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either. Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.
- xp84 3y ago
  Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)
_jal 3y ago
I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment for the phone. I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform. So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.
coldtea 3y ago
>The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen. It's more about control and all the other reasons. Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account. And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.
- acdha 3y ago
  Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while authors would have bristled at having to give up their favorite hacks. Flash was a fractal of bad programming and UI design, and there was no way to get that community to improve since Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. People wrote Click-to-Flash plugins to keep it from crashing your browser, every browser had to change their architecture to handle Flash crashing, the plugin & authoring tools had tons of performance, stability, and security issues – and Adobe just kept snoozing, waking only enough to cash the royalty checks, and claim the next version would be totally better. Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue. There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way. I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now. Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.
brokenmachine 3y ago
I remember my old Samsung Galaxy Note (or was it the Note 3?) could actually sense when your finger was near the screen but not touching, for mouseover events. I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.
girvo 3y ago
That, and even if you somehow fixed that, Flash on mobile sucked. I had Flash on my Windows Mobile handset. It was horrible!

foobiekr 3y ago

You might actually expand "Apple likes open standards when it is weak" to "companies likes open standards when they are weak." Generally speaking you get standards consortiums when there is a clear winner that is mopping up the space. Here's an example that's happening right now: Nvidia-NvLink-Infiniband. Nvidia owns the highspeed interconnect inside the chassis (HGX), the NICs (Mellanox), the inter-host interconnect (Infiniband), the high performance inter-host interconnect (switched NvLink), the and the ethernet network (Mellanox has the same 52.1Tbps switch performance that everyone else has now). GPU training is RDMA heavy and this is a place where both NvLink and Infiniband shine, ethernet much less so. Retransmissions are very bad, in global-performance-terms, for ROCEv2 transfers. Right now Nvidia is just crushing it and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by introducing new Infiniband ASICs. So what happens? You have a consortium spun up by all of the companies in the Ethernet space - Ultra Ethernet Consortium - to try and use "standards" to push back on customers who don't want to make big investments in "non-standard." UEC is pretty vague but seems to be promising Broadcom-style cellized fabrics, the whole point of which is to have an ethernet-like standard that avoids ECMP-induced flow collisions and retransmissions - that is, get Ethernet into the same territory as Infiniband. If you look back in time in the tech industry, you see this over and over and over and over. Standards are great, they make certain kinds of multi-sided markets and markets that need broad participation to be viable possible - but they are also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.

paulmd 3y ago
Same for adaptive sync. Gsync was first to market by a country mile, the adaptive sync standard wasn’t even approved until like 6 months after the first gsync stuff showed up and if nvidia hadn’t gone first it would have taken much longer if it happened at all. Freesync wasn’t really market-ready until at least 2015 and the early products were mostly junk, it’s not until the gsync compatible program that any vendors really cared about LFC or flickering issues.
SergeAx 3y ago
> losers joining together to compete You are saying it like it is something bad. Competition is good for consumers, and I cheer any means to spin up, sustain and heat competition.

JohnBooty 3y ago

Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again. I don't know if I can agree. On the software side, MacOS supports all those things. On the hardware side, it's still (edit: almost) nothing but industry-standard ports.

gumby 3y ago
I didn't say they necessarily denigrated the open formats but added and preferred their own proprietary image, audio etc formats as they gained market strength. On the hardware side I'm delighted by Apple's USB C/TB push (and Apple contributed a lot to those standards, esp based on what they had learned with Lightning) but note they revived the proprietary "magsafe" connecter on recent laptops (though you can still use USB C PD). Apparently enough customers wanted it. And as others have pointed out, Apple is hardly alone in this
- als0 3y ago
  > Apparently enough customers wanted it. Magsafe is genuinely a nice innovation that users missed. It solves the cord yank problem. But I do like having the option to use USB-C if I don't have the MagSafe cable.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    Also USB-C absolutely sucks. The socket seems to attract dirt and dust in a way that prevents its proper working like no other.
    - brokenmachine 3y ago
      I have lots of USB-C devices and never had that problem. I'm careful with my stuff though.
      - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
        Phones are very sensitive to it as they are in a pocket. Pocket lint -> pushed in USB cable -> after some years the connector wont connect anymore

mattl 3y ago

NeXT had RTF support. It was used everywhere including NeXTmail

simonh 3y ago

Or even “Apple doesn’t like open standards that are weak”. OpenGL was just no longer fit for purpose. They were competing against DirectX, needed to do ML acceleration, and at the time Vulcan didn’t exist. They had to do something, and especially given their chip strategy that must have been in full swing at the same time, Metal must have been a no brainier.

nixpulvis 3y ago

Big tangent, but can someone tell me why matter/threads doesn’t suck ass? I have one of these devices and frankly I have no idea what I expect it to be doing.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak." > [...] > Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again. Just four words: embrace, extend, and extinguish > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...