Steve Jobs speaks about Flash

[Lucas Wilson]

Yeah - like that propitiatory closed source Webkit framework that third parties can't use, or the Mac OS X kernel source which I definitely can't download at http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1063/ along with many drivers and libraries, or the open source LLVM framework and Clang compiler that Apple definitely isn't almost solely funding...

Oh, wait...

Two words:

Quicktime.
ProRes.

Lucas


Lucas Wilson
--------------
Director, Business Development
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Two words:

Quicktime.
ProRes.

Lucas


Lucas Wilson
--------------
Director, Business Development
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA

Which is available (encoding) now on a PC with Matrox DSX Developer products.

Testing now ...:devil:

 

[Lucas Wilson]

Which is available (encoding) now on a PC with Matrox DSX Developer products.

Testing now ...:devil:

This is no different from what Apple has always done with ProRes. It is tied to hardware. There is no software-only encoder on Windows for ProRes.

Also, the DSX line is an OEM line of products. You as an individual consumer cannot buy a DSX-series card, plug it in, and expect it to work. It is an OEM card that must be integrated into existing hardware-based product lines... which is why their two customer case studies are Editshare and VizRT.

(already been down that road, my friend... )

Lucas

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

This is no different from what Apple has always done with ProRes. It is tied to hardware. There is no software-only encoder on Windows for ProRes.

True.

Also, the DSX line is an OEM line of products. You as an individual consumer cannot buy a DSX-series card, plug it in, and expect it to work. It is an OEM card that must be integrated into existing hardware-based product lines...

Yes. But 3rd parties are working on solutions for existing product lines that people like me test ...

which is why their two customer case studies are Editshare and VizRT.

Lucas

For the moment.

 

[Milan Spasic]

Who is still pissed that they can't use one of these on their Mac?

There was the same hoopla when Jobs dropped the Floppy Drive, Parralel printer port in favor of USB, FW400.....

Let Flash die. It's a clumsy old Dinosaur.

 

[Noah Kadner]

I'd rather go with Steve Jobs' gut feelings on the matter than about 99% of the tech industry CEOs out there... Apple's net worth and stock are through the roof for one single reason- him.

Noah

 

[Ace]

I'm sorry but flash has been the single catalyst on the web to allow the designer/artist/animator to put CREATIVITY ahead of the TECHNOLOGY, and continues to do so. The best works of multimedia design have been through FLASH because of this. Perfect Anti-aliasing, bitmap smoothing and caching, comprehensive embedded typography and font management, perfect video scaling, oh and VECTOR based rendering, all of which makes Flash ahead of its time, not behind it.

http://www.thefwa.com/site

Heres what I have to do to draw a crappy smiley face in HTML5. Yeah. I'll order a side of get the f*ck out with that.

<!--[if IE]><script src="excanvas.js"></script><![endif]-->
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
var drawingCanvas = document.getElementById('myDrawing');

// Check the element is in the DOM and the browser supports canvas
if(drawingCanvas && drawingCanvas.getContext) {
// Initaliase a 2-dimensional drawing context
var context = drawingCanvas.getContext('2d');

// Create the yellow face
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFF00";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(100,100,50,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

// Add 2 green eyes
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFFFF";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(80,80,8,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

context.fillStyle = "#009966";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(80,80,5,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFFFF";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(120,80,8,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

context.fillStyle = "#009966";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(120,80,5,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

// Create the diamond-shaped nose
context.fillStyle = "#000000";
context.beginPath();
context.moveTo(93,100);
context.lineTo(100,93);
context.lineTo(107,100);
context.lineTo(100,107);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

// Add the smile
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.beginPath();
context.moveTo(70,110);
context.quadraticCurveTo(100,150,130,110);
context.quadraticCurveTo(100,150,70,110);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
}
}
</script>

 

[J Davis]

Damn Ace, why did you edit your post? That code underlined your point!
Matter of fact I was going to copy and paste it and try it for kicks

 

[Ace]

Damn Ace, why did you edit your post? That code underlined your point!
Matter of fact I was going to copy and paste it and try it for kicks

I felt It was a bit over the top. but heres the rest of it..

Heres what I have to do to draw a crappy smiley face. Yeah. I'll order a side of get the f*ck out with that.

<!--[if IE]><script src="excanvas.js"></script><![endif]-->
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
var drawingCanvas = document.getElementById('myDrawing');

// Check the element is in the DOM and the browser supports canvas
if(drawingCanvas && drawingCanvas.getContext) {
// Initaliase a 2-dimensional drawing context
var context = drawingCanvas.getContext('2d');

// Create the yellow face
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFF00";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(100,100,50,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

// Add 2 green eyes
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFFFF";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(80,80,8,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

context.fillStyle = "#009966";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(80,80,5,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.fillStyle = "#FFFFFF";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(120,80,8,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
context.fill();

context.fillStyle = "#009966";
context.beginPath();
context.arc(120,80,5,0,Math.PI*2,true);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

// Create the diamond-shaped nose
context.fillStyle = "#000000";
context.beginPath();
context.moveTo(93,100);
context.lineTo(100,93);
context.lineTo(107,100);
context.lineTo(100,107);
context.closePath();
context.fill();

// Add the smile
context.strokeStyle = "#000000";
context.beginPath();
context.moveTo(70,110);
context.quadraticCurveTo(100,150,130,110);
context.quadraticCurveTo(100,150,70,110);
context.closePath();
context.stroke();
}
}
</script>

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Heres what I have to do to draw a crappy smiley face in HTML5. Yeah. I'll order a side of get the f*ck out with that.

Sorry, but this is just plain stupid... What do you think Flash is doing under the hood? Exactly the same thing...

A sane person would either use an authoring application (believe it or not, Flash has export support for HTML5 images and animation), or download a little Javascript library that would load that vector image from one you made in an image editor like Illustrator and display it in the canvas...

Maybe if Flash had a 64 bit version available, didn't crash on me a couple of times a week, and actually had decent performance on Linux and OS X, people might be more accepting of it. Without those things, it doesn't matter how many good points it has...

Not to mention that Flash absolutely sucks for accessibility - screen readers and brail displays and things like that just see a black box. Search engines can't index Flash content. Flash files take a lot longer to download that HTML pages (remember that some people still only have dial up as their only internet option). Not to mention that fully flash sites often break the back and refresh buttons, and can make it impossible to link to an individual page of information...

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I would modify that a bit, since Jobs has been excellent at figuring out where we want to go even though we didn't know it - and producing the products to take us there - and I think that is part of what he is doing with HTML5/noFLASH

No. I would say historically Steve Jobs has been really good at commercializing products that lots of people know is the future but can't seem to find a company to property implement or market to a wide audience.

MP3 players weren't very common but millions had concluded they were the future long before the iPod and iTunes.

Smartphones and mobile web were were used by millions before the iPhone. The iPhone just made it easier and had a decent web browser.

Tablets aren't a new phenomenon.

AppleTV was a crappy implementation of Windows Media Center, XBMC or a host of other solutions.

I can't think of a single product that Apple has released since the GUI (From XEROX) which was really surprising or innovative and didn't emerge out of an obvious industry shift towards a technology. What distinguishes apple I don't believe is their competence so much as the lack there of in their competitors.

The one trend where Apple has been rigorously consistent in is banning an open ecology in which people are free to innovate. If apple had invented the internet they would have made it in the image of AOL where content is strictly administered. The important thing to note here isn't that Apple isn't supporting flash. It's that they're actively forbidding it.

Is Flash great? Absolutely not. Actionscript is a blight on computer science. But like Apple it's distinguished not by its competence but by the incompetence of its competitors. HTML is the future. But Flash is the present.

--

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...eat_flash_surprising_results_of_new_tests.php

 

[Ace]

Sorry, but this is just plain stupid... What do you think Flash is doing under the hood? Exactly the same thing...

A sane person would either use an authoring application (believe it or not, Flash has export support for HTML5 images and animation), or download a little Javascript library that would load that vector image from one you made in an image editor like Illustrator and display it in the canvas...

Sorry, you completely missed the point. HTML5 will take a *long* time before its even close to perfect and consistent accross all browsers and platforms and affords designers/artists the same freedom as flash. In which case FLASH may as well be the alternative for some time to come. As Gavin pointed out, HTML5 may be future, but Flash is the present.

Maybe if Flash had a 64 bit version available, didn't crash on me a couple of times a week, and actually had decent performance on Linux and OS X, people might be more accepting of it. Without those things, it doesn't matter how many good points it has...

A couple of times a week? That doesn't sound too bad. But I get you.

Not to mention that Flash absolutely sucks for accessibility - screen readers and brail displays and things like that just see a black box. Search engines can't index Flash content. Flash files take a lot longer to download that HTML pages (remember that some people still only have dial up as their only internet option).

Flash can be fully indexable and accessible, should developers care to do so. In any-case, multimedia intensive sites such as those used for big agency ad campaigns arent the ones blind people would be visiting in the first place. Kind of negates the purpose. This isnt a debate about HTML vs Flash. HTML is right for 95% of the stuff out there.

Not to mention that fully flash sites often break the back and refresh buttons, and can make it impossible to link to an individual page of information...

All the latest dynamic flash websites can be fully linkable and compatible with browsers back and forward buttons.

 

[Derek Marcinyshyn]

Search engines can't index Flash content.

Well actually, for years Google and other search engines have been able to read and index Flash websites. Here is a link to their blog dated June 30, 2008.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

Flash files take a lot longer to download that HTML pages (remember that some people still only have dial up as their only internet option). Not to mention that fully flash sites often break the back and refresh buttons, and can make it impossible to link to an individual page of information...

Well it all depends on the content that it is downloading. As you know, you usually use a graphic preloader to show loading in progress. I do the same with my AJAX. What about an html site with images right off a camera? You get nothing but white screen waiting...waiting...oh there it is. A properly written flash site will load only content as needed. I think you are referring to those sites which are timeline based and yes the whole site is loaded all together. Yes those suck and give AS3 scripting a bad name.

Also most full AS3 Flash sites will use the open source SWF Address class which allows for deep linking/bookmarking and full functioning back and forward buttons.

Not sure why most of you have gotten blurred by Steve Jobs letter which has many misleading facts about things that may have been true in 1997.

For me it has nothing to do with which OS your desktop is or which browser you use. There is a significant change about to happen in the next six months with the explosion of more powerful handheld computing devices. Adobe is providing a tool which allows for cross-device development in a familiar environment for a majority of developers/designers to build their applications. The Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 is still not even out of beta yet and still is being tested on many of the latest devices. As for those of you worried about battery life, the Flash Player pauses during idle times to save battery life. There are many more Mobile OS modifications in it.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html

It comes down to a corporation with their target audience locked in a closed system versus an open system which is about to explode with a whole bunch of new portable hand held computing devices. It is the end user who is going to lose out by paying $3.99 on the iTunes App Store for an app/game they can get for free over on Android, Palm, Windows Phone 7, RIM, etc…

Sorry to ramble on...these are just personal thoughts that I had to write down as it seems people here are comparing grapefruits to oranges by talking about Flash on desktop and comparing it to a theoretical Flash Player on their mobile computing device that is not even out yet. But then again, we are all on here talking about a theoretical camera.

 

[uz29]

Here is Microsoft official blog post about their support for HTML5 & H.264:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx

---------------------------------------------
HTML5 Video

There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view.
The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g. a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.

Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

Published Thursday, April 29, 2010 2:52 PM by ieblog
---------------------------------------------

 

[uz29]

Also 2 articles about Adobe's failed mobile strategy:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-underlying-story-behind-adobes-failed-mobile-strategy-2010-4

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Damn Ace, why did you edit your post? That code underlined your point!
Matter of fact I was going to copy and paste it and try it for kicks

I agree with Ace's statement that it will take time for HTML5 to take over. Flash is the present. However, his code posting did nothing to underline his point, in fact it was too over the top and absurd. There are plenty of better and more efficient ways to accomplish the same thing. And as Stephen also pointed out, this is what Flash is doing under the hood. Seriously, have any of you ever hand-coded Flash?

 

[Noah Kadner]

What's interesting is that Adobe makes so much about consumers not getting the "choice" to run their product on the iPhone/iPad and this is somehow anti-competitive. Are they conceding that all other mobile hardware is secondary to Apple's products?

Truth is they are pissed about being locked out of a highly lucrative market but how this affects the users' choice seems a secondary concern and more how they want to dress up their complaint. The Flash experience on my Mac is mainly about crashing browsers and permits me to see all the unpleasant banner ads that scream at me, bloated web sites designed 100% in Flash and video clips that show me a spinning beachball forever. Why I'd want that same experience on a battery operated device where I'm potentially being charged for every KB of data I unwittingly download is beyond me. Seeing YouTube in HTML5 is pure pleasure and I hope the trend continues until Flash is finally gone as yesteryear's development environment.

Take REDuser for example. What 'compelling user experience' do you give up by not having Flash on an iPhone- well some of the banner ads... That's about it. (Sorry advertisers but you should get over to animated GIFs or static banners if you want to cover the bases...)

Adobe had many years to fix Flash after acquiring it from Macromedia (Director anyone?) and deliver a compelling version for mobile devices but they didn't devote the development resources necessary to make it happen nor evangelize Flash to hardware manufacturers who could have incorporated it into their mobile chip designs. Now that strategy has bitten them in the ass big time and they're locked out for good on what is shaping up to be the dominant mobile platform. Apple just became the number one phone manufacturer in the U.S. so this is definitely a major fail for Flash. When someone as famously secretive as Steve Jobs takes the time to tap out an open letter blasting your software's inefficiency and unsuitability for his gear you know you're out for good.

Consumers have a very simple choice: you want Apple mobile hardware- you're not getting Adobe Flash software. You want Adobe Flash software- you're not getting Apple mobile hardware. Adobe suggesting that this is closed and unfair is like Exxon complaining that the Prius doesn't support diesel. Duh....

Noah

 

[Joel Kaye]

Worth a read:
http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2010/4/12/its-all-about-the-framework.html

 

[uz29]

article here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

http://ace-filmeditors.blogspot.com/

I'm a VERY open-minded person, and sure ... I have been told I have a "Type A" personality (isn't that better than someone saying you are a a Type Z person?) ... and I have always LOVED Apple.

But let me tell you this ...

If you don't think Avid MC 5 is 10 times the tool FCP 7 is .... you aren't awake, or you haven't taken the test drives.

Sure ... maybe Steve Jobs will impress us all with an "amazing" update of FCP ... but I'm not feeling warm and fuzzy.

Adobe CS5 KICKS ASS for short form.

AVID MC 5 KICKS TOTAL ASS for long form.

I LOVE my iPad.

So ... I support all three companies.