Submitted by Adobe has gone on the offensive – big time. The company has started a rather massive advertisement campaign on the web as well as in print in various large US newspapers, in answer to Apple’s battle with Flash and Adobe. In the meantime, Adobe received support from an unexpected corner – Andy Gryc, product marketing manager at QNX, has written a lengthy blog post supporting Adobe.
Adobe’s campaign
The ads are headed by a simple and clear “We ^aTMyen Apple“, followed by a number of other things the company claims it loves – such as innovation, the web, applications, Flash, healthy competition, all devices, all platforms, touch screens, oh, and they also love HTML5. The ad then continues, “What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”
The advertisement campaign is backed by a website headed “We ^aTMyen choice“. This website contains “the truth about Flash“, in which the company debunks the points put forth by Steve Jobs in his open letter about Flash. The company starts with stating that Flash was actually originally created as a technology for tablets with touch screen interfaces. Furthermore, Flash content designed for the mouse will have mouse events converted to touch events, and, of course, you can also design Flash content with touch in mind.
Adobe also touches upon the hotly contended issue of performance while playing video, including a nice stab at Apple for being so late with providing a decent API for video acceleration. “Playing back high definition video can be a CPU-intensive task,” Adobe states, “This is why Flash Player 10.1 includes support for hardware accelerated video playback across devices from mobile to desktop environments. Now that the appropriate APIs are available in OS X 10.6.3, we are also implementing GPU accelerated video on the Mac, available as a preview release code-named Gala. This can significantly improve both CPU usage as well as battery life.” Still nothing about Linux.
On the topic of security, Adobe points to a Symantec report which states that “Flash had the second fewest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers)”.
The most interesting part for me is the whole “open” aspect. Steve Jobs deriding Flash for being closed made me chuckle quite a bit, so I was very interested in what Adobe had to say on this one.
The core engine of the Flash Player (AVM+) is open source and was donated to the Mozilla foundation where it is actively maintained. The file formats supported by the Flash Player, SWF and FLV/F4V, as well as the RTMP and AMF protocols are freely available and openly published. Anyone can use the specifications without requiring permission from Adobe. Third parties can and do build audio, video, and data services that compete with those from Adobe.There are no restrictions on the development of SWF authoring tools, and anyone can build their own SWF or FLV/F4V player.
Adobe Flex, the primary application framework for Flash, is also open source and is actively maintained and developed by Adobe and the community.
Finally, Flash has a rich developer ecosystem of both open and proprietary tools and technologies, including developer IDEs such as FDT, IntelliJ, and haXe; open source runtimes such as Gnash; and open source video servers such as Red5.
I didn’t know any of this, and sadly, my knowledge of all things Flash is quite limited, so I’m not sure if any of this is of particular use, or if more important parts, parts that actually matter, are still closed off. Maybe someone in the audience can shed some light on this?
The website also has an open letter by Adobe’s founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, on the merits of openness. “We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,” they write, “No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.”
“We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web – the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time,” they continue, “In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody – and everybody, but certainly not a single company.”
One of the major things Adobe could do is actually open source the Flash player. While there may not be a technical advantage to this, it would certainly create an immense amount of goodwill. John Nack, by the way, has some things to add to this discussion, too.
QNX sides with Adobe
Andy Gryc, product marketing manager at QNX, has also entered this debate. He explains that several customers have asked QNX is the whole Flash debate would have any impact on QNX’ “embedded system designs that use Adobe Flash or the QNX Aviage HMI Suite”. Gryc is clear: there is no impact whatsoever.
Gryc has his own list of counterpoints to Jobs’ open letter, of course written from the viewpoint of QNX, after which he concludes that Jobs’ letter is full of unsubstantiated and untrue statements. “The claims levelled by Steve Jobs towards Flash are either not substantiated or untrue,” Gryc concludes, “Flash is fundamentally a cross-platform tool, which is noted by Mr. Jobs himself several times, and as a cross-platform tool it enables leveraging development effort across multiple platforms.”
“This means that developers using Adobe Flash would not be locked into the iPhone or iPad development target, and would be able to use their software efforts across a broad base of devices,” he continues, “It would appear that Mr. Jobs’ stance against Flash is for business reasons, not technical ones.”
This debate is slowly but surely causing a divide in the technology community. Adobe has Google on its side, and Apple has, well, the Apple community on its side. I’d hate to be in front of either of these two partners.
This “gala” version of flash is here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/gala/
can someone on a mac run a relatively taxing flash based video encoded in h.264 with and without this specific flash plugin and tell us how the system performed?
We can all have our opinions but we cant have our own facts. Hope some honest, unbiased, hard core performance benchmarks can be posted to give the rest of us a fair bickering starting point
Improvements with Flash 10.1 are heavily dependent on Apple getting Safari to support Core Animation which is only available in the latest Webkit builds. I’ve had a look recently and there has been a branch in the code so I have a feeling that Apple is getting close to releasing an update soon ( http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/59285 ).
I have run Gala and the improvement is moderate at best; still using something like 22-30% when viewing a YouTube video. There are a whole host of factors one must take into account when tracking down the cause of high cpu utilisation. As cool as it is to bash Adobe, one has to acknowledge that it takes two to tango.
Edited 2010-05-14 01:53 UTC
I just tried Flash 10.0.45.2 on Windows 7 to play a video on Hulu (the most recent ‘Friday night lights’) in windowed mode.
It appeared to use 40-50% of my core2 1.4 GHz cpu when looking at cycle-accurate timing (a default-hidden column in Resource Monitor).
It’s really important to use the cycle time measurements for multimedia applications, since they tend not to be displayed accurately by task manager’s interrupt-based time accounting, due to the fact that they are driven by the timer interrupt and tend to run in between clock ticks.
How is Flash open when its called Adobe Flash? Webkit isn’t called Apple WebKit, its just Webkit.
if you love innovation so much Flash you would have reacted faster when people complained 5 years ago about horrible Flash performance was.
You love all these things, but someone please advise can I natively create Flash apps in Visual Studio? You want people to write once run anywhere but only using your tools right?
Talk about the pot vs Kettle.
And why would webkit be called Apple webkit?? Are you implying that Apple laid the foundations for webkit?
If so, you are sadly mistaken! Adobe, on the other hand has indeed laid the foundation for flash (not going into whether they did a good job or not, because in my opinion they didn’t).
And for god’s sake, please PLEASE do not use Apple and open in the same sentence
Edited 2010-05-13 23:21 UTC
Macromedia bought Flash then Adobe bought Macromedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#History
Purchased = Owned + Branded (Flash)
Forked != Owned + Branded (KHTML under LPGL)
Err yes they did. Apple created WebKit which was based on KHTML. After they initial fork they write most of the code and run the project.
Again wrong. It was Macromedia.
Actually Macromedia bought the company that produced Flash but Macromedia was mostly responsible for its success.
The software isn’t open but the spec is. Similar to PDF
Apple could have joined the openscreenproject.org effort to make Flash better on MacOS.
Imagine if we all used Gnash player instead of Adobe’s plugin. In a bizarro world Apple could develop their own port of Gnash for MacOS and iPhoneOS, develop their own Red5 type server, and an app to develop Flash content.
Agreed; but how much of Flash problems due to bugs in the framework they refuse to fix? how much of Flashes performance problems would require Apple to finally address Mac OS X issues which in the past they dismissed as ‘trivial’? would it actually require them to hire more programmers than they have now instead on having but the bare minimum number of staff?
This article ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_windows_pa… ) is pretty much the tip of the iceberg as so far as Apples neglect of Mac OS X – and this has been going on for quite some time. The problem is that too many Mac advocates would sooner bad mouth third parties or go into a state of denial than admit that Apple does the absolute bare minimum as so far as devoting the resources required to develop Mac OS X.
If Apple really gave a crap about third parties and their customers, would they really behave the way they do? poor communication, no road map for operating system development, refusing to work with third parties to improve compatibility and performance? I swear sometimes Mac fanboys (and to a less extent users) suffer from this battered wife syndrome believing that every time Steve Jobs kisses with his fist they say to themselves he really truly does care and love them. Truth be told, Steve Job doesn’t give a crap. Steve Jobs looks out for Steve Jobs.
Edited 2010-05-14 02:04 UTC
First of all the article doesn’t say anything that everyone doesn’t already know. Apple writes their own drivers. They value stability over speed. It has nothing to do with their graphic stack which is solid. Sure they need to address performance issues, with the release of steam maybe they will get to it, but that article really missed a couple of points. The drivers used by Windows is written by Nvidia, the ones used on Linux as well. the the OSS drivers definitely aren’t up to par, the intel test shows this. It has nothing to do with the OS and the graphics stack and all to do with the drivers and how they were written. The article you linked to is inconclusive to your point.
I can do it too. Ubuntu needs to fix its OS because in anything besides gaming OSX pretty much wipes the floor with. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mac1062_ubuntu10…
You see that doesn’t help at all. Its not a real use case at all. Opengl performance needs to be addressed, specifically with the nvidia drivers this has been the case since tiger and they have been getting better with each version. 10.6.4 is supposed to address some opengl performance issues, but there is nothing wrong with Apple’s graphic stack and its not being neglected, just prioritized according to what Apple deems important. In-fact Apple has made numerous changes to the graphics stack since Tiger. Leopard and by extension Snow leopard have had some major reworking of the graphics stack as Apple changed the way quartz draws to the hardware. They can do that, why? Because they don’t rely on 3rd party developers to deliver their products, they can change direction on a dime with no questions asked and have done so many times over the past few years. How long did it take MS to get nvidia and Intel on board to their new graphics stack? Vista on release was a huge disaster due to hardware makers not being on board in terms of drivers. Apple doesn’t have to deal with that. The trade off is that their drivers aren’t as fast and not all feature are supported.
I do wish Apple would implement newer technology faster in terms of opengl spec and video acceleration. However, I think Apple’s priorities with hardware acceleration is to their UI and now video not gaming. That may change as Apple’s gaming profile is rising as users start to look for games on the platform and developers start to cater to them in earnest (no half ass cider ports please). Steam could be a big impetus for Apple to get their graphics drivers up to par. I would like to mention that ATI’s opengl performance on OSX is heads and tails better from past experience. I think its because ATI provides Apple the drivers and Apple modifies as needed. I may be wrong on that one.
Apple writes their own drivers.
Are you sure this is true? All of them? People often say this, but without any evidence or documentation, and without that, color me skeptical.
They may not actually write al their drivers from scratch but you be sure they they at least look at the scrutinize each driver that comes with the OS with a fine tooth comb to make sure their OS is rock solid for the most part. Like I said I think ATI writes their own drivers and Apple puts in the finishing touches.
Except there are several third party PDF viewers that work with most PDF’s.
No, the spec is not open. It^aEURTMs published, that^aEUR~s all.
Nobody decides what goes into the spec except Adobe.
No, the spec is “open” in the traditional sense of the word. That is, it is not “closed”. The “royalty free”, “freely implementable” and “patent free” tags that are now being assumed a requirement are a very recent addition to the notion. Open standards pre-date open source.
At this point I don’t know which company I despise more, though admittedly for different reasons. Apple are just getting ridiculous in their attempt to control everything. Adobe, on the other hand, couldn’t produce a piece of software that isn’t bloated and buggy if their lives depended on it. Adobe make Microsoft look like the world’s best software company by comparison. It’s a pity they won’t destroy each other…
Last time I checked, Objective-C support is still in GCC and it’s perfectly possible to create Linux or even Windows applications using Obj-C — using either the GNUstep framework or a binding to another toolkit.
GCC and LLVM+Clang are not FOSS? Those two are precisely the two compilers Apple uses.
He obviously never saw Flash for Mac OS X which shares much of the foundation with iPhone OS X. Flash’s bad OSX performance not only affects video playback, but also Flash’s normal graphics operations (for which Adobe could use OpenGL but chose not to).
Not saying that I like Apple’s App Store policies, but you can criticize Apple (or Adobe) without making things up. If you make things up, the valid arguments you may also have lose their credibility.
Edited 2010-05-13 23:10 UTC
The key part is that he said “is not used,” not “can not be used.” GNUstep is the only non-Apple-related thing I know of that uses Obj-C. And for good reason. Obj-C is not a very good or well supported language.
I think this is referring specifically to the iPhone. You can’t develop for the iPhone without using Apple’s tools.
You can compile with whatever you like, there just isn’t currently any alternatives to xcode for building the UI.
Which is why Mac apps look and feel like Mac aps while other platforms apps look like whatever the dev felt like using at the time. I don’t see consistent tools and apis as a negative.
No, that’s not why. Developing a native app does not make it have a “native platform look and feel”… the Windows world is full of apps built and available only on Windows and yet not even all MS designed apps do perfectly conform to a single set of HIG guidelines.
When you think about that Apple new SDK restriction and you have the thought “well, look at OSX and iPhone and how consistent and Mac like they all feel” then please do spend a minute thinking about the fact that you are looking at a world which was developed BEFORE this new rule came into being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorm_%28computing%29
I didn’t realize that was another NeXT thing, but it totally makes sense.
You’re comparing Objective-C to what, C++, the bastard child of object-oriented programming? What is the definition of good?
So you confirm me by agreeing that GNUstep uses Obj-C outside of Apple platforms.
Btw: http://etoileos.com/
Edited 2010-05-15 11:36 UTC
According to a developer who does the rendering stuff for Flash Player at Adobe, OpenGL was and is not an option: “No browser I know of supports this properly today.”
He has the benefit of the doubt from my side.
Edited 2010-05-14 13:15 UTC
WTF? Quake Live, Unity 3D, etc. access fully hardware accelerated OpenGL under Mac OS X and Linux just fine.
Yes, they do. Are they browsers?
Is the Flash plugin a browser?
It is entirely possible that you can’t run OpenGL content in a window that you’re only a guest in (i.e. a plugin hosted inside a browser Window). Windows typically supports interop between child HWNDs of one type and parents of another, but sometimes there is a performance penalty to doing that.
QTMovie *movie = [QTMovie movieWithFile:”movie.mov” error:nil];
[movie play];
That’s what adobe had to do to play hardware accelerated video since OS X 10.4 (on supported hw).
Apple provided a framework for developers to play back hardware accelerated video. Adobe wanted direct access to the hardware so they could implement their own algorithms.
Should Apple provide direct access to the hardware back then? Yes, but adobe shipped a pos flash player to millions of OS X users because of a political whim (not invented here syndrome). Now they are getting a taste of their own tactics.
And now those millions of Apple consumers should have no say in what/how they can view on Steve’s whim. Gee, what a smart way to go about catering to your users!
Where exactly did I say that I agree with the App Store approval policies or the 3.3.1 clause? My post is solely about the “Now that the appropriate APIs are available in OS X 10.6.3, we are also implementing GPU accelerated video on the Mac” bullshit.
My view about 3.3.1 is that it’s horrible, but I hate that Adobe is trying to come out as the good guy. They are making cross-platformness one of their core arguments while the Flash Player performance is crap for anything but windows. And they are showing off 10.1 as proof that the performance isn’t crap without mentioning that 10.1 “was coming next semester” since early 2009. Now it’s coming out late 2010. If Apple didn’t put some pressure on them we would have probably waited another year or so.
Not another year or so, but forever. Just like it took a good competition from FF to kick start IE improvements, Apple could have come up with a better player. Instead they went their traditional way we will decide what is good for the consumers. Just like they tried to push down users throat (for years) that they don’t need an eject button, it is more intuitive to just drag the disc into the garbage bin … f*@# right I’ll just throw the Mac into a real garbage bin and tell Steve to kiss me where the sun don’t shine … come to think about it so can Adobe
And none of these clowns has anything to do with open source (except borrowing from it) … Can you people tell that I am sick of these clowns abusing the term “OPEN”???
It’s interesting that BeOS also never allowed you to eject a disc using h/w either.
From what I understand, Apple’s approach is, when a disc is mounted on your system, it is part of the system. It is up to the system to unmount it. Imagine an eject button on your main hard drive.
I will take the point that pressing the button should tell the OS that you are unmounting, but it may not have time to finish what it is doing and unmount it correctly (most likely not).
MS actually wanted to go down this road too, but due to the way manufacturers implemented the floppy hardware, it couldn’t. On some drives, a true signal ejected the disc, on others, false did. Sadly, MS couldn’t ask the h/w which it used, so abandoned the idea. Apple of course controlled the floppy drives, so knew what the signal was.
As for Adobe never fixing the OS X version, I totally agree!!!
Which makes dragging the disc icon into the recycle bin “very intuitive”, right. They could have gone with … say … a dismount command from a context menu for example. Apple’s implementation gives a feel of an after thought, highly unpolished way for a supposedly very polished system.
You know this isn’t 1985 right? You have had the ability to right click and eject for years. You even have this handy button that just ejects disc for you on your keyboard that button has also been there for years. Dragging the dic to the trash is legacy for older Apple users its not longer necessary. There is story behind why they implemented it this way with the og mac but I just can’t find it.
Apple Key + E has always ejected disks as far back as I can remember. It’s been under the File menu forever too. Contextual menu support for eject from System 8 forward.
Dragging the disk to the trash can was a short cut.
Cry me a river.
Even way back when during System 6, they added command-Y, Put Away, to unmount external drives.
They did come out with a better player. Its called HTML5/Javascript and the video tag. Its the technology they chose to back and unlike flash anyone can implement it. Why houdl Appel fix Adobe’s problems? What will happen when you have all of these disparate flash runtimes that don’t run the majority of flash content because no one really know how Adobe’s runtime work regardless of the spec.
Are you referring to the same videotag that they are trying to portray as “open” and yet push the h.264 codec … That is “really open”… and I didn’t suggest that Apple medle with runtime, just with the player and if you can’t tell the difference, well too bad
Edited 2010-05-14 03:31 UTC
Oh, I don’t know you mean the same codec that has countless organizations that can create their own implementations and will work across all platforms that have a decoder installed and/or a browser that supports it? The same codec that will work on your phone, that is being used on youtube, vimeo, cbs.com. abc.com, etc? The same codec which best quality encoding software is completely opensource? Theone with most hardware support? The one that is used by almost all content producers when encoding their videos? The one that is used when you pop in a BluRay into you player? That one. Are you really comparing an open format (not free, OPEN) to a closed proprietary format that doesn;t run well on anything an official runtiem form one company. That same company doesn’t to have issues playing the said video codec either, which begs the question why use the closed proprietary container when you can just use your browser instead no plugin required. Yeah.
Also you are an idiot. What are you talking about, the Flash player is the runtime. I thought that was obvious. Flash for the most part plays content in realtime and runs scripts and such in realtime as well depending on certain criteria. The Flash player is just a player that runs the flash runtime in your browser, which is probably why its sucks for video and it shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. All this crap is running at the same time just to run a plain old crap quality youtube video.
Anyway the issue is no one can create a Flash player with any modicum of compatibility because Adobe doesn’t actually fully spec the runtime. There are way too many secret things the runtime does that woudl require projects like Gnash to reverse engineer the official runtime just to get a percentage of compatibility. If I’m not mistaken they have done so already and its still crap. Don’t buy Adobe’s bull about Flash being an open spec. Its an open spec if you want to create flash content, not if you want to run it. HTML5, H.264, Javascript are all open specs that can be implemented some freely some not and can be done so with a relative assurance of success depending on skills. H.264 can be implemented by anyone, which is why its the most ubiquitous of the formats being used with the video tag.
Wow budy … slow down. The apocalypse is not just around the corner. I see that you are in dire need of manners but should have been your mothers task, cause it definately isn’t mine. It seem that you are very well suited to be slotted into a deeply disturbed Applemaniac who doesn’t refrain from twisting reality until it it fits your mental image of what reality should be.
Earlier you replied that one could use a rightclick mouse for the purpose of unmounting a cd (ejecting a cd). I do agree with that … in most computers that is the case, but apple does not have the right mouse button. Instead I have to press a “special” key on the keyboard AND the mouse to get to the context menu. REAL slick, eh?
I think this quote from apple’s page is insightfull enough… Don’t you think?
As for the rest of your reply … I will not waste my time with a moron who chooses to defend h.264. All I can say is scr#w h.264, mpeg-la, apple and all their supporters.
All that is left for me to do now is wait by the door to meet the police unit that steve is going to send to bash into my house … what a pathetic creature (I cant even call him a person )
Edited 2010-05-14 04:57 UTC
First off you keep spouting about things you don’t seem to actually know. OSX and Classic OS have had numerous ways to eject disks throughout the years that doesn’t involve dragging a disk to the trash. Second Classic OS and OSX have had the ability to use a 2 button mouse for years. I have an Apple Bluetooth mouse that has a 3 button configuration and I didn’t even have to hack anything its officially supported by Apple this has been so for years.
Any Unix based OS will always want to unmount the disk before ejecting. Even Linux does this and takes its sweet time doing it too if the mount is being used. Even Windows will do this. Sure you can pull out the disk but if you use the safety eject functionality it will also take its time doing whatever it has to do to safely remove the drive. Sometime it won’t let you if a process is using it. Its called OS design 101. Make sure the resources are no longer needed before releasing said resources. Its the main point of an OS, to allocate resources in a predictable manner and release them when necessary.
As for H.264 other than, sounding like a ten year old. I don’t see any valid arguments against the format. Which is all I can expect from this crowd who delight is spreading FUD without any actual solution to the issue. At this point in time. It doesn’t matter what I day. H.264 won a ling time ago. It won when neither Adobe or any other codec had a viable option for mobile platforms. It won when it became one of the major formats used by content producers for their digital work, it won when Adobe decided to add the codec to Flash due to the benefits of the codec. When another format can actually compete on all those fronts I mentioned before then you can spew garbage about h.264 at this point in time it already king of the hill. Apple had very little to do with that. Its just the technology they chose to back, most likely at the content creatires behest.
I am not sure it is an original poster, who is an idiot I think that you completly missed what original poster was referring to.
If you don’t understand the topic, then where have you been for the last months, when various articles about H.264 appeared here? H.264 might be as much used as we all wish for its quality, but its usage is crippled by MPEG-LA lock-down, and hence original poster objected against its “openess”.
No I called him an idiot because he said he was talking the Flash player not the runtime. Um, what?!
As for the topic. Where have I been? I’ve been here doing exactly the same thing, trying to undo the FUD being spread by OSAlert as fact. H.264 is an open format and a standard governed by a standards body hence the designation H.264.
Open doesn’t always mean free, people don’t seem to want to make that distinction. H.264 is an open STANDARD. Anyone can implement it in hardware and software and if they know what they are doing they will be able to play the majority of h.264 encoded video out there. Flash is not a standard, no one has a say as to what goes in flash, their is no standards body that controls it, the spec is limited only to the file format not the runtime/player. No one can implement a successful flash runtime clone because no one really knows how the runtime works. Adobe themselves may not even know, hence the reluctance to port to other platforms or the inability to. Could explain why Flash performance is generally crap compared to something like Silverlight. My main point being I’ll take the patented technology with eh most open source implementation out there, a standard spec that can be implemented by anyone and will work, and that is supported it by one but many companies who have a vested interest in making sure its the best format for what it does and frankly it is.
I am not saying that you’re wrong – Flash probably should leverage the native platform player to do video playback for a smoother experience – but what you describe does not fit Flash use cases correctly.
You’re thinking of Flash Video as a simple container for H263/H264 content but it actually can act as both a container – the actual .flv file – and as a player – the plug-in itself. This is partly one of the reasons that the need to have the proper codecs on the system is mostly a thing of the past.
The other reason that I can think of is that using the plug-in itself as a player leaves the option of Adobe implementing DRM that cannot be bypassed and thus becoming very attractive for content owners for paid streaming, overlay “OMG FAIL!” text messages and/or clickable ads on top of the video and the likes.
Your bitterness is misdirected. Whatever was the reason, Adobe apparently could not simply offset the burden of playing the video to QuickTime and therefore the ball was on Apple’s court. MS did provide the APIs that Adobe needed to hook for its latest release and the result shows. The fact that it took Apple this long to release the damn APIs for hardware accelerated playback and that it had to be dragged kicking and screaming should be enough to let you know that you should direct your anger at Apple and not at Adobe.
Edited 2010-05-14 00:44 UTC
I think you are confusing QuickTime with the QuickTime player (rightly so, Apple could have chosen a better naming scheme). QuickTime is a framework for handling various multimedia content.
The Flash player could use QuickTime for H.264 playback (afaik H.264 is the only hardware accelerated codec in 10.1) and implement anything else they want, like software playback for other codecs, DRM, “no she di’int” overlays etc. Functionally and visually there wouldn’t be any difference. The only difference would be that the video would be handled by Apple’s implementation instead of Adobe’s.
EDIT:
QuickTime is exactly this (among other things). Adobe didn’t want APIs for hardware accelerated playback, they wanted direct access to the hardware to do whatever they wanted to do with it. As I said before, this is not an unreasonable thing to ask for, but since it wasn’t an option and there was another way to achieve what they wanted, they should have used that.
Edited 2010-05-14 00:54 UTC
You’re right and I apologize for the confusion. I was actually thinking on the framework but typed “player” when I wrote my last post. I blame the late hours and the fact my English leaves a lot to be desired…
But I agree with you otherwise. Where we are not quite looking eye to eye is that Adobe for some reason did not want to leverage QuickTime in the same way that it probably does not leverages DirectX on Windows either and prefers to do video playback directly and you think that they definitely should – I’m not even sure that I have a counter argument there. They probably think that it would leave them too dependent on platform-specific APIs for critical functionality on a supposedly equally capable multi-platform client or something along these lines – and that kind of sounds reasonable to me, being an user of neither platform for the most part and all…
If that was a wise choice, that’s another discussion altogether.
Edited 2010-05-14 01:30 UTC
Quick answer : Wrong.
Long answer : What if you want to draw some controls on top of the video ? Insert ads on free video services ? (if you think that they’re annoying, then propose another way for them to make money)
Quicktime is a black box, it displays the video but you can’t affect the way it displays it. Flash has to do this, hence it requires an accelerated video *decoding* library, which doesn’t do the displaying work right away.
Edited 2010-05-14 08:42 UTC
You can since Leopard. Here is a screenshot straight from Apple’s website.
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9826/screenshot20100514at100.png
Mind you, CoreAnimation rendering is for specific stuff like semi-transparent video.
If you just want to overlay controls (or anything else) on top of the video you could do this before Leopard.
I have a fairly recent ATI card hooked to two 1920×1080 monitor; I can watch a movie on Netflix (silverlight) or a DVD full screen on one monitor while playing Civ IV on the other one with no problem.
However if I want to watch something on Hulu (flash) I better keep the window around 600px wide and do nothing else or it will be all choppy. Full screen is more like a slide show.
The weak point in my system? A single core AMD x64 processor. So much for hardware acceleration…
Are you running Flash 10.1RC4?
They seem to be crying babies asking for food!
Come on Adobe… to me Apple is not ethical at all with this issue but, imploring and begging them to support Flash is simply pathetic.
Wanna win marketshare? Improve your Flash, improve your performance, be more open, create Flash VMs for a lot of smart phones platforms, be more creative and, if you do a good job… Apple will go after you asking for your pardon.
It takes two to tango – Apple has their responsibility to improve their operating system. Performance issues don’t just spring out of no where.
Regarding phones, they’re already going after Google and Google is working with them – the iPhone craze I saw take off but walking around Wellington I don’t see heaps of them. Most people my age are using one of the many touch phones out from Korea and Japan, the business people are mainly using Blackberry. What ever momentum might have been in the US, it definitely hasn’t continued down here.
If on one hand you have the iPhone locked into the AppStore and iTunes, then the alternatives that allow you to install anything you damn well please on it – I have a feeling that in the long run it’ll be the alternatives that will win. People might go ooh-aah about it but it soon dies out when people realise what they have to go through to get things they want on it but Apple doesn’t approve of. Hopefully Flash will launch a phone marketing campaign along the lines of, “Have it your way”.
Agreed, that kind of campaigns would be nicer and more powerful than the “Please, Apple please” one.
A good ad would be a person at a sandwich bar; the Apple sandwich bar where you go in and you’re allocated ‘The Sandwich’ to which you have no choices about what you want on it. The ‘alternative sandwich bar’ has a massive array of toppings, breads, and side orders that you can choose from. Then have the two side by side; the Apple user with the boring sandwich and the ‘alternative’ with this wonderful sandwich with the toppings he wants on it – with a voice over “you don’t expect that from your sandwich bar, why accept that when using an iPhone?”.
Edited 2010-05-14 05:13 UTC
“And that’s why we’ve decided to add Theora support to Flash.”
No? Sigh.
Adobe and QNX software systems have been in business for a long time, so support from QNX isn’t all that unexpected. As a QNX user for the better part of the last 7 years i have to say Flash has run incredibly well on QNX and Adobe and QNX’s relationship has yeilded great results.
QNX Who?
Yes, they could build their SWF Player but the likelihood of someone building a viable alternative to the Flash Player is just as unlikely as before. Because you would still have to reverse engineer tons of bugs and quirks built into Adobe’s Flash Player.
If the flash player is so open; Is a real puzzle why it is so hard to get hold of a good version of flash for alternative operating systems and architectures.
I also wonder why Apple has not released a better, faster versions of it for the Mac, built into safari for example.
Adobe affected my choices as a customer by swallowing Macromedia effectively limited my choices as a customer. The innovation credit to competition between tbetween Illustrator and Freehand, Go Live and Dreamweaver teams is no longer available.
Adobe should shut up and innovation on others Platform like Linux, Android or Mac OS X Desktop. What is holding adobe to deliver a great Flash plugin for Android or Linux desktop???
I suspect that Jobs is using this little war between Apple and Adobe to distract us from giving our full attention to the H.264 mess. Certainly Apple wants to control its portable products, but ff this were purely about preserving the walled garden he would not need to be so public about the fight. Sure, lots of people might be asking about Flash on iWhatever, but that doesn’t mean he has to provide an aggressive or in-depth answer. Most consumers can understand whether a device supports flash, but the subtleties of video codecs are a full step further removed and a bit arcane. I know Flash supports H.264, but I can’t keep track, does Flash support Theora? Perhaps that would be an interesting counter-move from Adobe…
Here is a novel idea. If, as Adobe claims, Apple’s statement that Flash on the iPhone will be an unstable resource hog is false then all Adobe has to do is demo a stable version of Flash running well on an iPhone and not acting as a power drain.
Apple allows any developer to install developer versions of apps on iPhones in order to test them so Adobe is free to do this. But they don’t – why?
Such a demo would carry a lot more weight than any open letter does but Adobe can’t demo flash running well on the iPhone anymore than it can demo flash running well on an any phone.
And do you think Apple would change their mind after seeing such a demo? I didn’t think so.
So it would basically be Adobe spending money on a dead project – this makes business sense how, exactly?
What – you think Adobe doesn’t actually have a version of Flash that runs on the iPhone? In which case what is all their froth and splutter about?
I think it is is almost certain they have a version running on iPhone (otherwise why beg and whine for Apple to run it) in which case lets see it, lets see how it performs.
Come on – if a company, any company, says is has a cracking good version of some software available but they don’t show it, doesn’t that look a teeny weeny bit odd to you?
Where is Thom’s “Hypocrisy of Adobe” article?
Geez, this is ridiculous.
Adobe have poor developers and/or development standards. I’ll spare you my ad nauseum rant on Adobe products never going completely idle on Mac OS X or not working quite right on Windows. Adobe heap feature upon feature without ever fixing the problems.
They need to pass the Flash runtime code to a standards body or make it an open source project so that they can all be re-written for stability, security, and maximum performance.
Adobe can keep their tools, but let us have something that works well and in the process, prove that Flash is open.
http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/sorry-adobe-you-screwed…
Great summary of Adobe’s commitment to to the Mac.