Apple v Adobe Flash problem leads CS 5 to RIM
Apple’s seeming refusal to enable Flash on the iPhone has Adobe seeking other avenues, which has now moved to hint at BlackBerry support in a future version of its Creative Suite product.
In a sense that’s nothing new, Adobe’s plans to extend its brand into the mobile market where part of the paradigm when the company took over Macromedia, which was actively engaged in developing content creation systems for mobile devices. Now you can output for various platforms from within Adobe creative apps.
With the iPhone as a Flash roadblock, no surprise then that Research In Motion (RIM) along with Adobe Systems have announced an expanded partnership in which the two companies will bring new software development tools to BlackBerry mobile application developers as part of Adobe's Creative Suite 5 (CS5).
These tools will include new utilities that allow designers to create various graphics, such as images and video, using a number of popular Adobe tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects, for use in BlackBerry apps.
The companies will also enable Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Adobe Device Central software to support the creation and vetting of BlackBerry Widgets. They showed the solutions during the BlackBerry Developer Conference keynote address.
It’s an interesting development subsequent to Adobe’s recent move to call Apple out for not permitting Flash Player on the iPhone. When iPhone users attempt to visit a Flash site they are now led to a message page which tells them Flash Player doesn’t work on an iPhone and clearly blames Apple for restricting technologies used by Flash from working on an iPhone.
In October, Adobe demonstrated Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones, which it is making available to Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS are expected to be available in early 2010.
The company also intends software for Flash developers which will export their Flash content in a non-Flash format for use on an iPhone.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs last year famously slammed Flash at the time for being too slow performing for the iPhone. Adobe has since approved its product for ARM Cortex A8 processors, but Apple remains reticent to play.
The game, it seems, continues.
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Comments (28)
What?
How about Adobe's seeming refusal to produce a Flash runtime that doesn't suck balls?
I totally agree. Adobe may think Flash is the best interactive runtime since sliced bread, but Apple's Quicktime is ten times better. It obviously delivers video with more clarity and has many interactive utilities that Flash has. That still brings me to another question: Why isn't the world embracing open source technologies like Apple's instead of the CPU-hogging piece of garbage that is Flash?
Theres nothing open source when it come to Apple.
So Darwin, Cups, WebKit to name but three are not open source projects then? Easy for a Noob to write a witty one-liner. Shame you didn't actually do any work to prove your point.
Lol "Theres nothing open source when it come to Apple."
Have a look here my friend:
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
Or did you misspell Microsoft?
News: Flash is NOT open source.
What? No offense but this must be the most ignorant, biased, and uninformed post I have read this year. It is wrong on every single point.
I have developed software professionally for 25+ years, and developed for the Mac, iPhone (and yes, I've got iPhone apps in the app store), and Flash. Let's get a few basic things right: Adobe has already offered much of its Flash technology to the open source community, including the Flash SWF file format, its Flash/Flex builder SDK, etc. You can develop Flash content without paying a dime. Sure, there is more technology that Adobe cannot release to the public, but it is mainly due to codec royalties, etc. Now on the contrary, and with very few exceptions, Apple's development tools/environment is 100% proprietary.
In comparing Flash to Quicktime, you've got to be kidding. I don't want to wast much time on this, but the technologies are totally different. The Flash platform is a professional and highly mature environment for developing professional web applications. No other technologies come close in terms of available features. Silverlight has a very long way to go, and Quicktime... well Quicktime is all about video dude (sure Quicktime has some primitive support for text, animation, and sound--but *highly* limited). So, let's talk video. First off, there's a good reason 99% of all major video distribution sites rely entirely on Flash (hint: it works). If Flash can't play videos on a device due to hardware constraints, quicktime certainly won't either. However, with the launch of Flash Player 10.1 Adobe has successfully demonstrated high quality video on ALL other (than iPhone) smartphones. There's also a good reason why all major TV manufacturers (but one, still resisting ;) are hard at work building Flash player hardware support into their TVs. Further, Adobe recently demonstrated the Flash Player 10.1 displaying stunning HDTV videos on underpowered devices including tabled PCs, netbooks, and TVs. Intel and GPU manofacturers are now supporting Flash player in hardware. The list goes on and on. AND--remember we're only talking video, which is pretty much all Quicktime is capable of doing OK.
I know this is a biased pro-Apple website, but please....
Totally true. Flash itself isn't open source, but it is built on a lot of open source ideas. Adobe even released some of the specs for these concepts. In the mean time, Apple hasn't improved Flash at ALL, as far as I can tell.
In contrast, Quicktime is great for the video pro - that's who it is made for - but do you really want to run it on a telephone? Video is one thing, but interactive games, like a space game or a card game? Unlikely. That's where Flash shines!
Silverlight is simply a Microsoft wrapper technology. It really provides very little new to the table - for me it's primarily used for maintaining compatibility with legacy Microsoft software.
Well if we talk just about video here, Quicktime is less bloated than flash, because it just does video. When a browser needs to use a plugin to display a video, do you want it to use one that does the job required, or one that does everything and burdens your CPU and battery with the bloat.
Yes Quicktime doesn't do animated websites, but that's not what Apple designed it for. Apple doesn't want the web powered by plugins (except for its Quicktime video player), which is why its pushing technologies like HTML 5 with animated CSS, which can create rich object orientated web applications, and web sites.
if they are so dedicated to get the flash on the iPhone, why on earth don't the fix the garbage we got on the mac now?
I think Apple shall just keep it away to that day happens.
I can only agree to the 2 comments above. Adobe definitely has made itself a bad rep with the flash player and pretty much every other piece of software they are putting out there for the mac. Performance is tragic at best. I couldn't care less about the flash player not being available for the iPhone. Imagine those unnerving flash ads sucking up battery juice.
Javascript and html 5 will render flash obsolete anyhow.
What are the power hits on Rim or Android phones with Flash. What kind of battery times do they have. I know it can drain my laptop battery so I am glad it is not on the iPhone.
"What are the power hits on Rim or Android phones with Flash."
At Adobe MAX conference Adobe mentioned they are estimating for a generic smartphone (the example looks like an Android phone):
- 3.4 hours for full-screen video
- 6.5 hours for Flash animation in active state
- 14.5 hours for Flash animation when the mobile device is in low power mode
The slide from the Adobe keynote with the above info can be seen here:
http://www.precentral.net/flash-demoed-live-pre-adobe-max-developer-conf...
Personally, I think the announcement has nothing to do with the iPhone, but everything to do with Adobe's strategy of developing for multiple devices. Because even if Flash was available on the iPhone, RIM's BlackBerrie devices are still too big of a market to ignore. I imagine Adobe is talks or already working with Google to streamline the workflow for Android development.
Why can't we just all get along? DUH!
...every time someone makes a website in Flash, Adobe kicks a puppy to death. That's why.
Duh.
Again Adobe is in someone's news. Adobe's products are too slow and have been slow or almost disabled for the Mac for years. Adobe is fighting a battle it very likely will not win. Is anyone getting tired of Adobe's whining?
Now let's all not be too harsh on Flash.
Yes, it has performance issues, and yes, there are major security and privacy concerns too. However, Flash is a well known programming environment. A lot of people know how to use it, and it can do some very cool stuff without resorting to more complicated technologies like Objective-C, C#, or something even more complicated like assembler.
I think the performance concerns are over-blown. I rarely see flash consuming a ton of CPU time or battery life - and in the rare times when it does, it is often doing very sophisticated things like rendering video.
You want to talk about a program that sucks balls. Adobe hasn't updated or improved the Flash user interface since they bought out Macromedia, and Macromedia never really tried to come up with a UI that didn't have a taste for goat penis.
There's nothing about Flash that doesn't suck, on the back end; so it's no surprise that it eats it bad in playback as well.
Flash runs quite fine on Windows. Not great, but not as bad as you claim it does on OS X, either. So it seems to me both Apple and Adobe have some work to do.
Yesterday I thought the headline odd (almost the whole industry is moving to common solutions) but today I'm more impressed by some of the comments (thanks!), and yet the downvote patterns are even more telling.
I know the Mac community had to deal with a decade of strife in PC wars, but unnecessary polarization today (and habitual anonymous flaming) doesn't seem like it will be as useful anymore. Your call, but....
jd/adobe
but don't pretend it's anything other than Adobe's actions that have lead Mac users to view your company's products the way they do. Adobe have hung Mac users out to dry for years with a Flash runtime that has indefensibly shitty performance, and now you want to talk about "unnecessary polarization" as though we should just forgive and forget? Up yours, mate.
The whole of CS4 slower and more buggy than it's predecessor, with a faked cluster-fuck of a windowing system and a laughable UI layer that is so unstable it's got it's own website to mock it.
Adobe is over-reaching, and the lack of care evident across almost the whole product line is overwhelming. They need to focus - quickly - and stop blaming others for their own problems.
Apple sucks balls and thats the truth. If you can't face the reality then too bad. Flash is here to stay and if Apple doesn't support it then its only the users of their devices who suffer. BTW. My iPhone would like to have flash.
...but Javascript/DHTML is getting closer to Flash every day. There are javascript frameworks out there that do frankly amazing things. As soon as someone comes out with a good development environment (and let's face it, Flash Professional is so shit, the bar isn't high) Adobe could be in real trouble. Air and Flash make horrendous piles of fuck out of websites; you only have to look at Adobe's own online store, and at how stupidly clunky and awkward it is to use, to know that this stuff is going to come seriously unstuck sometime soon.
Why does it consume 180 % of my Intel Core Duo? Bite me Adobe.
I've been saying this for weeks, and as a life long Adobe user, ADOBE CAN STICK UP THERE $%@!!!!
I hope they are reading these post and really listen to what their users are saying about them.
Face the facts guys Flash is a very common program used all over the internet and it has been for a while. If Apple still hasn't done anything about their inability to run this program why do you keep buying their crap?
As a mac user I am constantly disapointed by the support apple gives me, as the owner of an ipod touch I am still irratated at the interpertation of "just the internet", and as a graphic designer I spend more time waiting for the mac to finish rendering than I actually do designing.
At this point I am fed up with apple and its overpriced hardware and underpowered OS, I choose to use a a $300 laptop running vista than my $1500 imac with snow Lep.
If apple truely is a company that wants to attack other companies maybe it should fix its own faults rather than just showcasing others.
Bzzzzzttt!!!! Stupid Alert!!
Newsflash: Apple doesn't "run" Flash. The way in which Flash performs is almost entirely down to the way Adobe codes it. Shit performance? Shit code.
As a "graphic designer" you sound like you need to use your tools more efficiently, or else pony up for better kit and stop whining.
For what?? Playing minesweeper?
Ask me if I miss Flash on the iPhone......not for one moment is the answer.