The Switch To Mac

Apple Will Not Flash Anytime Soon

If you’ve been catching any Apple news lately, you probably heard the commotion over Apple not wanting anything to do with Adobe Flash on their mobile products, iPhone, iPad, or iTouch. Why? What’s the big deal? Are these just unfounded stabs at Adobe?

I read Steve Jobs’s online letter to Adobe (http://bit.ly/aiaaNg). He makes six points:
1) Open Software
Flash is proprietary. Jobs prefers the open software environment of HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Apple also has proprietary software. But when it comes to mobile video, HTML5 has the video infrastructure to read video in h.264 format without Flash.

2) Full Web
Adobe argues that without Flash on Apple’s mobile devices, you cannot browse through the full web, you would be missing lots of websites. Jobs’s counter is but these same sites can also make their videos available in the newer h.264 standard which does not require Flash. And there is no loss in video quality. In fact a mobile user browsing the internet can visit Youtube; and “…Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. …”

3) Reliability, Security and Performance
Steve says that Symantec reported that Flash had one of the worst records for software security as a product in 2009. In addition, Flash has crashed Mac PCs numerous times. Adobe has stated several times that they will fix it, but crashes persist. Steve says we are not sure when Adobe will come around to fix the problems, but we won’t hold our breath.

4) Battery Life
To enhance the user experience, the tablet, iPad should last a long time. Ten hours or better is the current goal. When running h.264 video on an iPad, iPhone, or iTouch, the codecs process occurs on the hardware which takes up less battery power allowing devices like the iPad to lasts up to ten hours. Flash, on the other hand, requires a software codecs process which takes up to twice the amount of energy. The estimate is the battery on the iPad may lasts only about half the time or up to five hours.

5) Touch
Flash is old technology when talking in PC years. Macromedia first introduced Flash to the world back in 1996. Since then it has been improved to become better and faster. But it cannot accommodate touch programming. No where in the Flash integrated development environment does it allow for touch programming. Even if Jobs was going to allow Flash for Apple mobile products, the Flash development environment would have to be recoded to accommodate touch programming.

6) Development Layer
Adobe wants to have one integrated development environment (IDE) for all platforms. That is, code once and create versions of the same software for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. Jobs says that adding this layer further prevents the points he made in items (1), (3), (4) and (5). In addition, Apple would further become dependent upon an outside vendor when critical changes needed to be made on the IDE. Jobs says to Adobe that instead of hanging on to technologies in the past, why don’t you create new tools to use with HTML5?

Opinion
In my opinion, Jobs is saying the future of the web lies with mobile users. If you prepare the environment for that future segment of users, the mobile experience can only get better. As for Adobe, they have much at stake in Flash. In 2005, they purchased Macromedia, Inc.
the creative firm behind Flash, for somewhere around $3.5 Billion dollars. Why would they choose to just trash their investment? They must still have at least a decade or more to go for this investment to return its payback. Currently, the internet has an estimated 70% to 80% of websites that use Flash. But if HTML5 proves to be lightweight when compared to
Flash, HTML5 will most likely win out over the long haul, especially if Flash carries with it excess baggage. I tend to agree with Jobs. Adobe should plan on developing some HTML5 tools and move on.

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