With all the hubbub from Steve Jobs about not allowing Flash on the iPhone and iPad, I can’t help but wonder what is there about Flash that Adobe can’t fix it. It’s not like it’s a beta product or something. Aside from bad implementations by users (and if so, why is that even possible since it’s not exactly assembly language), what is internal to Flash that prevents it from being fixed to make it robust enough for Jobs? And us lowly users for that matter.
Nothing sucks more than being on stage in front of a bunch of techies and having your demo crash on you twice. Actually, the only way that sucks more is if you’re Adobe and it’s Flash that’s crashing on a mobile device, forcing folks to wonder if Steve Jobs was right about the stability of Flash.
This incident happened last week at FlashCamp Seattle, according to a blog post by Jeff Croft, a Seattle developer who also moderated a panel at the event. Flash Platform evangelist Ryan Stewart was demoing Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One phone during the opening keynote when things went bad and then got worse.
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To be fair, Croft notes that the problem with Hulu may not be the fault of Adobe and may be more with Hulu – but no one knows for sure. Also, he notes that Flash on Android is beta, which means it’s expected to be “crashy and buggy” at this stage.Still, the natives are getting restless, he says, and are anxious to see a full Flash player that works well on mobile. A demo that crashes does little to help build confidence around a product or to prove that it’s almost ready for prime time.
Flash does suck and Apple does not want flash applications competing with its app store. Both statements are correct. My amiga 500 could animate better than flash on a modern computer. Flash is meant for compatibility not for speed. Why is flash so slow on MAC compared to same hardware on Windows? I don’t know but it is still slow on windows.
#20: In other words, like I said… Follow the money
Well any implementation of a Flash player, just eats up CPU cycles like nothing else does. Now why is that? It’s got to be something to do with the format. And changing the player, won’t fix that. It’s the proprietary nature of the format that Adobe stuck the world with. To fix it, would mean doing what Apple often does with Quicktime. Make improvements that cause older players to have incompatibilities with newer files. Wait a minute. Hasn’t Adobe done that too? And still it’s a CPU hog.