Comments on: Infinite Lies

By: Jazmin

Jazmin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:49:34 +0000

I am still hoping that Adobe will take their step-son Flash a bit more serious and rewrite the Mac Flash Player (preferably involving you somehow, Joa)… what else is there to replace Flash? Oh yeah, Microsoft warms their hands with Silverlight…

By: Detrus

Detrus — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:12:08 +0000

Core Animation support looks like something Adobe could have done years ago, and requires no cooperation from Apple. That is lazy.

By: Mihai Corlan

Mihai Corlan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:00:42 +0000

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe

@Daniel Grace

You can read Tinic’s post on using Core Animation in the next version of Flash Player on Mac (he is a Flash Player engineer):
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html

I think this is an example that we are working hard to make Flash Player better on Mac with help we have for now…

By: Tweets that mention Infinite Lies at blog.joa-ebert.com – Blog of Joa Ebert -- Topsy.com

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:22:46 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by joa ebert, joseeight, Kevin Suttle, HowDo.us, Siroko and others. Siroko said: YES RT: @joa: I could not resist. http://bit.ly/b3Zu1q [...]

By: joa

joa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:24:58 +0000

ti83: You got the point :)

By: Jeffrey Gilbert

Jeffrey Gilbert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:20:43 +0000

Also, the garbage collection that happens on the mac side chokes flash out and makes watching videos or tweening things around a nightmare in comparison to however it’s done on windows. Whatever black magic it’s doing in the background to figure out when it should free memory, perhaps it could do it less frequently or when it’s ACTUALLY needed, not when it’s potentially needed. On a machine with 6 gigs of ram i find it REALLY hard to believe i have a real dire need for the AVM to be running garbage collection as often as it’s trying to.

By: Jeffrey Gilbert

Jeffrey Gilbert — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:45:15 +0000

it’s not just the player, it’s the compiler as well. It would be unfair to say flash hasn’t made any improvements over the last few plugin iterations, but the bar has definitely been raised as far as expectations of what a RIA should be. Carbon may not be as easy to develop for in comparison to the rich suite of apps available for flash and java development, but you gotta hand it to apple when you look at how snappy their applications animate. Flawless full screen page curls slide smoothly on that iPad and I have a full mac pro with a serious video card in it and I spent a week and a half tuning a page curl effect to get even remotely close to that level of silkiness. The bottleneck here is flash player/compiler, not the developers. Adobe can step it up and we all know it. Jobs isn’t saying anything everyone doesn’t already know, including adobe.

By: ti83

ti83 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:25:11 +0000

Agreed. It’s turtles all the way down.

By: Marcel Klammer

Marcel Klammer — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:05:16 +0000

They will never bring Flash to the IPad. They would loose all of their mighty to decide which app is published and which is not. All the Flash-Developers would start bringing their apps and games to the IPad/IPhone, a nightmare for good old Steve.

By: David Wilhelm

David Wilhelm — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:44:59 +0000

From what I’ve heard (and my sources may be a bit biased since I’m a flash developer) the poor performance of the Flash player on the Mac has more to do with a lack of cooperation from Apple than a lack of effort from Adobe. And there’s obvious reasons why… To Apple, the flash platform must seem like a parasite, sucking revenues away from their own proprietary platforms. Its all about money, these phony arguments are just FUD.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:41:58 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by joa: I could not resist. http://bit.ly/b3Zu1q...

By: Daniel Grace

Daniel Grace — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:54:39 +0000

I am a freelance developer. Most (but not all) of my contracts have been related to Flex. I have skin in the game, so to speak. Flex is the perfect balance for me between pleasing to work in and relatively little competition from developers (versus, for instance, PHP).

That being said, the quotes about Flash being most of the crashes on OS X seem spot on from my viewpoint. In the last 5 or so years running a mac, I can remember maybe 5 crashes of third-party non-flash applications. I’ve had that many crashes from the flash plugin in the last week. Not even on my own (admittedly, in development, though as a virtual machine it shouldn’t _crash_ no matter what I throw at it) code, but on the Internet at large.

The Flash plugin on the mac SUCKS. Performance and stability is far far below what I expect. Oddly, none of my third-party AIR apps (I presume written in Flash, but really I haven’t checked if they were Flash or JS) have crashed ever.

I think, and hope, that this will all end up with Adobe capitulating to some degree with improving the Mac Flash plugin and continuing development on 10.x, with massively increased performance. Eventually the vocal majority of Mac users that hate the Flash plugin for being so unstable will calm down _and_ the Flash plugin will be reasonable to run on a small battery. Then we’ll see a gentlemans agreement.

But I DO strongly believe that the performance of the desktop Flash plugin for the Mac weighs heavily on any decision about whether Flash is “worth supporting” or not.

If Adobe doesn’t make any moves toward improving the Mac Flash plugin, I expect Apple to continue to play hardball and remove Flash from the list of pre-installed software/software managed by Software Update.

By: Og2t

Og2t — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:10:58 +0000

By: Xavi Colomer

Xavi Colomer — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:27:01 +0000

Please, don’t believe anything you read on the internet. [ But Steve Jobs said ] you actually didn’t heard that right? a mean, I understand you defend flash, I’m a flash developer too, but some bloggers put on the websites a lot of crap just to have more visits…

By: Ypmits

Ypmits — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:56:19 +0000

@Rezmason My thoughts exactly. Debating with Steve/Apple is gonna be impossible though. They are one tight-lipped company.

By: Rezmason

Rezmason — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:33:09 +0000

Don’t take Steve Jobs too personally. He didn’t lash out like this before; I think there’s a little more pressure all around, because the iPad got a lot more backlash coming out of the stables than he or anyone really expected.

The “Adobe’s lazy with Flash” statement really has little truth to it. HTML is twenty years old, and just now they’re talking about media tags and a canvas. But nobody’s calling them lazy. Because they shouldn’t! That’d just be a ridiculous generalization of the situation, and that’s exactly what Steve’s statement is.

That said, I think the Flash Team is underpowered, and there needs to be more interest in the FOSS part of it. Adobe could emphasize Tamarin as part of the Flash Platform, and maybe it’d get more momentum.

The Flash Team is also understandably hesitant. If they patch a security vulnerability the wrong way, millions of websites might stop working. Apple has never had that problem, and since their business model doesn’t focus on market share, they probably never will.