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Adobe Burned Twice After Apple Shuns Flash One More Time

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It’s been hard not to notice the adamant (and sometimes extreme) stance that a number of Apple fans have taken in Apple’s defense to the shocking evidence that Apple has not been telling the entire truth with regard to their reasoning for not allowing Flash on iPhones/iPods. First, let me be perfectly clear: I own 2 MacBook Pro’s, 2 iPhone 3GS’, an iPod Nano, a ton of Apple software, and to top it off – I bought my Dad a new iMac and my sister a MacBook for Christmas. I love Apple’s products. This is my way of pointing out that this post is not meant to be a defensive response to the attacks against the Flash Platform. If anything, this should help clarify some things for the seemingly misinformed…


Argument: “[Flash] crashes my browser/system”

I’ve read a substantial number of claims that Flash is an awful product in the last 2 days because it “…crashes my browser”. I’ve read people say they have Flash disabled as a result of this, and some go as far as to say “Make a product that doesn’t suck and maybe Apple will include you on its devices”.

How these people are misinformed

From a technical standpoint, this is a ridiculous claim. The Flash plug-in is actually incredibly lightweight compared to the majority of plug-ins that people bog down their browsers with. The problem is not in Flash itself, but rather in the poor programming practices on the part of the developers that are writing the programs that crash your browser. If your CPU pins at 100%, it is usually the result of a recursive loop that is firing an event, which calls back on the method to fire the event again. This occurs on an exponential curve, which is why your CPU gets pegged so quickly. If Java applets won over Flash many years ago, you’d be seeing the same thing. It doesn’t matter what language it is, when developers don’t take a best-practices approach to the code that they write, the end user suffers. I see the same stuff happen in the worlds of Java and .NET. Its negligence and carelessness. Developers have a responsibility to uphold when they build a client-side application, and if that contract is broken, well, your browser crashes.

As one would expect, the average response to this logical reasoning is something along the lines of: “Well then its the fault of the programmers writing Adobe code…” which of course is then somehow tied back to Adobe using a similarly unreasonable argument. So here’s a question – what do you think these developers were doing before they started writing Flash programs? They didn’t appear out of thin air. In fact, the larger percentage of Flash Platform developers come from the Java development community. In the world of application development, some individuals simply do not care to follow standards and conventions in programming best practices, and that is where it ends. If you don’t pick up the trash in your house, you end up with a messy house that is hard to move through. If developers do not pick up their trash as a matter of convention in their programming, then you’re running a crappy program. You can’t blame that on the Flash Virtual Machine. It’s just not logical.

Argument: “Adobe is trying to monopolize the web with a closed format”

I have to be honest, this one made me laugh. Here is an actual quote from a comment that was left on the Flash Platform team’s blog site:

You Adobe people are frelling hypocrites, open standards indeed… Your claims will hold water when you donate the Flash platform to the open source movement. Until then you’re just spewing hypocritical BS about open standards.

Now, I’m not sure what a frelling hypocrite is, but I assume it is much like a regular hypocrite (couldn’t help it). Regarding the last point about these same people that are declaring shenanigans on Adobe because of programmers that write bad code, what do you think would happen if the “Flash Platform was donated to the open source movement” as this person suggests? It gets better too. Included in the package of extremely passionate claims of blasphemy and wrong-doing against Adobe comes the next major reasoning as to why Flash should not be allowed on Apple devices…

Argument: “Flash is loaded with security problems”

Here’s an example of how extreme this gets. The following quote is also pulled right from a comment left on the Flash Platform’s blog site:

“Adobe Flash is a complete piece of junk. When Adobe fixes all the security problems and bugs in Flash, maybe then it deserves more widespread adoption. I can’t wait until the day that Flash is gone.”

This essentially takes us round-trip right back to the very reason that the Flash Player is NOT a “donation” to the “open source movement”. I find it interesting that one would refer to Adobe as being “hypocrites” in this regard; and yet, it just shows how far beyond reason the people that are so actively protesting Flash in Apple’s defense truly are.

The truth here is so blatantly obvious that I am perplexed as to how so many people do not see it. It is very simple: it is inconsistent with Apple’s business model to allow Flash on their mobile devices. Apple makes a massive amount of money by controlling (and taking their cut) of the money that is paid for media consumption by owners of Apple mobile products. Uh…DUH! The only reason this whole thing became so controversial is because Apple was not up front and honest about it. Instead, they made promises to include Flash and then went back on those promises…multiple times. The claim was that Flash was simply too resource-intensive, so Adobe began development of a lightweight SDK that catered just to the iPhone. It was not until the announcement of the iPad; a machine with far more than enough resources to run the full-blown version of Flash, did it become so glaringly obvious that they had been giving Adobe the run-around all this time. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when I feel like someone has not been completely honest with me…but that’s just me. Apple’s runarounds caused many business strategists a lot of frustration, so while the community may be reacting in such an extreme fashion, Adobe really hasn’t been all that vocal about anything yet (probably too busy watching all of this back-and-forth bickering going on…what a PR nightmare!).

This is capitalism at its finest folks, it has nothing to do with the technology. In the end, its all business and its all about the numbers on the bottom line. it’s the country we live in. But that doesn’t mean we the people do not have the power to facilitate change.

With that said, I will conclude with this –
As long as Adobe and Apple – two of the strongest technological innovators in the world – are unable to find a way to collaborate in the effort of furthering the advancement of mobile technology, WE ALL LOSE.

Ryan Stewart has some interesting things to say on the topic as well, not only from the standpoint of an Adobe Evangelist, but from the standpoint of an Apple consumer. Check it out HERE…

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Posted by Dan Orlando on January 29th, 2010 :: Filed under Flash Platform News
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A few words on the state of current web tech: Apple’s iPhone, the iPad, Adobe Flash, and HTML 5

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Although I’ve been in pretty deep finishing the book Flex 4 in Action, some recent conversations along with Apple’s iPad announcement this morning inspired me to blog about my take on the current state of the web as I’ve been following market trends in media consumption for a little while now.

HTML 5 vs. Flash

For some odd reason, I’m seeing more and more people putting the new HTML 5 spec up against Flash, largely due to the lack of support from Apple with regard to the iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad. As a side note, I love Apple, but did the marketing dept decide to take the year off and leave Jobs in charge of branding? WTF is an iPad? It sounds like a feminine hygiene product. Anyway, I digress.

First, its tough to compare HTML 5 to Flash. To me, one might as well try and argue that eggs taste better in the morning than spaghetti does in the evening… Eggs in the morning makes sense, right? It’s a good breakfast food. Similarly, who doesn’t like a good bowl of spaghetti once in a while for dinner? Seems to make sense… spaghetti = dinner food, as eggs = breakfast food.

To take a more pragmatic approach, this reminds me of Web Designer Magazine’s infamous “AJAX vs. FLASH” issue late in 2009. After furiously trying to find a way to pin the two technologies up against each other in a head-to-head, winner-takes-all, fight to the death; the author ultimately gave up and concluded that each technology had it’s own unique and specific purpose that filled a particular void that the other did not. They same could be said for why we have so many different programming languages and frameworks…I mean, have you seen the number of frameworks for Java alone? I’m not sure how Java devs are able to keep from going mad! And yet, every one of those frameworks has a very specific role and purpose.

Adobe Flash Platform vs. Apple Mobile Devices

The Flash Platform is the undisputed champion in RIA and is continuously running circles around the contenders, the most notable being Silverlight – which has been weak considering the number of .NET shops that have chosen Flex for their client side RIA development. Even more interestingly, the data provided by major research firms suggest that the iPhone will soon lose its dominance to Google’s Android platform, and has been reiterated by a number of different research companies now. WHAT?! ….its true, and the reason is that the public is generally dissatisfied with the full-nelson choke hold that Apple puts on its technologies. Apple lost massive market share last year in Music sales from the iTunes store – primarily to Amazon – because Apple wanted to keep the DRM choke hold on their tunes and Amazon had something else in mind. Even when Apple finally submitted to the pressure and let go of DRM, so many people (myself included) already had a bad taste in their mouth and didn’t really care to go back, and the rest are STILL unaware of the fact that Apple’s tunes are even DRM-free!

The research suggests that we can expect something similar to happen with the iPhone. A massive (and growing) number of powerful and innovative technologies are under development, all on the Flash Platform and all for different media consumption platforms (eg. cable boxes, mobile, computers, etc.) because we have the ability to seamlessly hook a variety of platform-specific client interfaces to the same network data source, which could be providing its data in near-”real time”. Google’s more “open” philosophy will eventually dominate (that is, assuming they can get a better handle on user experience), since developers ultimately decide what stays and what goes, and well, I work with 103 superstar Flex-developing iPhone owners whose patience with Apple’s un-kept promises to support Flash on the iPhone has run very thin.

Where do we go from here?

As far as HTML 5 having any impact whatsoever on the web (let alone on the Flash Platform) in the next two years… all I have to say is – don’t hold your breath. The market is actually in an unusually predictable state right now given the gradual and consistent advancements in technology, the philosophies of company leaders, and what we can derive from the trends of the last decade.

Anyway, that’s my take on things for what it’s worth.

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Posted by Dan Orlando on January 27th, 2010 :: Filed under Flash Platform News
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