Posted on 08/20/2010 5:01:10 PM PDT by Swordmaker
I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.
At LAPTOP, we’re still testing mobile Flash on a variety of handsets, but the early returns are a mixed bag, with some sites performing really well and other “unoptimized” videos and games causing restless thumb syndrome. When Flash 10.1 for Android is good, it’s great, but when it’s bad, it can make even the harshest Apple critic want to e-mail Steve Jobs an apology video playing in HTML 5.
To see mobile Flash at its best, I downloaded the Abobe Flash showcase for mobile in the Android Market, a directory of sites the company recommends. There I found a link to the Sony Pictures trailer site, and all of the clips played smoothly at full screen. I also found links to a number of TV shows that play in Flash, but not always smoothly. An episode of CSI on CBS.com didn’t cause any serious problems, but it was a bit jerky, particularly at full screen.
Despite the jerkiness, I was excited to be able to watch shows on my phone that previously played only on my PC. That excitement turned to disappointment when I ventured onto several sites that weren’t featured in the showcase.
When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…
When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons. At some point during playback, an overlay message warned me that this video was “not optimized for mobile.” I encountered the same message when I tried to play a trailer of the Expendables that was embedded on the movie’s mySpace page. Wasn’t Flash 10.1 supposed to erase the boundaries between mobile and the desktop?
During these Flash lockups, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the screen and most taps were ignored or followed many seconds later. The only way I found to get your phone back to normal when it’s having a Flash meltdown like this is to hit the back button or the home button to get out of the program and even then the phone takes a second to become responsive again.
The difference between the smooth Flash trailers on Sony.com, the jerky episode of CSI, and the system-stalling Flash video on Fox.com is that the smoother ones were optimized specifically for phone playback. But if content providers have to go back and optimize their videos for mobile platforms, one of the key benefits of mobile Flash–backward compatibility with millions of existing videos–is lost. If you’re modifying your videos anyway, why not go the full monty and use an HTML 5 player instead of Flash?
Back in April, Jobs pointed out that mobile Flash had been promised and delayed since the beginning of 2009. “We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath,” he wrote. Unfortunately, many Web content providers haven’t been holding their breath either. As we surfed around, we found more and more sites that work with HTML 5 or other non-Flash technologies. The difference between one video format and another is so slight you can’t tell. I visited South Park Studios on my PC and saw that it used Flash to play episodes of the popular show, so I tried it on my phone. I was pleasantly surprised at how well Flash episodes of South Park streamed over 3G, until I realized that the site had detected that I was on my phone and was serving me a specially optimized non-Flash video player (like the YouTube app) instead.
After my mixed experience with video, I was curious to try Flash-based games on our Android phones. When I tried going to famous Flash game sites like Newgrounds or Addicting Games, I found that, as Steve Jobs said, “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.” Many of the games I loaded were slow to start and slowed the system, making it difficult to scroll around the page or tap on links. But much worse was that, even when these titles loaded, there was no way to control most of the action. Most games required keyboard or mouse actions I simply could not perform on my phone, even with its QWERTY slider. One shooter wanted me to hit the CTRL key to fire; another asked for the left mouse button.
Finally, I went to Mochi Games, a site that Adobe points to from its Flash showcase, a site that is designed specifically for mobile flash. There, I found an attractive looking zombie game called Blood Red that was made for touch and required me to tap the screen to fire my gun at the oncoming undead. Unfortunately, when I tapped my shots went all over the place and I was dead within seconds. Was it Flash that caused the bullets I shot to go to places I didn’t tap or was it my poor hand-eye coordination? I don’t know, but I was frustrated.
Aside from playing videos and gaming, another purported benefit of Flash is that gives you the real web, without showing empty boxes on your favorite sites. While I love this idea, I actually found that some Flash sites had more difficulty loading on the mobile browser when I had the plug-in enabled. At one point, for a period of about 45 minutes, I was inexplicably unable to load either New York Times home page or LAPTOP’s home page as the Droid 2′s browser got stuck at the point where it was trying to download some Flash ads and a Flash video player.
When we ran our phone battery test, which surfs the Web until the handset’s battery dies, the whole process crashed when the browser reached Veoh.com, a site with an autoplaying Flash video on its home page. Once we disabled Flash, we were able to run the test to completion.
Despite all the problems I experienced with Flash Player 10.1, Adobe deserves credit for bringing the grownup PC experience of Flash to phones. Now, I can browse around the Web and attempt to use Flash sites that were never designed for my phone and see how it goes. Sometimes, I’ll even be pleasantly surprised by how well something translates. The South Park Avatar Creator, which is featured in Adobe’s showcase, is a really neat Flash tool for creating a South Park version of yourself.
Unfortunately, most phone users don’t have the patience for bugs and incompatibilities that hardcore geeks like myself do. Sometime this week, either Verizon or I will get an angry call from my mom when she tries watching a Flash video that locks up the screen or plays a Flash game that won’t respond because it expects mouse clicks rather than finger taps. Both of us will probably advise her to disable the plug-in so we won’t get called again and she won’t see Flash again, which may be her loss.
If Adobe can’t make its mobile plug-in work effectively with all Flash content, it needs to at least warn users and give them the option to cancel before it downloads and attempts to play a game or video that isn’t compatible with Flash Player 10.1 for phones. Popping up a cryptic message that says “this video isn’t optimized for mobile” after it starts buffering is not acceptable.
More importantly, Adobe needs to have a better answer to whether or not Flash is still relevant in a world where other technologies have rapidly started displacing it. Based on my early experience with Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, it could soon join the floppy drive in the tech graveyard, something else Steve Jobs helped kill.
Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch oversees the production and infrastructure of LAPTOP’s web site. With a reputation as the staff’s biggest geek, he has also helped develop a number of LAPTOP’s custom tests, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. Catch the Geek’s Geek column here every other week or follow Avram on twitter.
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Flash isn’t so great on ANY platform. While it gives a semi-convenient development tool, particularly for games - it is a resource hog, a security hole the size of Alaska, and is still quite unstable.
I have seen brand new computers with LOTS of RAM and high-power processors brought to their knees after dealing with Flash for any length of time.
There are times that I wish my iDevice had Flash... but then I open a web page on my desktop or laptop and am reminded why it is a good thing to not have it.
add to this issue the fact that Adobe STILL hasn’t developed a 64 plugin for 64 bit browsers, and I am among those who would love to see HTML5 replace FLASH completely.
As expected. Flash already sucks the life out of my Mac and PCs. One thing sure to bring the system to a crawl is the kids running Flash under their accounts when I go to log on. Kill their logins and everything starts running better. Of all the things she normally runs, nothing drains the battery on my daughter’s netbook like Flash.
With Flash doing that to full computers, I didn’t expect mobile devices to do very well.
In the late 90's I thought Flash was way cool. A couple of the early Flash animations were pretty interesting. Then the webpage advertisers got it and overused it to the point of running screaming from the room...
I find Flash annoying as hell these days. Firefox "FlashBlock" is a saving grace.
I won't miss it -- other technologies are better now.
That said, I don't actually give a rat's patootie whether Jobs was right or not; the headline of the thread "...Proves Jobs Right" is premature, even though I agree that it's likely to pan out that way.
Okay, 'nuff said. Here's hoping I get this posted before the thread goes downhill...! :)
Surprise Surprise.... NOT.
I mean seriously... Adobe products practically LIVED off Apple PC sales for year before they went PC mainstream. If Flash was GOOD for Apple touch products, Steve Jobs would be ALL about them. But he was right. They SUCK. And now we have Droid products which, by perception alone, will seem to suck, to users, just because they “wanted” to be “not” Apple.
Suckers.
An astute observation. I know a couple of people who had iPhones but now have Androids. I don't know why they changed but they are now singing the praises of Android. I suspect, with these particular people, that the price difference is the reason. They were previously really boasting about their iPhones.
As we have seen in the past, I think the Apple system's superiority will soon be obvious.
I hate flash even for regular computer work off webpages.
It is as bloated as I.E. and should really be replaced by 264 technologies. Less overhead.
Your #7:I'm put in mind of the Peanuts episode that provoked thought at the time, and that I now consider a classic in my memory.
- First panel: Lucy screams, YOU BLOCKHEAD!
- Second panel: Another girl says, "You shouldn't call Charlie Brown a blockhead." Lucy replies, "Why not?"
- Last panel: Girl replies, "Because he might be one.
Moral: You may be perfectly right in your post - but even if so, it might be bad form to say so.We don't need a return to the bad old days of flame wars on these threads!
You are mistaken. There is no “blockhead” nor any “person” in that post.
It was discussing the “Product” and saying how the “experience” of using it will “suck”.
Further, it stated that this “effect” of “sucking” is directly attributable to the “emotional” choice of the competitor to be “other” than Apple.
That is, to make a product in such manner and in such design as to specifically be able to say “we did not do it the way Apple did”.
And they have fallen short in expectations of performance because of the emotional decision making.
That is totally and completely different than Lucy and some girl in your cartoon.
Your post to me, however, IS about me.
And now, I reply to you.
These are the only such Lucy posts and you made it so.
Think about that.
Apple and Adobe pretty much kept each other alive through the ‘80s and early ‘90s (especially if you count Aldus). But the bloom has been off the rose for a while. Adobe decided to make Windows its primary platform, and was ridiculously slow to make the transition to PowerPC; slow to go fully OS X native; slow to convert to Intel.
Illustrator (since it absorbed Freehand) and Photoshop were pretty much the only game in town, and InDesign was poised to eat the lunch of Quark, a company that was even worse about releasing bug-riddled software and taking forever to update. (It’s been a long time since I was in print production, but knowing workarounds for Quark glitches was practically a job requirement. It was on many a resume.)
Apple has also not been shy about becoming a direct competitor to Adobe. Aperture beats Lightroom all hollow, and Final Cut Pro pretty much drove a stake through the heart of Premiere for Mac. Adobe has a professional audio tool I can’t even name; the battle is between Logic and Protools.
All that said, and while there are definitely tensions between the companies, keeping Flash off of iDevices is a question of the product, not the politics. Maybe, someday, Adobe will come up with a version of Flash optimized for touch-screen devices, that loads tight, fast-loading code, and that elegantly handles non-mobile Flash content. And maybe, when something like that exists, Apple will reconsider. But if designers are going to transition their content over to this new Flash, they might as well make the switch to HTML5.
If Adobe isn’t working on producing kick-ass HTML 5 authoring tools, they’re idiots.
You are mistaken. There is no “blockhead” nor any “person” in that post.
In rereading it, I see that you have a point. But when you conclude with "Suckers," I - looking at it from the kind of POV which has been evinced by those who have been "debating" on these threads - assumed that they would take it as ad hominem against them, and not against the developers of competitors to the iOS system."Blockhead!" wouldn't be taken as ill as "suckers." And people who read emotionally - which is generally the case in the flame wars - easily might identify with "Charlie Brown" (i.e., the developers of the iOS competition).IMHO. But happily, that doesn't seem to have eventuated in this case.
Please note that I don't disagree with you on the substance. I was only trying, in what I conceived to be a diplomatic way, to keep a guard on the emotional temperature.
Flash allowed the production of Joe Cartoon in the early days before the bandwidth for video was common.
It did its good on the Internet, now it can die.
Joe Cartoon was great stuff... not exactly high-brow humor, but I laughed my a$$ off more times than I can count!
I think they moved it to YouTube a little while ago. Yep, Flash served its purpose, and that purpose is gone now.
Thanks for the blast from the past!
The best was the Hummer H1 running over the gerbil uprising, fade into the real white Hummer the author has with the gerbil blood & guts paint job. I think the episode was Gerbil Genocide.
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