Steve Jobs List Reasons Why Apple Hates Adobe

I have less resources on my box and I'm using a beta Flash version. I don't get crashes. Now, Flash does run slow, if I decide to open up like 4-5 different Flash apps.
 
Virtus said:
Perhaps the whole anti-Flash scheme is just a covert attack against Microsoft. Who does apple hate? Microsoft and Google. They're not just competitors like dell vs HP, they actually hate Google and MS so much you can taste it.

Adobe actually helps apple a lot since most people who buy macs run Adobe CS almost exclusively. So it's weird to see apple biting the hand that feeds them since they would be nothing without Adobe's apps. Can't they work together to optimize flash?

So maybe this whole thing is a preemptive attack against Silverlight. Especially since it's just starting to gain traction.

Or maybe SJ is just being extra whiney because an ipad lacks the cahones to run flash.

</tinfoil hat>
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tinfoil hat indeed :-P

Microsoft is a software company first and foremost. Microsoft software works on Apple computers. Apple has no reason to hate Microsoft. They're not really stepping on their toes. In fact, wasn't it the introduction of Office for Mac that pulled Apple out of their slump (besides bringing Job back and switching to Intel)?

Google on the other hand is a direct competition with their Android phones. Microsoft isn't much of a competition in that field.
 
flatrock said:
Except for the fact that it's 99% bull shit.

Where to start. The Flash Video format is a container format, not a type of compression. It can use multiple types of compression, in more recent versions of Flash Player that includes H.264. It can take advantage of the same hardware decoder on the iPhone that Jobs talks about if Apple would allow it or work with Adobe to expose the functionality.

Any requirements of only using a software encoder are being forced on Adobe by Apple, not an inherrent weakness of Flash. The thing that Flash Video gives content providers is the ability to prohibit saving the video to a file. That's important to the TV media that is willing to allow you to watch a video of a tv episode online with some commercials, but wants to charge you for downloading the video. Apple is going a step farther. They don't want to make it easy for you to view it online, they want you to buy TV episodes on iTunes.

Flash applications may suffer performance issues. If so, it is in great part due to Apple being unwilling to allow Adobe the low level API access they need to develop an efficient Flash Player. Apple could work with Adobe like Adobe has been requesting to make a solid and relatively efficient Flash Player, but that would undermine their efforts to prevent any app that doesn't come from the app store from running on the iPhone.

Apple creates barriers to Flash, and then uses the limitations imposed by those barriers as a reason for not supporting Flash.

Job's comments about open solutions are absurd. Apple disparaging anyone else for not being open should be openly laughed at. The iPhone is the most closed smart phone on the market. Apple supports open standards only when they have to do so or when they gain a significant advantage by doing so. ie. Webkit is an effort to have browsers based on it gain enough market share that web developers will bother to make sure their pages render well in it.

Jobs isn't an idot. He's obviously smart enough to realize he's oughtright lying to his customer base. He apparently believes those customers are stupid enough not to realize it and turn on him. He's probably right.
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Amen
 
Hop-Scotch said:
Sounded pretty reasonable till that line.

Lots of valid points, but in the end he's asking the internet to drop flash and tailor itself to his products. What's he going to do when flash becomes hardware accelerated?
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Why? Apple, like MSFT undoubtedly collects information whenever the OS or an app crashes assuming the user has opted in. They have data on that. If Adobe were so stupid as to contest it Apple could easily show the crash reports from their install base and I suspect Adobe would come out looking pretty bad.

Oh, and HTML5 and jscript are not Apple products. I will bet you MSFT is going to go the same way as apple, even to the detriment of Silverlight. As to hardware acceleration? So what? HTML5 can be accelerated as well for video.

He has a point in that flash is going to be made obsolete by HTML5 so why not adopt it?
 
Dzero said:
Amen
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Really? So if Adobes inability to deliver flash on the iPhone is all Apples fault for not providing a low level API and other resources then explain the lack of flash on Android where there is no such limitation? And I'm not talking the flash light mess on some HTC devices.
 
flatrock said:
Except for the fact that it's 99% bull shit.

Where to start. The Flash Video format is a container format, not a type of compression. It can use multiple types of compression, in more recent versions of Flash Player that includes H.264. It can take advantage of the same hardware decoder on the iPhone that Jobs talks about if Apple would allow it or work with Adobe to expose the functionality.

Any requirements of only using a software encoder are being forced on Adobe by Apple, not an inherrent weakness of Flash. The thing that Flash Video gives content providers is the ability to prohibit saving the video to a file. That's important to the TV media that is willing to allow you to watch a video of a tv episode online with some commercials, but wants to charge you for downloading the video. Apple is going a step farther. They don't want to make it easy for you to view it online, they want you to buy TV episodes on iTunes.

Flash applications may suffer performance issues. If so, it is in great part due to Apple being unwilling to allow Adobe the low level API access they need to develop an efficient Flash Player. Apple could work with Adobe like Adobe has been requesting to make a solid and relatively efficient Flash Player, but that would undermine their efforts to prevent any app that doesn't come from the app store from running on the iPhone.

Apple creates barriers to Flash, and then uses the limitations imposed by those barriers as a reason for not supporting Flash.

Job's comments about open solutions are absurd. Apple disparaging anyone else for not being open should be openly laughed at. The iPhone is the most closed smart phone on the market. Apple supports open standards only when they have to do so or when they gain a significant advantage by doing so. ie. Webkit is an effort to have browsers based on it gain enough market share that web developers will bother to make sure their pages render well in it.

Jobs isn't an idot. He's obviously smart enough to realize he's oughtright lying to his customer base. He apparently believes those customers are stupid enough not to realize it and turn on him. He's probably right.
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Tell you what. You get a PC laptop and run Flash based videos and observe the battery life, then install Chrome or Safari and run the same video from an HTML5 source, again observing the battery life.

Come back and post the results.
 
Sikkyu said:
most of his arguments can be summed up by saying:

I love money
I love control
Having Flash on apple products takes money and control away from me
Therefore I hate adobe

Also they are poo poo heads.
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As a web developer, I think this sums it up. SJ has every right to do so however. SJ also is operating under his new “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine”. That does not sound very open to me at all.

He is basically trying to get everyone to switch to his standards and leave other technologies behind.

It ties pretty will witht he old Mac hardware philosophy too. They used to have less driver problems but they also supported less hardware. If everyone runs the same hardware, then there are less combinations of things to deal with that can cause problems. The same ting can apply for software too, but then to not allow code translation...

I feel that the argument of flash not supporting touch screen is poor. A huge percentage of web applications and pages that exist currently do not support touch screen well at all. Applications designed for a mouse interface group buttons and drop downs close together, touch where screen things should be a setup differently. Should we forget about accessing all of these pages too because the Iwhatever does not support them well? Everything should be re-written for the IDevice? Is touch screen the best technology for using a computer or does it simply have it's place?

Let Steve Jobs do whatever he wants, if you want flash support don't buy his products. If you like his philosophy then support it. The typical consumer just wants things to work and be simple in the end and that is his largest customer base.
 
The typical consumer just wants things to work and be simple in the end and that is his largest customer base.
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Flash's issues extend well beyond the developer all the way to the consumer. That's the problem.
 
Azhar said:
Tell you what. You get a PC laptop and run Flash based videos and observe the battery life, then install Chrome or Safari and run the same video from an HTML5 source, again observing the battery life.

Come back and post the results.
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Now, take the same laptop and hit up a site that is built entirely on Flash with no video and then do the same with Chrome/Safari and see how well HTML5 displays it.

Now tell me how having a higher battery life helps out in such a scenario.
 
Azhar said:
Tell you what. You get a PC laptop and run Flash based videos and observe the battery life, then install Chrome or Safari and run the same video from an HTML5 source, again observing the battery life.

Come back and post the results.
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Now, take the same laptop and hit up a site that is built entirely on Flash with no video and then do the same with Chrome/Safari and see how well HTML5 displays it. Now tell me how having a higher battery life helps out in such a scenario.

Also, HTML5 is no better or worse on Windows, than Flash. Except Flash 10.1, gets to use certain gpus to help out with h.264 decoding. Anandtech already tested this all out, so judging from the performance, the battery life is probably going to end up being near each other too.
 
krotch said:
Now, take the same laptop and hit up a site that is built entirely on Flash with no video and then do the same with Chrome/Safari and see how well HTML5 displays it.

Now tell me how having a higher battery life helps out in such a scenario.
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I dont understand this post. Are you trying to say i COULDNT achieve the same results with CSS / Javascript in HTML5?
 
phide said:
Nope.
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Check the date, it just happened now, they opened it up only when reviewers pointed out the a site was running faster with less CPU resources on windows than when the same site was running on a mac.

Flash may be a resource hog on the PC, but that's mainly because of the all the filtering that's applied (The subtle shadows, anti-aliasing, etc.), just have the flash player on the mobile ignore those and run it in minimal mode. Flash does have this even on the PC, just right click and select Low quality and the CPU usage goes down dramatically. All those special effects also has a property that sets their individual quality, the player can simply override or remove them (Shadows are too subtle on anything smaller than an actual monitor anyway)

How flash is executed is up to the container. The flash player can evaluate the hardware and see how best to run the SWF. That's why the exact same SWF runs on the PC with hardware acceleration and reverts to software on the mac, without changing anything on the SWF.

The same can be applied to the input device. You don't actually directly access the flash site directly, whatever input you do is actually sent to the flash player and then interpreted before being sent to the SWF. A touch is a roll over, and a tap is a click. The flash player can be programmed to recognize any gesture and interpret it as an action.

Heck the device may already have the built in capability for recognizing gestures and the flash player can simply access those functions.

You won't see sites running on javascript losing their rollover menus anytime soon either.
 
Sly said:
Check the date, it just happened now
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Yep, and Adobe actually has a 10.1 beta for OS X already. Adobe was pretty quick on that one. Only works on a very limited set of GPUs right now, however, excluding most Macs.
 
Cali3350 said:
I dont understand this post. Are you trying to say i COULDNT achieve the same results with CSS / Javascript in HTML5?
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You probably can, but nowhere near as easily or quickly as doing it on flash.

Want to animate a falling leaf? Draw some curved lines and have it followed, all done in a minute. Want to use less bandwidth? Draw the leaf instead using a bitmap and you'll lower the size instantly from 500kb down to 10kb.
 
I laughed while reading his " reasons " to hate Adobe. 85% of the time, if you replace the word " adobe " with " Apple ", it'll pretty much sum up what Apple is as well.
 
Sly said:
You probably can, but nowhere near as easily or quickly as doing it on flash.

Want to animate a falling leaf? Draw some curved lines and have it followed, all done in a minute. Want to use less bandwidth? Draw the leaf instead using a bitmap and you'll lower the size instantly from 500kb down to 10kb.
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This is tooling. It's nothing HTML5 can't do (and pretty easily with Canvas, really), it's really the Flash developer tools that are good, not Flash itself. It will take some time, but in a few years there will be powerful development tools for Canvas-based stuff as well.

phide said:
Nope.
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I thought we were talking about phones here...?
 
This is a very good list for him, and very entertaining to read.

But what alot of us are argueing over is his choices of his actions. Problem is, its his products and thats his choice wether we don't like it or not.
 
I agree with everything he says, especially a couple of points specifically.

Flash is a miserable resource hog. It sucks on my MacBook, on my iMac, and on my old core i7 920 with 6gb of ram. Slow, crashed constantly, on all platforms, and didn't provide me anything I couldn't get elsewhere without it.

Second, it is a security nightmare. I have seen more exploits released for flash in the last few months than any other application that I monitor. It is the weakest link in most systems, and one of the easiest ways to introduce foreign code into a system.

The iphone os, unjailbroken, is one of the most secure computing platforms available on e market, in my opinion. There have been far fewer breaches on iPhones by any of the off sec research firms i deal with.
 
Cali3350 said:
I dont understand this post. Are you trying to say i COULDNT achieve the same results with CSS / Javascript in HTML5?
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I'm saying you're not going to get anything to display. Unless you decide to go work for all these companies and rewrite their webpages.
 
jrdonnaruma said:
I agree with everything he says, especially a couple of points specifically.

Flash is a miserable resource hog. It sucks on my MacBook, on my iMac, and on my old core i7 920 with 6gb of ram. Slow, crashed constantly, on all platforms, and didn't provide me anything I couldn't get elsewhere without it.

Second, it is a security nightmare. I have seen more exploits released for flash in the last few months than any other application that I monitor. It is the weakest link in most systems, and one of the easiest ways to introduce foreign code into a system.

The iphone os, unjailbroken, is one of the most secure computing platforms available on e market, in my opinion. There have been far fewer breaches on iPhones by any of the off sec research firms i deal with.
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Huh? Less breaches doesn't mean the most secure. It just means no one cares. Why break into a phone, when breaking into a computer nets you more information.
 
keenan said:
This is tooling. It's nothing HTML5 can't do (and pretty easily with Canvas, really), it's really the Flash developer tools that are good, not Flash itself. It will take some time, but in a few years there will be powerful development tools for Canvas-based stuff as well.
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And until then, while you have web companies mass producing web pages and ad banners, flash isn't gonna budge. When i was making those ads, i was making maybe 4 of them per hour, less for the interactive ones. There is no way i can do that on four different languages to do the same thing.

Performance wise, wanna see what's really sucking up the CPU in flash? I made this a long while back (i drew a Ragnarok Online animation so it's a *long* while back), it was when i wanted to know how to do an animation and what sprite to use. Square bitmaps, transparencies, vectors, etc. It was running on AS1.0, republished it for AS3.0.

Open up task manager and keep an eye on your CPU usage and go here.

http://codetest.+++++++++++++++/benchmarker/Benchmark.html

Circle numbers 5, 11 & 13 are murder on the CPU... or is it? Try clicking "LOW" to lower the rendering quality (Or right click and set the quality there). Dunno about you but my IE usage dropped to 0. The player has control on how to render flash.

Want a more direct comparison?

http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/

http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/

How much CPU are they using on your rigs?
 
crackbone said:
That's not at all what was said. Read it.

Flash is a resource hog, it's missed every deadline so far on mobiles, and it is a layer of proprietary bullshit on top of the web.

I'm not arguing that Apple isn't the master of controlled environments and proprietary nonsense. They are.

That's their prerogative to control their products and the experience the want their consumers to have, but the web is all pervasive and forcing proprietary plugins for everyone that diminishes the experience for everyone isn't good for anyone.
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Apple owes Adobe for getting the Mac where it is today. Without the support of that content creation community it wouldn't be where it is today. Steve's comments are a slap in the face to Adobe and its users. Not having flash is his choice and I really don't care as I will never own an iPhone or iPhad.

The thing that bugs me the most is removing the ability for a developer of Flash to make apps for Apples platform in the tool of his choice. This solely for the purpose of locking down developers and making it tougher for them to develop for multiple platforms. His points don't have merit against removing this ability and it obviously completely stems from greed.

As far as performance goes we will see how it is when Google releases Android 2.2 and when Flash is added to HP Palm and Microsoft Windows Phone 7. I definitely see HTML 5 as the future, but right now so much of what I do on the web is with Flash. So I'm choosing an OS that lets me choose what I run, I'm not big on letting a dictator chose for me.
 
If I was Adobe I would work extra hard on making Flash work great on every mobile platform besides Apple of course. The second thing I would do is stop development of their Creative Suite for Mac and just make it for Windows.
 
I remember complaints from mr.jobs from some time ago...
I found in amazement over 5 years ago, the pc I thought was getting outdated played h.264 worlds better than flash.. and ya know what? it is five years later and flash still sucks ass. I am pc all the way.
I think they can nail flash for monopoly..or lack of diversity. WTF pc are they building for? it sure as hell is not mine.

h.264 on the other hand uses next to nothing, and looks damn good. A mobile standard ends up a world standard for clients.
 
Maybe you need a new PC. Even my netbook plays with Flash fine. Granted, it can't run anything 1080p (Flash or h.264), but 720p works fine.
 
krotch said:
Maybe you need a new PC. Even my netbook plays with Flash fine. Granted, it can't run anything 1080p (Flash or h.264), but 720p works fine.
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2 issues:
1. Just cause you can run it doesnt mean you can run it as well as other technologies. The lower overall strain on the system is desired.
2. That netbook is way more powerful than most ARM processors in phones and small devices.
 
Cali3350 said:
2 issues:
1. Just cause you can run it doesnt mean you can run it as well as other technologies. The lower overall strain on the system is desired.
2. That netbook is way more powerful than most ARM processors in phones and small devices.
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I have a Nokia 5800XM and it can run this site exactly as it does on a IE.

http://www.sodastreamusa.com/

Even the video on the lower right shows up and plays back normally.
 
Cali3350 said:
2 issues:
1. Just cause you can run it doesnt mean you can run it as well as other technologies. The lower overall strain on the system is desired.
2. That netbook is way more powerful than most ARM processors in phones and small devices.
Click to expand...

If you've looked at comparisons of HTML5 vs Flash 10.1, there really isn't a difference on a PC. Mac is a diff story, as Flash has always suck on it and still sucks.
 
phide said:
The additions in CS5 are actually the most substantial in recent memory, and I've been a Photoshop user since version 5 (frankly, not that much has changed).
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If you think things haven't changed much between Ps 5 and Ps CS4, then you don't use Ps enough. :) (I say CS4 because I have not used CS5 yet)

Granted out of all their apps, Ai (Illustrator) has changed the most old versions -> new versions (IMO), but Ps and Id (InDesign) both have changed quite a bit. Don't know how long you've been using these apps, but I'm going on 17 years now. ;)

Really, after quickly reading through that article, I see nothing more than usual Steve Jobs self appointed drivel, trying to save face for the inevitable day when Adobe tells Apple they don't need their platform anymore and they're going Windows only. I did find his crash comment very funny:

We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.
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B-B-B-But Steve...according to your stupid ads, Macs don't crash. :rolleyes:
 
daveloft said:
The thing that bugs me the most is removing the ability for a developer of Flash to make apps for Apples platform in the tool of his choice. This solely for the purpose of locking down developers and making it tougher for them to develop for multiple platforms.
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Keep in mind that OS 4.0 is introducing "multitasking", in which the OS needs to be able to control an application's state (pause it, resume it, suspend certain processes while allowing others to keep running and so forth). With Flash, there would be no potential for fine-grained control over an app's processes. How can Apple multitask in the manner they're multitasking in OS 4.0 if they have little to no control over running applications and their states?

zero2dash said:
If you think things haven't changed much between Ps 5 and Ps CS4, then you don't use Ps enough. Don't know how long you've been using these apps, but I'm going on 17 years now.
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Around 12 years here. You would suggest that your additional ~5 years of Photoshop experience simply invalidates my opinion?

Hardly the case, I think.
 
phide said:
Around 12 years here. You would suggest that your additional ~5 years of Photoshop experience simply invalidates my opinion?

Hardly the case, I think.
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Dude, how can you say that? One of the upgrade included Lens Flare! Lens Flare, man! How can you say that's not a huge upgrade?

I remember Photoshop before Windows 3.1 when it was on 30+ floppy disks. lol
 
phide said:
Around 12 years here. You would suggest that your additional ~5 years of Photoshop experience simply invalidates my opinion?

Hardly the case, I think.
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No, I mentioned my experience just to show how long I've been using it, not in an attempt to discredit your experience.

I've noticed the changes they've made; maybe you haven't, but I certainly have.
 
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