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Adobes Ipad “No Flash” rant spectacularly fails on thier own blog

By Edward O. ⋅ February 2, 2010 ⋅ Email This Post Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Adobe, Adobe, Adobe.

fail-ash

Late last week, an evangelist one of Adobe’s blogs was so bemoaned about the lack of flash on Apple’s mobile platform, he decided to make a talking point about it. While usually a relatively humble resource for great flash tips and technology, all I can say is- WOW did it ever backfire. Mac users, programmers, even flash devs were letting it be known- flash desperately needs a code base overhaul. Instead, Adobe is crying all over the interwebs, looking for your support- quite a tall order at this point in the game. Too bad there’s not comment counter on the page, but the page sure is LONG (edit: 541 posts at current count).

As a faithful mac user myself, it’s really and truly is a shame to see how Adobe can struggle with its now ubiquitous platform’s performance after all these years. In the meantime they have upended the main program’s interface and scripting languages, but still cannot deliver a vector engine runtime that doesn’t want to eat your processor for breakfast. And lunch.

These posters sum it up so well:

Anon writes:

Instead of moaning about Apple not including Flash support, why don’t you, Adobe, do something about it… It’s your source code, open it up, and then maybe Apple will consider compiling it and adding it to their restricted OS. Heck you haven’t even built a stable 64bit version of Flash yet. And if your answer is “pfft, no, why would be want to do that?” then that is exactly the same response Apple give you to to want to put “dirty” unknown code on their system.

Dennis Serras

I’m a very heavy Flash developer – though for web sites, not for apps. For one-off sites that are very limited in scope, like portfolios or some stores, it works great. I love the total design control. However, Macromedia screwed you guys royally by leaving you with a codebase that is from the 90s and sucks all but an 8-core bone dry on a page with even a couple of ads because it’s based on Director/Shockwave – it’s very, very resource heavy and aimed at programmers, not the user. I don’t blame Apple one bit for leaving it off, we developers will all decide what to do about it. Adobe needs to rewrite Flash from the ground up to be A) an Adobe app with all the requisite user-focus, and B) much, much more efficient – if it wants to stay in the game. Otherwise Adobe & Flash will simply be abandoned.

——-

Makes me wonder though…why doesn’t adobe just open source flash so the community can make it better? I mean, it would take upwards of a week for an aspiring dev to make flash work proper. And with the onset of truly capable HTML 5 video players imminent, web video delivery is about to undergo a revolution. Protect your neck Adobe, because the pendulum is swinging your way- fast.

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Discussion

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  1. I think they aren’t opening the source code because it’s probably a bloated mess. Plus, I bet they make lots of money selling Flash to developers.

    Posted by Matthew | February 2, 2010, 4:57 pm

  2. “bemoaned”? I think you mean “distressed”, or perhaps “unhappy”.

    Posted by Patrick | February 2, 2010, 11:12 pm

  3. “why doesn’t adobe just open source flash so the community can make it better?”

    Tamarin’s been that way awhile, in hopes of making faster progress on 64-bit overhaul, but there was little commitment by others, and after ECMAScript process got snafu’d, the only positive thing out of it was a Firefox speedup…. ;-)

    Here’s more on Flash “open” over the years:
    http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_format.html

    (I liked Lee’s post… asking content developers to design for each private little fiefdom is nuttily onerous.)

    jd/adobe

    Posted by John Dowdell | February 3, 2010, 5:54 pm

 

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