Thursday, May 20, 2010
Adobe vs. Apple
If you have an iPhone or iPad, or you're just up on your tech news, you know that they infamously don't support Flash. iPhone users have been hounding Apple since the iPhone debuted to support the program so they could browse Flash based sites on their mobile phones and the iPad's debut just magnified the issue. For the longest time, consumers just assumed it was software issue that Apple would no doubt eventually overcome. They waited and waited in vain. Steve Jobs came out last month with an open letter as to why the iPhone and iPad do not, and never will, support Flash. He's makes a couple of good points and mostly blames Adobe for not adapting. Jobs asserts that HTML 5 will have enough functionality like Flash to appease most of his iPhone and iPad users.
Well Adobe didn't take that very well. Earlier this week they launched a campaign that scolds Apple their exclusion. It's an interesting little rift between two companies who, at least in my little design world, go hand-in-hand in making my job easier. I'm not such a fan of Jobs dismissing the idea of ever supporting Flash. Even if HTML 5 reduces the need for Flash, it will be awhile before the functionality and usefulness of Flash goes away completely. What do you think?
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I am OK with letting Flash go away while HTML5 replaces it. Flash was a plugin created by Macromedia to give us some interactive features in the browser which were not possible before. In the last few years much of the the interactivity has been done with JavaScript and jQuery and it has worked well. HTML5 adds video support to the browser along with the Canvas tag which is a powerful 2D drawing surface. There is so much that you can do with it and it is an open web standard and Adobe could now make tools to help their customers build interactive web sites with these open standards instead of prolonging the life of a technology they acquired when they took over Macromedia.
And now Adobe wants all apps to be build with Flash. They want to take over the desktop and all mobile platforms. This would be a very bad development if this ever happend. The biggest complaint about Flash is the fact that it chews up your processor. Did you know that there are no tools available from Adobe to profile Flash apps to discover the bottlenecks which need to be optimized? If this were a serious platform it would at least have tools to help the developer optimize their app for processor and memory usage.
I do not use Adobe AIR applications because after they have been running a while they are typically using over 1GB of memory. Adobe needs to stop picking fights with others and focus on making their offerings better.
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