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Adobe Has “Moved On” From Flash On iDevices Says Adobe CEO

Posted in Commentary with tags , on August 17, 2010 by itnerd

The Telegraph has published a very interesting interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Most of the interview focused on the Flash on iDevices circus with this comment being made by Narayen:

“They’ve made their choice. We’ve made ours and we’ve moved on.”

I’m guessing that “moving on” has something to do with the fact that Flash was recently released for the Android phone platform. And that won’t be the last mobile platform that you’ll see Flash:

Indeed, Adobe has cemented its role as a partner to other technology groups in recent years, working with 19 of the world’s 20 top mobile phone handset companies, including Motorola, HTC, RIM, Hewlett-Packard WebOS and Google, to bring Flash Player to their mobile devices.

I’m also guessing that Adobe is taking the view that if everybody else has Flash, and if Flash gets widespread acceptance, Apple will have no choice but to let Flash onto their shiny iDevices. A guess backed up by this quote:

Is the door to Apple completely closed, then? “Our doors are open,” says Narayen. “You will have to ask them about their part.”

We’ll see how this plays out, but I suspect things are about to get interesting.

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YouTube Experiments With HTML5….. Steve Jobs Smiles

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on July 8, 2010 by itnerd

You have to find it ironic that after YouTube comes out with a statement that says that HTML5 can’t do everything that YouTube needs, but then I trip over this page that talks about experimental support for HTML5:

This is an opt-in experiment for HTML5 support on YouTube. If you are using a supported browser, you can choose to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player for most videos. Your comments will help us improve and perfect the mixtures we’re working on. So jump in, play around, and send your feedback directly to the brains behind the scenes.

To be fair it’s been around since the start of the year, so I have to assume that this is some sort defensive move to make sure that if HTML5 wins, they can be right there with support for that.

I wonder how Adobe feels about this seeing as YouTube is a huge Flash user? I don’t have to guess how Steve Jobs feels about this.

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Jobs And Porn On The Same Side When It Comes To Flash… WTF?

Posted in Commentary with tags , , , on June 30, 2010 by itnerd

If Apple God CEO Steve Jobs was looking for allies in his fight against Adobe Flash, he’s got a powerful one now. Digital Playground who produces porn movies wants Flash dead as Michael Jackson. Ali Joone, the founder and director of Digital Playground stated in an interview with Conceivably Tech:

Mobile browsers run HTML 5 very well. Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML 5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.

And:

“We are waiting for browsers to catch up. As soon as they are ready, we will move everything to HTML 5,” Joone said. He noted that he was grateful for what Flash has delivered, but said that it was “just a matter of time” until Flash disappears. “It’s the next passing of the torch.”

This is ironic as “The Steve” is on record as wanting to not have porn on any of his shiny iDevices. Now, Digital Playground is not a small porn company. They’re one of the top five porn companies according to Wikipedia having hits like “Pirates” and being one of the first companies to produce HD porn. The reason why this might matter is that there is an urban myth that porn drives technology citing the VHS vs. Beta fight back in the 1980s and how porn’s choice of VHS killed Beta. People are arguing that if porn gets behind HTML5, Flash is doomed. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. But it will be interesting to not only see how this plays out in the Apple vs. Flash debate, but how “The Steve” reacts to having a porn company being on his side.

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Flash & Acrobat Vulernable To Remote Hijacking…. Meanwhile Steve Is Laughing At Adobe

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on June 5, 2010 by itnerd

Adobe. You have some explaining to do.

Adobe dropped this little bombshell on the universe late yesterday. Apparently if you run Flash or Acrobat (and lets face it, who doesn’t other than Steve Jobs), you could be open to remote crashes and remote hijacking. Oh yeah, Mac, PC, UNIX are all open to these attacks. Adobe recommends moving to the release candidate for Flash, and deleting authplay.dll to keep you safe until Adobe gets around to updating things. Meanwhile I’m going to guess that Apple is going to take full advantage of this and illustrate how bad Flash is.

Oh wait. They already have.

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Apple May Face Anti-Trust Probe…. Oh No Fanbois!

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on May 3, 2010 by itnerd

It looks like God Steve Jobs rant about Flash might have caught the attention of some government types for all the wrong reasons. Assuming that this report in the New York Post is true, the iLawyers may be looking a lot more work to do:

According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.

I think it’s a safe bet that God Steve Jobs can’t be happy about this. But there are a few things for Apple’s rabid base of fanbois to keep in mind here:

  1. An inquiry doesn’t mean that anything will actually be done.
  2. It may be months or years before anything actually happens if the inquiry actually produces a decision to actually do something.

So assuming that this is true (this is after all the New York Post that posted this), the best strategy may be to sit and wait to see what happens next. I can’t see any anti-trust action being anything like Microsoft in the 1990’s. But who knows? Apple are a pretty powerful player in the mobile phone market so I suppose that the government could always argue that they’re too powerful.

Stay tuned.

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Microsoft Joins In On Apple vs. Adobe… Sides With Apple

Posted in Commentary with tags , , , on April 30, 2010 by itnerd

This has to be really weird. Microsoft and Apple actually agree on something, and that something would be Flash. On the same day that God Steve Jobs ranted about Flash, I found this posting on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Blog where Microsoft basically takes Apple’s side of this argument:

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

And:

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

So it looks like God Steve Jobs has an ally of sorts in his ongoing battle against Adobe. You have to wonder how Adobe is going to spin this one. Over to you Adobe!

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Adobe vs. Apple: Who’s Right… Who’s Wrong

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on April 29, 2010 by itnerd

This morning God Steve Jobs posted an open letter about why Adobe Flash is not right for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. He basically says that it’s a relic, buggy, crash prone, insecure and not the future. I’d read the full text of his letter to get the gist of his arguments. Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen didn’t waste any time in firing back at Jobs by saying that Jobs points in his letter are a “smokescreen,” Flash is an “open specification,” and suggested that any Flash-related crashes on OS X have more to do with Apple’s operating system than Adobe’s software. This is the latest in an ongoing battle between Adobe who wants to put flash on God’s Steve Jobs iDevices and how Jobs will do anything to keep them off his lovely iDevices.

So who’s right about this? It depends. Here’s my take:

  1. Flash is unstable. It crashes on Mac OS X and Windows. It’s so crash prone that the next version of Firefox (which if you’re really brave you can preview right now) will have code to try and contain crashes to the browser rather than have a Flash crash spread to the OS. Maybe Adobe should do something about that.
  2. Jobs points out that Flash is insecure highlighting the fact that Symantec backs him up on this point. However, I’ll point out that Flash runs on LINUX and the security issues that exist on Windows and OS X don’t appear to exist on LINUX. That to me sounds like an OS issue and not a Flash issue. Perhaps Microsoft and Apple might want to do something about that. Having said that, there are a ton of exploits floating around that use Flash as a gateway. Perhaps Adobe might want to do something about that.
  3. Jobs points out that open standards such as HTML5 and SVG vector graphics are the way to go. True. Ultimately, moving to truly open standards that are cross platform is the way of the future. But, Flash is everywhere right now. People know how to code for it and it would be foolish to simply ignore it because God Steve Jobs says so.
  4. Jobs writes in his letter “It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms.” I think that translates to “Adobe pisses us off because they won’t support us and us alone.” I guess that’s why they changed the terms and conditions of the iPhone SDK to keep anybody who writes apps with something other than Apple tools (read: Adobe) off their phones and tablets.
  5. Adobe Flash is a CPU and battery hog says God Steve Jobs. True. Flash heavy pages send the CPU usage of my Mac or my wife’s PC through the roof. That has to affect battery life at some point. Now to be fair, Adobe is working on hardware acceleration to make Flash more CPU friendly, but you if you take a look at at video on and HTML5 webpage and see how low the CPU usage is, their hardware acceleration would have to be damm good to compete with that.
  6. Neither company is a paragon of being open despite what they both say. I guess if you want open, you’d have to go for Android. But then you’d get porn according to God Steve Jobs, and it’s his “moral responsibility” to keep you from seeing porn on any of his iDevices.

Both sides have their issues and nobody is the clear winner of this little pissing contest (although I have to admit that I am leaning towards Adobe at the moment). If Apple and Adobe were smart, they’d go back to the days where they worked closely together to produce really good software for their users rather than try to slag each other in the media. This little spat doesn’t help users and as a result nobody wins. Not Apple. Not Adobe. Not end users.

A pox on both their houses.

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Snow Leopard Users Get Downgraded Flash Version Without Their Knowledge…. WTF?

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on September 3, 2009 by itnerd

Kudos to Don for passing this along. According to The Cult Of Mac, Snow Leopard users get a really advanced OS, but they get a downgrade in the version of Flash without any prior warning. Graham Cluley who found this issue had this to say:

“Adobe has been urging users to keep themselves up-to-date, and what’s most frustrating about the Snow Leopard upgrade is that I had been diligent, I’d been doing the right thing. But I was downgraded in the background. And most people, even if they had been diligent in the past, simply wouldn’t think to check for that sort of thing.”

This isn’t good because there are a number of Flash exploits floating around out there and news on them can be found by doing a Google on the subject. So Snow Leopard users should upgrade the Flash version on their Macs ASAP.

The bigger question, why does Apple feel the need to SILENTLY downgrade your version of Flash? Would anybody at Apple care to explain this?

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