Apple was right, Adobe get over it?

[Mr. Tunes]

This ends up being problematic on mobile platforms because processing power and the electricity required to do some of this stuff is just scarce. I thought Jobs was fairly accurate discussing this, it's something that may be resolved but it's not quite there, for the iPhone at least.

Interesting that Weebl has moved to YouTube for the next Savlonic tune - http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/tiny% ... ese%20girl

ok so isn't battery life something that the user should decide if it's worth the cost/benefit themselves? i'm sure a lot of the music iphone apps are horribly battery intensive, yet they pass.

[xh3rv]

This ends up being problematic on mobile platforms because processing power and the electricity required to do some of this stuff is just scarce. I thought Jobs was fairly accurate discussing this, it's something that may be resolved but it's not quite there, for the iPhone at least.

Interesting that Weebl has moved to YouTube for the next Savlonic tune - http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/tiny% ... ese%20girl

ok so isn't battery life something that the user should decide if it's worth the cost/benefit themselves?

That's really not the Apple way of doing things

i'm sure a lot of the music iphone apps are horribly battery intensive, yet they pass.

A substantial problem is about like this: Apple provides some core functionality for playing a variety of sound file formats, that can be assumed to be appropriate for iPhone hardware; some of it skips the CPU and uses other dedicated hardware to decode media. If not, Apple's libraries can at least be assumed to handle the CPU/energy costs fairly efficiently. There's a list of supported audio and video codecs on the iPhone that match what Apple has engineered the iPhone to support.

Flash could probably employ this hardware or Apple libs where it supports the same codec the iPhone does. The computational costs in this scenario, I don't know if they would be tolerable or not, it could be either AFAIK. It wouldn't be nothing, compared to using iPhone stuff natively. But a big thing is not all legitimate Flash formats are directly supported by the iPhone. This makes some sense - not all codecs are designed for mobile platforms, they may have been designed to rely on amounts of computation that aren't significant on PCs but are a bit much for mobile platforms.

So the choice there would be, do all the transcoding from a Flash format to an iPhone format via CPU, or offer a limited version of Flash. I think it's fairly obvious the latter choice isn't really satisfying for anyone, users would never really know what would work or what wouldn't, and it would weaken the robustness of both Flash and iPhones. The former is certainly technically possible but not necessarily technically sound for the iPhone.

That's the status quo. For the future, if Apple wants to implement some other stuff, if it's not supported by Flash already it doesn't seem likely Adobe would immediately update Flash correspondingly. Adobe isn't really in a position to tailor future versions of Flash to any specific platform in the future, either.

For the music playing apps on the iPhone, or anything that's just a video or single audio track playing, this can be done via dedicated decoding hardware very efficiently. For beat sequencing apps or whatever, I believe that does need to be done via software but again it's guaranteed to at least use the Apple libs, which are going to be efficient, without costly interpretations that Flash could introduce.

That was a bit long and wordy, but to summarize - optimal performance comes from the closest interaction with the iPhone OS and hardware possible. Flash guarantees some pretty sub-optimal things will happen in a certain number of cases and will generally introduce some degree of sub-optimal performance in all cases. This is certainly true for audio or video, but it also applies to things like how Flash is interacted with by users, how tight and responsive the platform feels, how cleanly software presents - if Flash is involved there's substantial risk that the iPhone would act like a less-than-stellar product.

[spaceman]

Microsoft says IE9 will support only H.264 for HTML5 video playback.
That's a kick in the teeth for Flash again.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/0 ... video.aspx

[UltraJv]

Microsoft says IE9 will support only H.264 for HTML5 video playback.
That's a kick in the teeth for Flash again.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/0 ... video.aspx

Intruiging, but HTML 5 is still a draft. That means anything can happen to it. Its development could even be halted like it happened with XHTML 2.

[eduardo_b]

Microsoft says IE9 will support only H.264 for HTML5 video playback.
That's a kick in the teeth for Flash again.

Or motivation for Adobe to up their game.

[Stupid American Pig]

While HTML5 is still in draft, webkit browsers already support most of it. Personally I found this pretty inspiring for the future of the web....

[UltraJv]

While HTML5 is still in draft, webkit browsers already support most of it. Personally I found this pretty inspiring for the future of the web....

I installed it and I saw a million ways for exploitation of malware. I look forward to some new and nasty ways of getting f****d over by this. If Apple are saying this is better for security than Flash - Theyve lost the plot. Id take security over toys any day.

[Stupid American Pig]

installed what exactly?

[UltraJv]

installed what exactly?

Google Chrome Frame. Thats what the page shows in standard IE8. After you install it, the page then shows HTML 5 stuff (or to my mind exploit city).

[Stupid American Pig]

heh- well, you could just use Chrome I am about 50/50 between chrome and firefox and really havent worried about being "exploited". I dont really consider that any browser is "safe" so its 99% browsing habits and 1% luck...