May 2010 Archives
May 5, 2010
Kevin Rose and the flash player
I'm a diggnation fan. I try to watch it every wednesday night. Today i watched episode 253 in where Kevin Rose (digg's, wefollow's, etc. founder and web entrepreneur) talks about his experience with the flash player on mac and his thoughts on Steve Jobs' letter regarding the same topic.
I thought it would be a good idea to share his thoughts with the flash community that doesn't follow diggnation and try to contribute to his opinions.
NOTE!!
I haven't transcribe every word but just resumed the idea to introduce my comment so don't punch me in the face about that. Comments in bold are Kevin's and the rest is mine, sorry about the confusion.
flash - at least on a mac - has sucked ass for years. ... flash crashes at least 3 times a day on google's chrome browser
I'm a mac user and could not agree more. I didn't find the same "flash experience" under osx that i used to find on my old pc. Chrome crashes a lot because of flash. I don't remember firefox crashing but it's been a while since i used it so i could be wrong. I don't think we are in a position where we could blame flash though. We don't know the inner workings of the integration between the plugin, the browser and the os. (Will try to get a comment from Tinic Uro on this)
there is no hover state on touch interfaces
There actually is a hover state. It's not the best or most clever state but there is. Web apps are still not designed for touch interfaces by default yet. html/css/js (standard stuff) lacks on this too. As Steve Jobs says, we need to rewrite our apps with touch interfaces in mind. This is not a flash thing is just how technology is innovating.
open standards can do pretty much whatever you wanna do now
html5 has a long way to go. We need not only a definition of a standard but a good implementation of it. If i could take the decision i would make webkit the "de facto" for all browsers. html5 capable browsers doesn't have much penetration yet and please lets not get into the "best viewed under XX browser" era again.
Regarding video streaming, there is no multibitrate streaming in html5 nor DRM. We can't control a "buffering" state in html5. Although "live streaming" is possible with h264 (the proposed video codec by google, apple and microsoft) it's more of a hack than a true streaming.
h264 is hardware accelerated for the device
I suggest everyone under mac osx 10.6.3+ to download flash player 'gala'. It has hardware acceleration for h264 decoding. Why adobe just implemented it? because apple didn't gave the necessary api to do so. Flash player under osx has a lot of restrictions not because adobe doesn't care about removing them but because they don't have the right tools for it. Not all h264 content can be viewed on the iphone os.
flash is a cpu hog
It is (see my comment above). Sometimes is not flash player's fault but the developer's. The thing that fascinates me about programming languages is that there is more than one way to make smth. In flash, some developers abuse of components and behavior panels and they end having cpu hog applications. Same thing happens with .net and the same thing will happen to html5 soon.
iphone apps built by flash not allowed on the iphone OS
The common thing about true coders is that we want to take advantage of the latest API available. If flash lags on the implementation of new apis i'm sure developers will move over to another platform. I think we have the right to chose. Flash is not the one using a compatibility layer for this effect.
As an interactive developer i welcome html5, silverlight, etc. only good things come out of competition. We should be in an open environment where technology could compete and get better.
Thoughts?
--fernando
