No more iphone support.....

[dandylion13]

I also agree that Jobs was completely wrong about HTML 5.0.

But... Steve Jobs is a smart guy, surely he would know about its severe limitations?
Legitimate performance issues aside, I think that this might be part of what Adobe referred to when its CEO said that a lot of Jobs' letter was a "smokescreen".

Could that smokescreen be because Apple is developing it's own competitor to Flash?
It would make sense because all the major tech companies have a cross-platform technology (Like Silverlight, Java and Flash) except Apple (Yes, there's Quicktime, but it's very limited). It would allow Apple to draw users into the Apple eco-system on non-Apple hardware. It could work if Apple cuts exclusive content delivery deals with some of the big players who are looking for safe distribution channels.

... this is just wild speculation, of course, but, hey, wild speculation is what makes the internet so much fun

[tomsamson]

haha, yes, that´s fun to have in between =)

So yeah, let´s roll with it
To reply to your points:
Sure some points in Job´s letter were more off or well, more a smokescreen than others.
On the other side Adobe spokespersons themselves clearly straight out lie regarding many points, repeatedly over the last few years.
(Like hey, no, there is no performance problem with flash, see, here we got the proof when comparing in a made up test case to the one competitor in this field that is running worse than flash in this test case! What, your cpu fan of your high end machine is getting louder when running flash content although it can handle crysis in high detail settings fine? Nay, that´s imagination.. )


Regarding whether Apple wants to create a competitor to flash is right or wrong depending on what you mean with it.

When you mean they´d maybe like to create a similar to flash technology for cross platform web ownage, then i think that´s unlikely right now.

But when you look at it from the side that they´d like to push other things which are quite different but in a way still do similar things and by their nature would under widespread adoption kick flash towards not being a major player anymore, then yes, they totally do that.

Apple most pushes its portable devices these days which don´t run flash content on them. For Apple its the largest win to spread iTunes as far and wide as they can and with it movies, music, games and other apps one (seen from their end) ideally buys for money.
So despite being very different, in one way iTunes and flash do similar things:
they offer a way to access media, apps, games etc.
Where they are very different is that with the flash player one gets most content for free for the consumer.
Sure there´s some content to buy and some content based on micro transactions but the large majority of flash content out there is completely free to consumers.

See, that doesn´t fit to selling movies, music and games/ apps, so to me one of the main reasons why Apple doesn´t want flash on the devices in the browser,besides the very valid performance problems reasoning given, is that it would probably lead to way less sales on the iTunes store outlets for all sorts of content one can get for free on the web when having a flash player installed.

[.hooligan]

Just chiming in on this no flash support on iphone thing. Sorry if the following questions have been answered already in the thread. Couldn't be bothered reading it all :P

So what's the deal. I haven't touched CS5 yet, so the iphone exporter is useless? You can export but the store won't accept your app? That would be the only reason I would get CS5.

What are our alternatives for converting flash content to iphones? Is there? Who knows if pixel wave will even get finished. Or do we have to port the code ourselves.

Apple is sort of right on flash dieing out. Flash's main selling point was the fact that it exported things at such a small file size so we didn't have massive waiting times to view content. That was cool back in the day but now that's all the flash player has going for it. No one cares as much about file size now because the average internet connect is so much faster. So you would have thought they would concentrate on speed and features for flash.

[tomsamson]

Regarding the flash CS5 iPhone app exporter: yeah, that is totally useless now due to two things:
Apple changed a rule in the developer agreement that blocks flash made apps out of the store so you can´t sell them.
In return Adobe also clearly said they won´t develop their exporter further.
So its basically vaporware included in the ide.

Regarding alternatives for converting flash content:
Pixelwave will for sure get finished, i know that as the developers are good friends and they are pushing it nicely =)
Note that for that you should also still know cocoa stuff to some degree.
Other options are other middleware where you have to check which is still allowed on there.
For things like unity it looks good again after some initial wondering whether its still allowed. Unity made apps even after the new apple developer agreement change are still accepted by Apple and in many cases even featured among the staff picks.


Regarding what you said regarding flash dying:
Well, right now flash still is used for several things, main fields are video, ads and advertising centric sites and games.
But yeah, the thing is more and more big video providers like youtube are already providing versions of their sites and players which work on mobile devices without using flash, for games there are other middleware solutions coming up which allow deploying to more platforms resulting at way better performance than flash made stuff and well, advertising centric stuff is the main reason people install flash blockers, so yeah..

That´s also where i feel the discussion got off rails most, people started arguing whether html 5 is ready for doing everything one can do with flash.
Which is not the point really, its more about whether consumers actually want everything that´s doable with flash and whether if those parts most consumers really want can´t be done or isn´t done more and more with other solutions as time goes by.

Adobe has for the longest time ignored us game developers a lot while flash was used a lot more for other stuff, now as more and more of the flash usage for video stuff could go down over the next few years games would be the last big bastion of flash content most consumers actually want.

On that end it will be interesting what us flash game developers will do in large and for a good portion that´ll depend on whether they can actually earn their living with flash content once they don´t do it as hobby thing anymore and also which solution allows better results at more enjoyable less cumbersome workflow.

[erixon]

Apple have built simplified surfing devices. If it had Flash some applications would have run acceptable and some would been too slow. Things have to be optimized to run good on that thing. But what if you want to run "multimedia" on the net? HTML5/javascript is slower and doing some transformations or multiple things are really a mess across browsers. Even video will take time to implement. Do we want to stop to create fancy web pages or multimedia? No. Of course all services doesn't need Flash but majority of users have computers. Don't let Apple stop you.

[Ray Beez]

Lately I've been thinking, there's no reason they couldn't design Flash implementation on Ipad/Iphone to start off in a frozen state and require a click (tap) to activate it. That will solve much of the claimed "performance issues", especially given that this would stop multiple flash windows from running at the same time.

There is always a solution, always a compromise. Steve Jobs doesn't want one.

[Sietjp]

In case you didn'tt notice, Apple just authorized iPhone aps published with Flash CS5 http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010...statement.html

Let's see what comes to the store now

[Ray Beez]

Well that depends. It's funny because on anti-Flash sites, people are interpreting this as a means to allow Unity but still disallow Flash. Here on a Flash site, you jump to the conclusion that we can now use Flash.

The specific statement is:
"In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code."

Does Flash CS5 output something that "downloads code" ? (think about how vague that part of the statement is).

[Sietjp]

It's confirmed that Flash is now accepted, this update made with CS5 was waiting since march and has been approved yesterday : http://itunes.apple.com/app/phillyge...57413307?mt=8#

source twitter.com/rhall

[.hooligan]

Nice!

[Ray Beez]

Congrats Siet. But now I understand what Steve Jobs was saying. As an example, your app is a simple text app, yet frame rate is not up to "Apple polish". I clicked "Home" button and it did nothing (staying in pressed state) until I clicked it again. And everything, even text is at the old iphone screen res. (I assume cacheasbitmap is to blame, since text shouldnt be rendering with jaggies on an iphone 4 ... ??)

:-/

[Sietjp]

Actually it's not my app, it's the app of somebody I was following on twitter.
And I totall agree that even if iPhone apps made with Flash are authorized, it doesn't mean they will all be accepted. A low framerate also means batteries beeing consumed more quickly and this is not acceptable on mobile devices.

[.hooligan]

I've never used the iphone exporter in cs5 (still on cs3 ) does it give you the source once compiled so you can fool around with it in xcode? or just the compiled version?

[tomsamson]

It produces a final ipa app file. So yeah, it doesn´t get compiled using xcode and so it brings the theoretical upside of not needing a mac to build the app but downsides like not being able to use the xcode toolchain to test, debug or extend the app. You´re stuck with the functionality Adobe has exposed via their api.

Still, in theory, as with many flash related topics, this could still become big if Adobe does the right moves and instead of hyping and talking goes and pushes extremely hard to release a good update ASAP.

Right now the thing leads to lousy performing content compared to all other middleware solutions i tried (and i tried a good bunch) and its also quite outdated in feature state regarding which device features one can use cause we´re heading towards iOS 4.2 with fast app switching and game center etc on all devices and the Adobe solution is still stuck on early OS 3 version feature set (and didn´t even support most of the features that were available back then, like for example one could save a picture but then not open the photo gallery to choose the picture, likewise many other iOS sdk features were not usable or only half heartedly implemented).

So yeah, let´s see what Adobe actually delivers with the next flash update, if they want to get and be taken serious with this they would have to do it like many other middleware providers and release regular free dot version updates every few months to keep up with the ever evolving hardware and software specs of the mobile devices.

[.hooligan]

Yeah I thought so. What features can you use? Are the tilt features available?

I totally agree with you Adobe is in a very good position to screw this up if they don't keep up with the features current like other middleware's do.

The only reason I ask because rather then port something I'm working on with unity or in xcode it's so much more convenient to be able to export it from flash, but I was only thinking if I could come in and clean up some performance issues myself, unless adobe eventually does it for me.

Also the CS5 exporter only supports iphone/ipod resolution and not ipad?

[tomsamson]

Yeah I thought so. What features can you use? Are the tilt features available?

old style Tilt and multi touch yes, gyroscope no.
(so you can tilt but its not as precise and limited regarding axis etc, too)

I totally agree with you Adobe is in a very good position to screw this up if they don't keep up with the features current like other middleware's do.

yup

The only reason I ask because rather then port something I'm working on with unity or in xcode it's so much more convenient to be able to export it from flash, but I was only thinking if I could come in and clean up some performance issues myself, unless adobe eventually does it for me.

yeah, no tuning afterwards, as i said, its a final app what gets dropped out there.
Regarding performance: it was ok for some 2D stuff (though clearly again not anywhere close as native or other middleware made results) as long as you used all the flash typical performance trickery (ideally use no vectors at all, use cacheAsBitmap where appropriate, though best do all bitmapdata based and do heavy object pooling etc).
As soon as you had some other performance intensive things besides the graphical side going on like playing lots of sounds, a video, intense action with complex AI or physics sim going on etc it usually ran quite poor though.
Now the newer devices have faster cpu/gpu combo and more ram so that would help, on the other side the newer gen of devices also has way higher resolution so way more pixels to fill per frame, so yeah, would have to see if its good enough for your use case.

Also the CS5 exporter only supports iphone/ipod resolution and not ipad?

The last official version was released before there was an iPad or iPhone 4/ newest iPod touch with their higher resolutions, so yeah, other than obtaining some beta level stuff you´re largely out of luck right now.
Same with other iPhone device and OS features introduced after the last official Adobe release like in app purchases, Game Center, fast app switching etc.

[Ray Beez]

The last official version was released before there was an iPad or iPhone 4/ newest iPod touch with their higher resolutions, so yeah, other than obtaining some beta level stuff you´re largely out of luck right now.

I was in the Beta and when Ipad was announced, Apple also released the SDK update same day. This was back before the "terms" change. Adobe immeditely released PDFs detailing how to make your App adapt to the bigger Ipad screen.

Are you saying this was taken away in the final CS5 release?????

[tomsamson]

No, i´m not saying they took it away again before release, putting out a pdf isn´t exactly propper integrated support.

[Ray Beez]

No, i´m not saying they took it away again before release, putting out a pdf isn´t exactly propper integrated support.

WHATEVER! PDF + support to actually do it. Cripes.

*grumpy*

[tomsamson]

haha, yeah, you´re right
talking about this stuff seems to always bring out the grumpy moany groany side in all of us
Maybe best we just see what Adobe releases till the end of the year and if its something cool then use it, and meanwhile just go back to playing around with stuff we like today