Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not so easy
The work at Adobe Systems toward getting its nearly ubiquitous Flash technology onto the Apple iPhone goes on...and on, and on.
Speaking with the Bloomberg news service on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen acknowledged that even after months of striving, a workable version of Flash for the iPhone remains a tough nut to crack.
No Flash for you--not yet, anyway.
(Credit: CNET Networks)"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," Narayen told Bloomberg Television. "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."
How much exactly are the two companies collaborating? Some reaction to the Bloomberg report has taken Narayen's words to suggest that Apple is pitching in like never before. But we've seen that kind of generality before in regard to Flash for the iPhone, dating back to March 2008, when Adobe first confirmed that it was working to bring Flash apps to the iPhone. And even then, it was apparent that this would not be a simple chore.
As Adobe said at the time: "To bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK (the iPhone software development kit) and the current license around it."
Two weeks before that, in early March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had thrown cold water on hopes for a happy Flash-iPhone coexistence. The PC version of Flash, he said, "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, while the Flash Lite version for mobile phones "is not capable of being used with the Web."
However far along Adobe actually is with reconfiguring Flash for the iPhone, it will need a definitive thumbs-up from Apple to bring the technology to the public.
So perhaps we should be paying more attention to this part of Narayen's statement to Bloomberg: "The onus is on us to deliver."
In November, Adobe talked up a new push to broaden the use of Flash on mobile phones. "We are in the midst of evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile," Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said at the time. "We're taking the full Flash Player and making that run on the higher end of the mobile market." Conspicuously absent from the presentation was the iPhone.
Lynch said in the November presentation that the company was confident enough to move up its goals for making phones Flash-enabled. "We're actually going to get 1 billion Flash-enabled phones by 2009," he said.
Jonathan Skillings is managing editor of CNET News, based in the Boston bureau. He's been with CNET since 2000, after a decade in tech journalism at the IDG News Service, PC Week, and an AS/400 magazine. He's also been a soldier and a schoolteacher. E-mail Jon. 
Adobe purely sucks. period.
It fails to use gpu, and uses the cpu generating lots of heat.
that's passable on laptops and desktops, but on a mobile phone, battery killer.
the flash your talking about is flash lite
which is a crippled version of flash
the flash Adobe/Apple r working on is the entire pakage
which is why it will be a resource hogg unlike the symbian version
and plenty of simple apps on itunes that could run in flash.
Flash is ubiquitous. I develop for flash for online education and we really had not choice but to use Flash becuase more than 90 percent of all browsers out there use Flash. But this is REALLY good news for us, because our educational material on an iPhone will be a boon to our students around the world.
Really? I thought 32 bit Windows was still king.
Logically, if you have less than 4GB RAM, though, going 64-bit doesn't make much sense really - 32-bit Windows can use up to 3.25GB RAM, which is probably fine for 95% of all users (yes, even those with Vista). It does get my goat that some OEMs ship machines that are capable of having 4GB or more of RAM (even offering to go from, say, to 2GB to 4GB as an optional extra) and then *don't* provide the similar "upgrade" option of 32-bit to 64-bit Vista.
MS don't charge OEMs any more money for 64-bit Vista compared to its 32-bit equivalent, but there is the additional testing time they'd need to certify their hardware against yet another OS variant of Windows - margins are tight enough that OEMs have mostly ignored 64-bit historically :-(
However, give it a couple of years and I think the entry level for PCs will indeed be 4GB RAM for a desktop (and quad core will also be the norm by then) - at that point, the OEMs will *have* to offer 64-bit OS'es by default, otherwise cue lots of customers wondering why they can't use 768MB of their RAM.
Funniest thing about this whole 64-bit Windows debacle is that the OS that's got the most pre-built 64-bit apps - by a long way - is now Linux! So if you want a 100% 64-bit system that doesn't run any 32-bit apps at all, Linux is basically your only OS choice at the moment.
It is pretty much the same with all of the CS4 apps, Windowie as hell. it might make the subject for a movie, "The Decade the Interface Stood Still."
Anyway, I'm guessing that the problem is not really porting to iPhone but adhering to Apple's rules on the Apple Store. Maybe they want development on Flash for iPhone can only run on iPhone and those developed for general Flash can't run on the iPhone.
Not sure how iPhone can keep-up with this software development model. It's the most closed system there is, I believe.
What does the open source community have anything to say about this?
http://satoshi.blogs.com/uie/2009/03/do-we-really-need-flash-on-iphone.html
- by thinkingmanDotCom August 2, 2009 11:37 AM PDT
- Flash is bloatware in the extreme. The difficulties inherent in making a rather large "platform" work on a device with comparatively little ram, storage, etc. without interfering with the rest of the user experience is something that is nearly impossible to overcome without some very clever programming tricks, optimizations and downright hacks. You need to reach right down into the core of the device and allocate everything manually, without resorting to any of the shortcuts possible during regular development. In addition, you still have to deal with massive realtime processing tasks using megabytes of simultaneously-loaded video, sound and images, all (possibly) undergoing layered filtering of some sort, without causing the phone to become unresponsive to touch events, notifications, phone calls, low power events, memory warnings, not to mention clobbering interface orientation changes. Flash itself will have to be completely reimagined, and I imagine Adobe is hard at work trying to now unify their 8 bazillion, incompatible Flash platforms into something more palatible to individual OpSys providers, not to mention open source projects. I'd bet around the end of 2009 we see a new version of Flash called something like "Flash Unity 11" which is 10, but with tons of bandwidth and memory shaping options throw in for more savvy developers to take advantage of. At that point, those of us who archive and keep our .FLA documents can recompile them and make them work with the (hopefully simultaneously released) update to Safari that will contain this plugin. Anything less than this is asking Apple to give up millions of dollars in perceived market share to a technology which would directly compete with their App Store and require a minimal, Open Source operating system to run. Sound familiar? I'll take superior technology and clearer division of responsibility/performance any day. That's why RIA is still so slow in adoption as of the date of this posting, at least over broad distribution.
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