Comments on: Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not so easy

Shantanu Narayen acknowledges that even after months of striving, a workable version of Flash for the iPhone remains a tough nut to crack.

[iff2mastamatt]

Symbian? Please?

[malmedia]

Hopefully it is better than the PSP's Flash Player.

[john55440]

Adobe also hasn't delivered Flash-64 for Windows. On the consumer side, most new computers come with Vista-64 Preinstalled, soon to be followed by Win7-64 Preinstalled.

[getwired]

But since the predominant browser, and the one you should be using, is a 32-bit browser, that isn't an issue. Don't expect 64-bit ActiveX controls for at least 8-10 years, if ever. There isn't a compelling need to port the world's ActiveX controls to 64-bit - 32-bit under WOW64 works just fine.

[Lerianis]

That isn't good enough, get wired. Making everything 64-bit enables of some the 64-bit OS's special protections, that are not available when using 32-bit code.

[gwhiz2K]

I should point out that I have 64bit Flash player running in Firefox on Ubuntu 64bit. It's a bit of a large switch: Adobe porting something out to Linux users before Win/Mac users...

[DubleDeuce]

Shucks, Fat chance on you getting YOUR version of Flash any time soon. I'm still waiting for my version of Flash for my Commodore 64 machine.

[UITD]

Sorry, but this wouldnt have happened with Macromedia. I've had numerous crashes with PDF - a format that I hate with a passion. Almost as bad as Java, the programming language. Man that sucks too.

Adobe purely sucks. period.

[JadedGamer]

Microsoft have no plans for a 64-bit Silverlight, why should Adobe be in any hurry?

[Goodbye Helicopter]

flash is a resource hog.
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.

[Ilgaz]

If you have a real smart phone like us, Symbian owners, you would know the Flash on portable isn't the desktop Flash. It can run on sub 200 mhz ARM processors without problem. Flash does use GPU very well too, the underlying OS is responsible for its GPU acceleration.

[seven7dust]

&llgaz
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

[Lerianis]

Flash is a big resource hog..... I have a pretty good computer that Flash sometimes in SLOWER THAN SH** on, and it's a gaming PC. I first throught that "Meh.... the GPU isn't running correctly!" It was running correctly, Flash is just too STUPID to use it.

[greatzulu]

flash player cant be that hard to make for iphone and ipod touch when there is a flash plug in for jail broken ipods and iphones.

[ArtInvent]

Yes. I have to think that enabling Flash on the iPhone interferes with Apple's business model: to make money from media sales on iTunes. Enabling Flash would mean that all the video and music and games available on the entire web would be accessible, and thus erode Apple's profit machine. Same as the situation for AppleTV - enabling a complete web browser with Flash on your TV would be the obvious answer to access web entertainment sites - but then Apple's iTunes would no longer be the essential portal that it is now. I fail to see why Apple users put up with this stranglehold Apple insists on maintaining over web and entertainment access.

[anilsudh]

Since it is so trivial why don't you make one.

[suspicious_alouicious]

surely youtube app for iphone is proof apple are holding out on us?

and plenty of simple apps on itunes that could run in flash.

[ewelch]

No, YouTube added h.264 media for the iPod Video. The YouTube you see on the iPhone right now is the h.264 streaming media, not 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.

[chabig83]

"most new computers come with Vista-64 Preinstalled"

Really? I thought 32 bit Windows was still king.

[getwired]

It is. I don't know where that poster came up with that...

[rklrkl]

If the poster had said "most high-end new computers come with Vista-64 Preinstalled" (i.e. those with decent dual-core or quad-core CPUs and 4GB RAM), then they might have had a case. Dell XPS machines, for example, are indeed now shipped with 64-bit Vista (although on Dell UK's site, you bizarrely have to selected it as a zero-cost alternative).

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.

[jz33040]

The iphones cpu and battery life are too limited to run it. Flash was designed to be a player for very simple anims on pc and net etc. So adobe coded it high level and inefficiently. In order to run it on an iphone, they need to redo it in a more efficient manner. Even if they get it going, it will have very limited apps it can run becaue the iphone is simply under powered next to a desk top. But working with apple, they will probably have the ability to access code more directly along with the cpu etc. But even if it gets more cpu cycles out of the iphones cpu, it will still kill the battery that much faster. THAT is why adobe is having so much trouble with it. They'd have to rebuild the app from the ground up and then it will still not be able to run the most complex flashes a desktop can run.

The Flash player is coding very efficiently, but was implemented at a time when GPU (graphic boards) where most the time not used to compute rendering. So everything is done using the CPU. Second big problem is the vent loop. The Flash viewer will drain the battery to its knees very quickly because it will never stop (or sleep when something is displayed. A complete rewrite won't do the trick: the basic principle of Flash are not right for a cell phone.

[Hep Cat]

Adobe built an application without foresight or a way to make a lightweight and portable version? Why, I'm SO surprised! I mean, just look at Photoshop, which has had fifteen years to move to a portable architecture....and still, Adobe ends up making the Mac version carry all the unnecessary interface baggage the Windows version suffers with. Adobe is the perfect example of a company with a beholden audience, no desire to innovate other than to drive product upgrade cycles, and no apparent ability to see their own failings objectively.

[Perry_Clease]

"just look at Photoshop, which has had fifteen years to move to a portable architecture....and still, Adobe ends up making the Mac version carry all the unnecessary interface baggage the Windows version suffers with"

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."

[jinx101a]

Just want I need, more Flash advertisments that slow the computer/device down to a crawl. Flash games are great, Flash apps are great, Flash advertisments are super obnoxious for the most part. I'd like to see it on the iPhone but only if there's a way to disable it when you don't want it.

[winstein]

Adobe has problem delivering Flash for 64-bit Windows and iPhone, which led to me to believe that a big portion of Flash is hand-coded 32-bit low-level assembly code.

[vamman]

64bit? Linux? IPhone? Adobe come on?

[gerrrg]

Seems like Adobe is just a wee bit slow in supporting new OSs. Question is, will Silverlight take the opportunity and sneak in the back door?

[eadeguzman]

The problem with Silverlight is they opened-up where the application can run, but development will still need to be done on a Windows machine (Visual Studio or .Net SDK).

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?

[inachu]

I hate the latest version of flash..... many times after the video is done playing there are optiosn for that video but adobe thought it would be nice to place advertisements over the menu options if I wanted to replay or choose a video link lower down but it is blocked by stupid flash spam adverst you can't bypass.

[nixermac]

Flash is heavy because it it trying to handle too many things at the same time. It has sort of become a platform while not truly being one. Adobe AIR is supposed to replace the overheads but that is not happening anytime soon. Remember Flash was FutureSplash play before Macromedia acquired it long back. back then the scripting was bare minimum and we did see a great future in Flash. Now I would love to see flash take a step back and create a rich-media higher version and a secondary tier flash that would appeal to the smart phones and handheld devices. I am not talking about Flash Mobile. That is absolutely the FutureSplash code.

For the 64bits Windows version, the problem is somewhere else. A 64 bi Linux version is available. I suspect the Windows architecture itself (ActiveX) is the problem.

[SatoshiNakajima]

I think Adobe is going to have a very hard time porting real Flash (not Flash lite) on iPhone. I think Javascript-based animations are much more feasible and scalble. Here is my view:

http://satoshi.blogs.com/uie/2009/03/do-we-really-need-flash-on-iphone.html

[thinkingmanDotCom]

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.

[emx385]

Apple working with adobe? Really? Hmm let's see.

Adobe wanted to finish apple off by moving to PC. Apple tried to protect it's self by working with Macromedia on similar programs for Apple. Although Macromedia never took the programs, apple did end up with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. There is a lot of bad blood between these two companies and the ball is in apple's court.

Adobe deserves what it gets for canning Macromedia Director and the Shockwave pluggin. Flash light is a port of a 1998 flash player. It isn't even close to the later versions. Flash has always been poorly built and now it is catching up with it. Apple with come up with a flash style SDK before it hands the keys over to Adobe.