I suspect there were both performance, user experience and business/control freak reasons not to put flash on the iphone.
Certainly on the desktop flash was very cpu-intensive and older mobile lite versions of flash were not very good. However Adobe have been improving on this, and there is a general move towards gpu-accelerated video decoding which takes the load of the cpu on both desktops and mobile devices. Its especially important on mobiles for battery life and because the cpus often are not powerful enough to do decent video playback on their own. Flash has been getting better at hardware-acelerated stuff but Apple still want to do things their way. Apple also probably wanted to be careful with the user experience in terms of things like multitouch and screen size, so they didnt want people running flashbased apps that were not iphone specific. But I would think they also wanted to make sure that iphone developers use Apple stuff rather than flash, there are a few commercial reasons for this, and the success of the app store will make them even keener to persue these sorts of strategies. On the desktop Apple have also been dong all sorts of things that could increase the chances of flash becoming obsolete in the longterm, eg canvas tags, downloadable fonts, css transforms & transitions, webGL. Apple have mostly been doing this the right way, by giving these things to other standards bodies to ratify and make part of web standards that goes way beyond Apple, although Apple have not helped the chances of the html5 video tag becoming a big success due to the standard codec issues. If I was forced to make a prediction Id say that flash will slowly fade out over the next 2-5 years as web standards & browsers improve. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, forestm...@... wrote: > > Joly MacFie wrote: > > > > > > Forest - are you suggesting that flash is more > > cpu-intensive than baseline h.264? > > > > Is that so? > > > > I was referring to the flash player in general and wasn't suggesting the > flash container itself requires significantly more > resources on the client side. (Also, flash is a container format; 264 is > a compression format, so not completely sure what your question is.) > > Even so, when Adobe/Apple rolled out their 'compromise' last year, there > was the usual hang-wringing about battery life & browser performance; > although to my mind it's not clear how a custom rolled app that plays > flash video from a specific site (eg. Hulu) would *necessarily* realise > significant performance gains. (At just 5MB the whole binary itself weighs > in on the low side of a typical app, and not likely the app porter is > going to improve its performance.) > > But then I haven't built an app such as that, myselfÂ… yet. > > > stay tuned, > > forest mars > -- > mnn.org > http://mnn.org >
