Actionscript Development Notes

A rebuttal to Steve Job’s long winded post which can be viewed here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

1) Flash is proprietary and closed. Sure, that’s true in the sense that the source for the IDE and some of the visual editors is not readily available. However there are a huge variety of 3rd party flash creation tools which output the same swf format that adobe themselves uses. Apple however does not allow this type of creation on their mobile platforms. Further the flex SDK and flex compiler are completely free to download… and are part of Adobe’s open source initiative: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK. Translation: it might not be the worlds most accessible platform, but it sure is open.

2) Listing 10 sites that support h264 video a patented closed codec that Apple themselves is pushing does not in any way explain how apple supports “The full web”. Steve is quick to call out youtube as an example of h264 enabled site–unfortunately for his example not all of youtube’s content is available as h264. Additionally many popular 3rd party sites such as liveleak.com and collegehumor.com do not support h264. Of course this entire argument is structured around video, where the real context of the argument should be centered around all of the great interactive work that uses flash… none of which is accessible on Apple mobile devices. And really, lets examine Apple’s motives for why: is it really in their best interest to allow a huge amount of free content that is more interesting/entertaining than their current app store content that they are making 30% of each sale on?

Additionally, it is important to note that in the iPad’s current implementation of mobile safari the “Blue Lego” has been removed. Why would Apple take this away if there wasn’t user backlash against “missing” web content? Rather than rehash this argument I will simply link you to Grant Skinner’s excellent post on the subject: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/return_of_the_b.html

3) Security. Steve points fingers at Adobe’s less than stellar security record with flash. Unfortunately for him, all major flash security holes have been rapidly fixed… unlike those in OSX which caused it to be labeled as the least secure modern operating system by a security expert. Lets face it, they don’t even randomize the locations of libraries in RAM… leading to trivial buffer overflow exploits.

Performance. Steve attempts to claim that flash doesn’t run well on mobile devices. A few recent videos from Google showing 10.1 running on android 2.2 beg to differ. If there was really this massive performance hit Google wouldn’t be including it in ALL android with the 2.2 release.

4) Battery life (which is really part of the performance argument since this is really about software vs hardware decoding–but lest we forget, steve is not an engineer). Sure, hardware decoded video is faster and way way way more power efficient. So why did you choose to go with a proprietary and closed system (the apple A4) instead of adopting the Nvidia TEGRA 2 platform which supports flash video playback in hardware, and has been getting excellent reviews in early test units? Blaming Adobe for your own hardware choices seems to be fallacious at best.

5) Touch support. Flash 10 has full multitouch support for both raw touch data as well as specific gesture events. HTML5 supports neither.

6) Oh noes 3rd party IDEs making software on our platform. Again, this is a barely disguised move to attempt to make more iDevice exclusive content. By handicapping tools that are designed to make ALL mobile development streamlined for developers it forces the very people that Apple’s success has been based upon to bend over backwards to support their platform. Who would buy “Plants vs Zombies” in the appstore if they could play the flash version on their device (at 100% speed) for free? Its in Apple’s best interest to close down their platform. Unfortunately both the consumer and the developer suffers as Apple puts their own profits in front of the needs of the user.

Conclusions: HTML/Javascript were also created during the PC era. As such they have even less support for modern mobile/touch interfaces. HTML5 as a proposed standard sounds like an interesting idea. Unfortunately its not currently a standard, nor is it even up for ratification by the W3C until 2022. Claiming that your platform supports open “Standards” is disingenuous at best. Focusing the argument entirely on video again ignores not only the large variety of other sites that DO NOT support h.264 for video. It further ignores the vast wealth of free interactive content currently residing in the SWF format. Everything from games to tools, all of which would run fine on a properly supported platform with decent (tegra2) hardware support for the format.

As a developer–especially in such a rapidly moving technology segment as modern web development its important to stay current with all possible new technologies. As such I have built projects in HTML/CSS/javascript (jquery), HTML5 canvas experiments, as well as Microsoft Silverlight. The conclusions that I drew from this were that there are many exciting new technologies that have incredible (and often better) capabilities than the Adobe Flash™ platform. Unfortunately none of them are as easy to use for the graphic designers and non-coding animators that make up the backbone of the marketing and non-application Flash development community. Until a tool comes out that makes any of these technologies as accessible to non-developers as the Flash IDE has done throughout the years calling any of them “open” is not only foolish, its a disservice to the creative spirit that apple claims to nuture through their branding.

I challenge Steve Jobs to personally build 2 simple applications (i realize hes a busy man) in both technologies before making any wide, sweeping and completely uninformed statements about technologies that he has never used at anything but a consumer level.

edit: as a side note from conversations i’ve been having about this post… i forgot to mention that Apple’s own user experience department uses flash for prototyping. (thanks jef)