Funny “no Flash” on iPhone video

Then you have the other issue…

http://newsbiscuit.com/article/apple-iphone-cant-make-or-receive-basic-voice-calls-147

That’s brilliant!

Thanks Robert for the great find.

Wonder why they’d have not handled this issue prior to release. Great vid, btw.

I wonder what were they thinking in Apple, releasing a browsing device without flash?;)

I hope Apple stands firm on this. Web sites shouldn’t be built on proprietary plug-ins like Flash, when open standards like SVG are perfectly capable of replacing them. We didn’t get rid of captive-X from the evil empire just to get into the same situation with Adobe.

Sigh.

A lot of the world’s best online games over on Electronic Arts Pogo.com and sites like Kongregate are built in Flash.

I guess you don’t want any of those games on my iPhone. Well, screw off. I want to have Tower Defense and other games on my iPhone. SVG isn’t going to get those games on my iPhone.

Standards are fun but first Apple needs to support what people already have done and built. Flash is it.

YouTube is built in Flash, not SVG.

God, I hate people who have attitudes like yours.

Tomonzo: I hear Apple has some SVG bigots just like SomeGuy working on the iPhone team.

Engineers like purity and standards. The market just wants the job done.

People like Some Guy shouldn’t be listened to and, if they persist, should be fired.

Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but the reason why YouTube’s video is such crap is flash. That’s why they’re going to H.264 to support TV and the iPhone.

I hope there are SVG advocates on the iPhone team. It’s a superior technology.

BTW, if you want to play games, why don’t you get an Xbox 360?

(Oh, wait… Make that three Xbox 360s, so you’ll have a decent chance of having a working unit.)

I have a 360 and it works just fine.

But when I’m waiting in some security line, tell me how to play my 360. I’ll have my iPhone with me.

SVG can replace Flash?! Don’t be so ignorant and research more. This is like saying a couple of shoes can replace an airplane, or a GIF can replace a 8mm movie, or a rope can replace a bridge.

God, I hate when people start talking how much they hate something they obviously know so little about.

Stop the bigotry. This doesn’t get you freedom of choice or anything of the sort, it just makes you seem stupid. What’s next: we don’t need the web with its fancy images because we already got telnet?!

Robert,

Here’s an interesting take on why Flash isn’t on the iPhone. I didn’t write it; just forwarding it on:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-5595-4746-BFCE-524BBA7C7A85.html

“In any case, the iPhone is Apple’s best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such. The company just recently removed all remains of Flash from its corporate website, implementing everything that had been Flash-based using standards-based Ajax techniques instead.”

and

“Three years ago, Apple refused to include support for Windows Media on the iPod. That resulted in the online music market being opened up and pushed toward the vendor agnostic MPEG AAC format.”

An interesting take.

SVG is not anywhere near as capable as Flash. It’s too verbose, lacking in features and flexibility, and most importantly, has no VM. Flash Player has one of the fastest VMs available on a computer, is OPEN SOURCE (check Tamarin project at Mozilla), and will be used in future versions of Firefox. Also, the quality of video on YouTube isn’t due to Flash technology, it’s due to the fact that YouTube has opted to use the open source (and illegal) FFMPEG library to encode Sorenson h.263 video instead of using Flash’s newer VP6 codec – which rivals h.264. Why do they use Flash? Because EVERYONE has it. It’s the most widely distributed piece of software on the planet – period. Flash Player offers WAAAAAAAAAY more in capabilities than SVG, or any other “open standard.” It also offers a VERY PREDICTABLE environment to develop against. How much time do you spend debugging between browsers and platforms? And did I mention that the VM in Flash is Open Source? The file format is open? SOMEGUY: You should learn more about Flash AND SVG before you profess to downplay either one of them.

“the iPhone is Apple’s best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such.”

That’s just stupid. Why would Apple want to “kill Flash”? Microsoft doesn’t even want to “kill Flash” – they use it ALL OVER their website (check their recent product, “Surface” – http://www.microsoft.com/surface/). Microsoft just wants to stay relevant on the Internet – and they are quickly becoming less and less relevant among web developers. Also, sophisticated web applications (*cough* Google *cough*) are a huge threat to the OS – which is where MS makes it’s money. But I’m straying from the point.

Apple doesn’t want to “kill Flash” – they use Flash on their website from time to time but have recently favored using – GET THIS – Quicktime to do so! Shocking! Apple’s using their own rich client for displaying rich media on their own website. How dare they? Microsoft doesn’t even use Silverlight on their website (yet).

By the way, those Xbox Live marketplace games that you download an play — most of them are Flash. That’s right, they’re Flash. Microsoft ships their own version of Flash Player on the Xbox 360 and they have a big team in their casual games unit that builds games using Flash and a custom plugin they built for Visual Studio for doing ActionScript development.

Daniel Eran has a very interesting perspective, and I certainly hope he’s correct that leaving flash out of the iPhone was a policy decision, and not just a matter of how much they could have done by the launch date. Flash is a bug, not a feature.

Apple has never been known as an advocate of open source when it comes to their own playground. I wouldn’t want to work with javascript based animation technologies that all the so called experts are pushing to try to get engineers doing what artists have been doing for 10 years — animation and games for the masses that aren’t built over ten months but ten days. Come on Apple, give it up. No one is going to buy your games from iTunes, no matter how much you wish it to be. This is not what the web browser was meant to be — why include object/embed tags in HTML at all? Forget about all the sites with .net embedded activeX controls that are required for some enterprise environments. I think you’ll find that the iPhone will only work with 1/5 sites with no loss in content. Ajax blows — where’s the Flash IDE equivalent for Ajax? Yeah, I thought so. Flash is for the little guy, Ajax is for IBM.

Whether or not Flash is supported on the iPhone is irrelevant to the success of Flash, but it is certainly a ‘ding’ on the iPhone feature list and probably not relevant to the iPhone success either. It seems the battery issues and ATT lock-in will have more to do with the long term of that horse.

@Some (lol) Guy: SVG/Linux/pick-yer-religion zealots are always amusing – the SVG argument always reminds me of the joke where a d-list actor says to the French waiter “Don’t you know who I am?” and the French waiter replies “Non, Monsieur… who zee fuck are you?” In other words – if SVG was so great and competative, you’d see it used all over the web, its been around long enough and the 10 hardcore SVG zealots out there should have created *some* kind of web wonder to point at by now… right? right?? *ahem* link please…

Mike,

SVG + JS gives me anything I might want to do with Flash. In the words of the sages: been there, evaluated that.

Steve, don’t make the mistake that I advocate SVG. I simply point out that it’s an open, free alternative to Flash. If it were up to me, I’d impose a flogging on anyone using flash for anything that can be done with HTML, *especially* those freaking oh-so-clever real estate agents’ web sites.

I’m not sure I buy the analogy of AAC on the iPod. I’m pretty certain 99% of the music on iPods is MP3. I do sense the exclusion of Flash was intentional however. Exactly the master plan and the deal or lack of with Adobe we sure won’t find out any time soon. I do accept that excluding Flash might be Apple’s “best shot” at eliminating Flash–but that’s like saying their chance is now 0.0001 out of a million instead of an even lower number. SVG… funny. YouTube exemplifying the best possible Flash video… similarly funny. For better or worse, the internet without Flash is not the internet. I can’t believe I agree a little with “Some (unnamed) Guy” when he says you shouldn’t use Flash when you could use HTML. But, man, get real please.

First, I’m not an “SVG bigot” and I don’t agree with “Some Guy” on many things (including “flogging”, wtf?!?).

Further, I don’t think SVG is a replacement for Flash – and I think the iPhone will have some form of Flash on it eventually.

But whoever said that “SVG has no VM” doesn’t know what they are talking about. SVG/Flash are the languages. Browsers/plugins/players are the things that run/interpret the languages (i.e. the “virtual machine”), So saying “SVG has no VM” is really nonsensical. The JavaScript interpreter + DOM _IS_ the VM for SVG browsers.

And the other quote that got me was “if SVG was so great and competative [sic], you’d see it used all over the web” – surely you realize that whether a technology succeeds or fails does not depend solely on its technical merits. Corporate agendas have a lot to do with it too. If Flash doesn’t succeed, Adobe won’t be able to keeping sell its developer tools. Same goes with Silverlight and Microsoft. And I’m not saying this is a bad/good thing, either.

After reading a bit more articles on the iphone, I have my own take as to why we’ve not seen Flash on the iPhone yet:

Outside of hardware graphics acceleration, the iPhone is pretty slow compared to a computer. Really, really slow, actually (see the benchmarks linked below). Some blogs talk about the iPhone having a very specific video codec that is hardware accelerated, and it’s the only type of video that the iphone will play. Hence the custom Youtube video app with only a small sliver of videos available.

So, my guess is that a *straight* port of Flash to the iPhone was embarrassingly slow. Video playback sucked; perhaps even semi-complex vector rendering sucked too. So Apple, rather than ship with a Flash experience that made the iPhone look slow, tabled it altogether until Adobe (or Apple, or both) could optimize it for the iPhone’s hardware. They then pulled the Flash from their site so that apple.com was fully “iPhone compatible” — it would be silly if the iPhone couldn’t view all of Apple’s own site. Apple probably yanked any flavor of Quicktime from the site that was not iPhone compatible too.

Javascript benchmarks here:
http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/07/01/iphone-javascript-and-spec-benchmark/

Note that this is running in Javascript inside of Safari, so it’s safe to assume that the javascript engine was as least *somewhat* optimized by Apple for the iPhone. Still, these numbers aren’t anywhere even close to comparable to what a PC can handle. Without heavy optimizing, my guess is Flash on iPhone would crawl slower than a baby.

I don’t doubt though that at some point, it will be optimized to a reasonable degree.

“SVG + JS gives me anything I might want to do with Flash. In the words of the sages: been there, evaluated that.”

If you are comfortable with that, then fine, but there are plenty of others out there that want to push the web beyond what browsers along are capable of.

There are plenty of things that Flash can do that SVG can’t. Video and Audio are two big things, not to mention high performance rendering of vector AND bitmap assets.

While I agree that HTML should be chosen first if possible, it’s ignorant to think that SVG could replace Flash.

I saw a blog by a Laszlo engineer and he said that even Laszlo sucks on an iPhone (Laszlo is an open source Flash compiler using declarative markup that pre-dates Flex and now incorporates standard DHTML). I don’t have a link unfortunately, but he was mentioning that just a simple Laszlo DHTML button is a hog on the system. A nice, candid observation, I thought.

I was once a big advocate of SVG but you can’t ignore an installed base like Flash. Hopefully the next version of iPhone will incorporate Flash.

The Archos 605 WiFi is the first product that supports full screen flash video streaming:

it also supports flash video in normally embedded mode, but for watching video the full-screen mode is automatic and is a much better experience. Full-screen flash is something we hardly have on our computers and Archos does it automatically for video (a popup asks if you want to watch the video in full-screen mode or in normal embedded mode).

More videos of the Archos here: http://archosfans.com/2007/07/07/english-dubbed-video-of-archos-ceo-henri-crohas-keynote/