Flash is such a piece of crap. I'm glad it's not on the iPhone and I hope it never is
About six months ago, a friend who was working closely along side adobe's flash application development team told me that they received a prototype of Flash for iPhone. The prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash. They then sent the prototype to apple and suggested incorporating this prototype iPhone flash into the iPhone OS in the next update.
Apparently apple sent this letter back thanking them for being interested in developing a working version of flash for the iphone but because the prototype is so processor intensive, and awful for battery life, they would not include it with their OS because it is just not good enough. They suggested using the gpu instead of the processor to render flash. Then they suggested building a seperate app for flash and web browsing because there was no way apple could endorse flash integration on the iphone in its current state.
Adobe apparently didn't want to release the app under their name either and it never showed up in the app store.
A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn't going to be endorsed by Apple.
Flash sucks. It takes forever to load stuff. Flash videos are rarely high quality. The fans on my computer always jump to full speed, my lap catches on fire. And often it crashes.
I really wish Quicktime had won the online video battle. The quality and experience are far superior. Quicktime just doesn't have the penetration flash does.
But I'm glad it's not on my iPhone. The last thing I need is for my iPhone to be even hotter or have an even shorter battery life.
4 comments
My favorite example of how badly Adobe sucks at programming is this: http://blog.greensock.com/tweening-speed-test/ Basically this guy had to rewrite the Tweening engine in Actionscript because Adobe's is so buggy and slow it's unusable. Just look at the speed test! TweenLite does tweens super fast - so fast that Adobe's official Tween class can't even run the demo without crashing! And this guy had to write it in Actionscript, whereas Adobe could have written it in native code... and still theirs is slower. Weak!
However, the point is moot because Flash is dying. With jQuery and HTML5 you can do pretty much anything Flash can do, without all the accessibility, searchability and stability problems that Flash imposes. As soon as the browsers can decide on a common video codec and completely implement HTML5, we will be in a new world.
