“Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century,” Steinberg writes. “It’s time for it to go.”
“As tens of millions of additional customers acquire Apple’s mobile products, the number of visitors to Flash-based sites will also decline, which pretty much forces the issue. Web developers must either build two versions of their sites to accommodate the different requirements of their potential visitors, or just set Flash aside and try to work within open Web standards,” Steinberg writes. “That may be happening. Google is beta testing an alternative to YouTube without Flash, and just this week Virgin America, a small airline, decided to drop Flash from its site. In the Macworld article reporting on the change, writer Dan Moren concludes, ‘Because, as we know, all it really takes in the corporate world is one executive with an iPhone to ask why she can’t use the company’s site on her device.'”
Steinberg writes, “As has already been mentioned, even if Flash runs with decent performance, and even if it doesn’t hog system resources or compromise stability, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to magically access all or most Flash sites on your smartphone. Flash is designed to work with regular personal computers that have conventional input devices [not] multitouch… As a result, Web developers might begin to look for the free, open source alternatives to Flash that don’t require paying fees for Adobe’s products.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just this past Tuesday, “Smart companies don’t exclude potential customers who have the most disposable income. You want to cater to the type of people who buy Windows PCs based on lowest possible sticker price and who are much more likely to steal software, music, and movies? Or do you want customers who have been proven to spend money for quality, who understand true value, and who are much more likely to pay for software, music and movies? Your choice.”
Please see:
• Apple Mac owns 90% market share for ‘premium’ PCs costing over $1,000 with $499 iPad coming soon – February 01, 2010
• iPhone owners more likely to pay for digital content – November 26, 2009
• Apple iPhone users buy many more apps, surf the Web much more than other ‘smartphone’ users – March 27, 2009
• NPD: Mac users significantly more likely to pay for music than Windows PC owners [updated] – December 19, 2007
• Study shows iPod owners significantly less likely to steal music than the average person – January 13, 2006
MacDailyNews Note: Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
Virgin America site here
http://www.virginamerica.com/va/home.do
Click the map, it’s Flash. Long way to go if you can’t find one big site.
I won’t miss Flash. May it rest in peace.
theOnion.com was my main usage for Flash.
now they offer their finest news as podcasts!
No Flash!!! What am I going to do with my old grey raincoat with no buttons?
For perspective remember that Apple sells 90% of all US retail computers costing more than 1,000. Any advertiser that ignores Apple customers does so at their own peril.
Apple should make sure that every CEO in America and beyond knows this fact. At the same time they are driving home this simple fact they can state that to be compatible with the entire line of Apple’s category leading CE devices they had better leave behind legacy web tools for open web standards.
Never really cared for flash in the begining to now. It always crashed my pc and ain’t worth shit to my mac and iPhone soon iPad. I’ve been waiting for the day something would knock flash off it’s pedastool and give it a boot out and HTML5 is doing a pretty good job.
Web standards are very very important and adobe doesn’t want to let go of it’s strangle. Don’t be surprised if adobe & Microsoft join forces. I know silverlight is out there but that is shit too. Combine the two efforts and you just only have one pile of shit stinking up the place than two.
Adobe and Microsoft will never join forces – each is too stubborn to let the other have any input. These companies are two dinosaurs headed for extinction. Adobe faces smaller, more agile competitors for its flagship products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat), and Microsoft can’t give its customers a good reason to upgrade their current Office or Windows product except by cutting off support.
It will be an interesting next 5 years to see what happens to these two software behemoths.
Adobe should let flash go. They didn’t develop it, Macromedia did. It has had it’s day, but isn’t going to come along in the ultimate evolution of mobile computing. Out of respect for the absorption and extinction of Macromedia, which was in the process of kicking Adobe’s ass on most of it’s core software packages, Adobe should just put it to rest (in peace.) But, they’ll probably be like MS, and hang on to obsolete technology until their very last breath.
If Apple forces out Adobe’s Flash, I hope there’ll be no retribution from Adobe regarding Creative Suite’s future editions for the Mac. However I feel about Flash, I absolutely would hate for Adobe to start favoring PCs over Macs again with their other flagship software.
Since the iPad was announced, we have been hearing a lot of noise about Flash. Most of it seems to imply, hope, expect, or forecast, that it’s going away.
I have no doubt that there have been many high-level meetings of senior management at Adobe over this. It will be very interesting to see in which direction Adobe goes from here. A smart company might place bets on both sides. On the one hand, forcefully re-engineer Flash to make it lean and fast, as well as provide consistent, easy to use and effective tools for implementing multi-touch for touch-enabled devices. On the other hand, starting developing a new set of GUI development tools for delivering interactive, multi-media content using open standards (AJAX, CSS, HTML5…). Cover their bases. If Apple continues to stubbornly refuse Flash on their mobile devices, Adobe would offer a tool to develop similar content for those devices. For all others, the “new and improved” flash would make it harder for content developers to abandon Flash for a set of technologies that is arguably more difficult to work with.
Flash also discriminates against disabled people:
http://www.flashsucks.org
@McIntosh
I would argue that Adobe’s been treating Mac customers like shit for a few years now
Apple should just buy QuarkXpress and Package it with Aperture and maybe upgrade McDraw & McPaint into a creative suite to compete with Adobe. That would rock.
Die, Macromedia, die!!!!
You won’t be missed. Flash is directly responsible for ruining the web experience, replacing content with distraction.
Regarding the Virgin America web site – it has a large rotating billboard on it’s front page.
What technology is that?
……..In the Macworld article reporting on the change, writer Dan Moren concludes, ‘Because, as we know, all it really takes in the corporate world is one executive with an iPhone to ask why she can’t use the company’s site on her device………….
Interesting writing using she rather than the default he when describing corporate executives. Another sign we are advancing as a race?
@ bizlaw
I don’t know if there are “better” programs out there than Creative Suite. Certainly Photoshop, bloated though it may be, is the gold standard for raster editing. InDesign has thankfully put godforsaken Quark into the background, and Illustrator is more or less the only program I’ve ever known as a professional grade vector drawing program outside of AutoCAD. Bridge is awesome as a creative asset management tool. But what makes CS great is the fact that its components work so well together now. I’ve spent too long learning this world to do over again.
I think regardless of what Adobe thinks of Jobs and his push against Flash, they know they have a virtually guaranteed source of revenue and users in the Mac community for CS and they’ll treat them right.
@Meh…
“…knock flash off it’s pedastool…”
And perhaps also its pedastal.
@ Toonces
If Adobe has been mistreating the Mac community regarding CS, I don’t think I’ve noticed it. But then again, I’ve only been using CS programs since 2006 and don’t know much about the CS/Mac community history. Maybe I should look into that a little more.
@McIntosh
Please no! I abandon Quark years ago and it is painful to work in every time I open an old document.
I just wish Adobe would drop its Flash focus and add better support for some of Acrobats advanced features in InDesign and Illustrator.
@ Toonces
Adobe has had many Windows only functions in multiple versions of CS. It has also been vary slow to update (re-write) much of its bloated outdated code to take advantage of advances in OSX. Adobe also dropped FrameMaker for the Mac.
That being said InDesign is the best layout tool I have used in my over 20 year design career.
Methinks Apple’s not killing flash so much as hastening its demise.
Fix that headline!
Apple’s = belongs to Apple
@Rook,
CSS and JavaScript. Not Flash.
Thumbs-up, Virgin America. Flash does NOT need to be on an airline’s public-facing site. There is no good reason for it.
Flash does have important and critical applications, but NOT the web at large, and DEFINITELY NOT on a marketing/PR/sales-oriented site that doesn’t have directly to do with interactive media.
Thank you, Apple for shepherding the industry in the right direction on this issue.
Into a world of persistent ignorance and recalcitrant superstition comes Steve Jobs. Where others clung to green lines of code on black screens, his company had a mouse and GUI. Where there were floppy disks, he moved to optical. Where there was beige, his company brought colors and metals. In a world of CRTs he converted all his products to flat screens. As others insisted on physical keyboards on phones, he introduced a virtual one. Now html5 instead of flash. One more visionary stroke in a persistently ignorant world. Incidentally, along with all authentic scientists, Jobs is certain of the facts of evolution and global warming.
@qka
Apple’s = Apple is (contraction) as well as belongs to Apple
Apples on the other hand is the plural of Apple
As for Adobe’s products – does anyone outside the professional publishing industry actually need Photoshop and all its bloat? For what the vast majority of people do with it there are better, leaner tools available at much better prices.
On a personal note I’ll miss the odd well designed and implemented website that uses Flash but sadly they’re all too rare. I won’t miss the constant crashing caused by the implementation.
Setanta
I am so happy to hear that Flash is on the way out.
But the sad truth is: Flash use may first go way up before it going down.
I see a lot of really slick flash sites emerging (with most there aren’t that much annoyances like in the early days, think background tunes, long intros, etc), and as usual some are bad, but many are good, i.e., fast, easy to use, etc.
The reason: small and medium company business sites.
These are typically
– outsourced by people who don’t know much about Flash’s problems, and haven’t thought of/don’t know about Flash’s curse of reaching fewer people…
– outsourced to IT-folks/Web designers who have found themselves an invincible niche of mumbo-jumbo flash programming, and won’t quit using the techniques before they start feeling the pinch (money-wise, that is).
Hoping I am wrong and may Flash’s downfall be quick and deep.
How about this scenario.
Apple refuses to support Flash.
Adobe’s market value drops like a rock.
Apple slips in and buys Adobe cheap.
Game Over
@ecrabb
Thanks – I’ve been hearing a lot about jquery – though know nothing about it and thought it may be that.
Thanks again.
I wish ActiveX and Silverlight would die too.
Adobe is stupid for not overhauling flash for multitouch. They are doing this to themselves by not staying relevant and keeping pace with modern technology.
I have a good hunch that SJ even led them by the hand and showed them what they needed to do, and they refused. So screw em. Just like verizon they could have been a partner (by working with apple, taking their advice)but they blew it and now get nothing.
Or sooner I should have said. as in 10.1 being 2 yrs behind?
Plain and simple. Apple does not want apps to be distributed outside of the app store. They want their 30% from all developers. The ability to distribute an app via flash is detrimental to their stranglehold on software developers.
Flash is dying – and the iPhone could do some damage to other media formats too, including web markup languages.
Objective-C is the new HTML. Good times for Mac/iPhone developers, and it won’t become a commodity as quickly as HTML did.
Adobe IS the new Microsoft.
Buying and then killing FreeHand MX is a classic example of their removing all competition. So Flash dying out is fine by me considering Adobe’s anti-competitive tactics and it would be a nice slap in their face.
@Andreeccm: “Apple does not want apps to be distributed outside of the app store. They want their 30% from all developers The ability to distribute an app via flash is detrimental to their stranglehold on software developers..”
Nice try, but a vast majority of applications in the App Store are free… 30% of $0 is $0. Plus Apple is out the money required for storage and bandwidth. Your argument is complete nonsense.
Flash is not allowed because it breaks one of the largest developer’s rules; no separate run-times. That is, programs are not allowed to download external code, interpret it and run it. The Commodore 64 application had to be resubmitted with the BASIC interpreter removed for this same reason.
No one is stopping developers from creating web applications, which can be downloaded and “installed” onto the phone and run just as a regular application can. Even have its own icon on the main screen. Apple has a page on their site dedicated to these applications… http://www.apple.com/webapps/
I do a lot of surfing with Safari and Click-to-Flash. The number of webpages where I need to activate flash is rather small. No one needs it. Period.
It only survives because web developers like it.
I had installed a Flash blocker on my office Firefox about six months ago. In my ‘whitelist’, I currently already have some 48 sites that cannot work properly without Flash.
I would say, this represents almost half of all web sites I regularly visit. The other half also contains Flash (some more some less, a few don’t), but only for advertising, so it doesn’t bother me.
Keep in mind, though, this if Firefox, so they stubbornly refuse to support HTML5 completely (due to that “MPEG-4 isn’t an open-source standard” policy).
If you really want to be linked in and easy to search for on the web, flash is your enemy. It was cute way back when the early animators were doing some black humor with it, but it’s just flat annoying today.
I am laughing at all of you right now. Not only will Flash apps be coming to your iPhone/iPad in the next few months, half of you won’t even know that the programs are Flash based.
One of the biggest changes in Flash CS5 is the ability to use iPhones API to create iPhone apps. Of course these programs will not be web based because Steve Jobs has denied your Apple cult following the ability to use Flash on your browsers.
Needless to say, Apple products will get Flash based programs whether they like it or not.
So while you sit around waiting for your HTML 5(Which lacks serious fire power…), the majority of the world will be checking out awesome Flash content for years to come.
Flash lives… so live with it.
And I just got an email from ‘My Coke Rewards’ that their site is now good on the iPhone
@ McIntosh
“… I don’t know if there are “better” programs out there than Creative Suite. Certainly Photoshop… is the gold standard for raster editing. InDesign has thankfully put godforsaken Quark into the background, and Illustrator is more or less the only program I’ve ever known as a professional grade vector drawing program outside of AutoCAD…”
While I agree with you regarding Photoshop & InDesign (if Adobe treats its Mac customers bad, Quark has been pissing on their customers for years longer).
But Illustrator? Here I have to disagree. Macromedia’s FreeHand, I felt was always the more superior vector app., compared to Illustrator. Too bad Adobe abandoned it – I’d love to see someone pick FreeHand up and bring it up to speed. It was a great program.
As for Adobe not treating the Mac well – I first started noticing it with CS3. Everything started to look really “M$-like”. And they still haven’t optimized their suite for Cocoa. Seeing as Photoshop began life as an Apple-only product, this galls many Mac users.
At least it galls this Mac user.
@screamster – If what you say is true, that is fine. Flash can live with the Flash developers. If they are willing to pay Adobe to have an IDE translate Flash into Obj-C or HTML5 so it’ll run as native app on the iPhone or mobile Safari, that’s their money. Adobe is acting (at least externally) like this is some big affront but really is an opportunity for them to evolve with Apple/Google to set the standard for next generation dev tools. But it does beg the question – if it all compiles to HTML5/Cocoa Touch anyway, why do you need Flash/ActionScript except as a crutch for devs not willing to learn new lang?
What are the alternatives to flash then? What do I need to start learning? My clients still ask for it – are there alternatives I can point them to?
@botoncandy
“…But Illustrator? Here I have to disagree. Macromedia’s FreeHand, I felt was always the more superior vector app., compared to Illustrator. Too bad Adobe abandoned it – I’d love to see someone pick FreeHand up and bring it up to speed. It was a great program…”
Yep! As I said earlier, Adobe’s tactic of killing it’s competition (FreeHand) thru a buy-out is right out of MS’s book. I couldn’t agree more with your feelings about FreeHand as an excellent app and worthy of a future. Thankfully there are about 5000 users who agree with you: freefreehand.org. Can you say, open-source?
If it’s not about money and control then why do they not allow .ipa apps from third party distibutors and trying to get jailbreaking outlawed? They are a dictator mindset company. I enjoy their products. But not their facts. Including their marketing slander. Win customers on merit, not some guy that sits on tv and mocks their competitor.
Facts was supposed to be tactics. In the above. 🙁
I have Flash blocked in both Firefox and Safari. So I can control what Flash content displays.
And my Mac has run so much better since I started doing this.
MDN, you might want to tell your advertisers that there are six Flash-based ads on this page. That’s six wasted ads for them.
It surprises me how little I need to activate Flash content. And worse, how often it’s total overkill. e.g. a site the other day was using it simply to show rotating images – could have used Javascript.; and another was even using it just to show a flashing tick – could have easily used an animated gif.
Hulu answer, “We’re keeping a close watch on video support in HTML5. While as developers we are always excited about cool new technology, we always analyze it from the perspective of the needs of our customers: our end users, advertisers, and content
partners. To serve these customers well, we’d love to see further support in HTML5 for features including the following:
– Quality of service monitoring (e.g. detecting playback glitches)
– Advertisement playback and reporting
– Secure content delivery
Without support for the features listed above, it’s not really a viable option yet for companies like ours that serve ad-supported professional content.”
but what about all your base are belong to us and the other 200 or so viral flash videos?
a little sarcasm there; flash does suck tho; horridness system hog, as a developer I can tell you that HTML5 and H.264 is easier to develop with and 20x more efficient. May flash rest in piece. someone needs to start archiving and converting.
I would bet my life that Apple has, deep down in it’s skunkworks, competitive products to Illustrator and Photoshop armed and ready to go should Adobe ever threaten to pull those products from the Mac market. Bundle them with iLife/iWork and watch the Adobe empire crumble.
Click2flash is a awesome little app. No more dancing ads on my MBP.
@Maeric
Thank you so much for cluing me into freefreehand.org.
I’m glad to see there are others who feel the same as myself!
Just the fact that FreeHand let you make multiple page sizes in the same document – 5+ years ago, still puts it head & shoulders above Illustrator in my book.
Man, I miss Macromedia!
@botoncandy
You’re welcome. Look at what it accomplished in it’s lifetime to see why this is worthy of saving;
http://www.design-tools.com/freehand/
The flip side of this is that I surf more on Firefox as Safari will crash on some sites repeatedly. And that gets tiring.
I blame both parties equally. Apple is not without fault here.
I’m guessing a lot of you consume media but don’t create any. If I want to make a little cartoon, what programs out there work like flash? This cartoon has no complex codes or scripts, just frame after frame animation. What software if flash is no good should i use?