“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.
@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.