Adobe, Get Off Your Fat …
Adobe’s Flash Player Not Suited For IPhone, Apple CEO Says
As Jobs put it Tuesday, Apple’s iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.
Whose job is it supposed to be to provide a Flash player for the iPhone?
Why should Apple do it? Flash isn’t Apple’s creation. And apparently the H.264 video codec can produce far better images than Flash.
I see this as yet another failure by Adobe. Did Adobe even approach Apple about developing Flash for the iPhone? I doubt it.
Why?
Just look at Adobe’s history with PalmOS. The PDF viewer they created for PalmOS was a disaster. No one was pleased with it. It used too much RAM and was too slow.
Similarly, with Flash, only Sony’s latter CLIEs were able to play Flash. Palm’s own PDAs couldn’t.
This really makes me wonder about that new PDF software for the Sony Reader (hey, it’s now March; where is it?) as well as the IDPF’s .epub ebook file standard.
Adobe is looking more like a fat and complacent Microsoft all the time.
Hey Adobe! When the “iSDK” is released, are you going to do something?
Adobe Under Scrutiny. Doesn’t Look Promising.
March 5, 2008 at 6:27 pm
The sad thing is, Adobe is an empty shell. Final Cut Pro made Adobe Premiere obsolete. Preview COULD make Acrobat Distiller/Reader obsolete, with very little effort. Apple could put a pretty face on GIMP and kill Photoshop. Lightroom is a rip-off of Apple’s Aperture.
Flash is–well–Flash. Annoying. CPU hog.
March 6, 2008 at 3:05 am
As someone who worked on the Adobe Reader for Palm OS, you have to understand that the processing power of most of the Palm’s was quite limited. AS for it being a “disaster” – Palm Computing liked it enough to bundle it on the companion CD-ROM for most of their Palm’s. I could give you plenty of examples from users that were perfectly happy with the Adobe Reader for Palm OS.
As for Flash on the Sony CLIE – that was licensing deal with a “clone” company, and if you looked into the details, used much of the processing power.
I doubt the iPhone SDK will be sufficient enough to develop a Flash Player. Adobe wants Flash to be ubiquitous. It’s Steve Jobs/Apple that is preventing Flash not being supported on iPhone rather than Adobe.
And the PDF support on the Sony Reader – that is using Adobe licensed technology.
March 6, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Here’s Adobe’s record on getting PDFs to work on Palm:
1 – Adobe PDF files for the Palm Platform
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/501/adobe-pdf-files-for-the-palm-platform/
2 – Acrobat Reader for the Palm Beta Released
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/1798/acrobat-reader-for-the-palm-beta-released/
A YEAR LATER! And then still a BETA!
3 – Palm PDF Version 1.1 Released
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8408/palm-pdf-version-1.1-released/
The 4th comment there, from joad, sums up the Palm user experience with Adobe’s rotten program.
Just because Palm bundled it free doesn’t mean a thing. Palm would bundle a damned pack of Q-Tips if they thought it would help sales.
March 31, 2008 at 9:09 am
Flash 9 (Actionscript 3.0) isn’t the “hog” Flash 8 was. It’s so awesome to program in – games especially.
I don’t even own an iPhone and I’m disappointed! I want to write Flash games for mobile devices in one language across all devices.
I’ve been programming in Java for 15 years, and I’m happy to see SilverLight, JavaFX, and Flex all out there. I like options.
You can bet Apple is trying to develop a 4th alternative and keep the gates closed on their device.
Speaking of, we own an iPod and hate iTunes. ITunes store has kept us from listening to our own music several times.
Did you know you have to have crack software just to download your music back off the iPod? It’s a horrible experience to be kept out of your own music (my wife burned all her CD’s, had most on iPod, then our hard drive crashed – and she threw away her CDs cause they were taking up too much room – big mistake!)
I feel this is where they are taking the iPhone as well.