Adobe’s Flash is under a lot of scrutiny at the moment. A brief summary of latest developments (in no particular order):

1 - Firefox will “sandbox” Flash so that when it crashes, it won’t bring the rest of the browser down.

2 - No iPod/iPhone/iPad support in the browser. This is unlikely to change.

3 - Apple’s new iAds framework for iPhone OS 4 is run on HTML 5 - no Flash anywhere to be seen. If you want to do iAds, you’ll need to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

4 - And today’s big buzz - is that Apple’s iPhone OS4 SDK developer agreement says that you can not use something like Flash Compiler to build iPhone apps:
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphon ... h_compiler
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/04/08/app ... agreement/

Apple are clearly going after Adobe here, and I know many here have little sympathy for Flash anyway, but it seems that others are also considering corralling this technology onto the naughty step.

That said, it has taken how many years for the HTML <video> tag to be ratified? And what’s emerged as the #1 internet web delivery system? QuickTime? No - Flash.

Well at one point we thought [BLINK] was a good idea. The internet moves on.

Jon

Tbh, I've had more problems with things failing to run in QT (in general) than Flash, but both are a bit crap IME

I think Apple did a bad port of QT to Windows, and there is no QT for any of the *NIX's...

Flash is pretty horrid, and tbh, on most of the sites that use it, I don't notice that it's there, because they are ads that get blocked by my browser...

Flash can be good or bad. Like many powerful tools, it can be abused. Like many powerful people, it has become fat and complacent.

However, I can't think of a single nice thing to say about QT. I hate it. I'd rather have a baby raping Nazi bugger me up the arse with a red hot pineapple than let it near my PC. It's just evil and it should die and go to hell to rest happily ever after with RealPlayer.

I bet you wouldn't.

Mark

I'm with JJ. QT is like kryptonite to a windows PC (not unlike iTunes tbh) and there are plenty of other better, more stable bits of software which will cover it.

There is still a problem with the html 5 <video> and <audio> tags... Which format do you use?

Apple & Google have gone for h.264, Opera & Firefox Ogg and the others haven't decided yet.

That means that you, currently, need to encode your video twice and check the browser id, before streaming - this takes us back to IE4/5/6/7 days.

The problem is that h.264 isn't fully open source, so you need to pay for licences, the problem is, if you are giving a browser away, how do you cough up for a licence for each installation? Ogg, on the other hand is free, but not as good at compression and Apple & Google have already heavily invested in h.264 (Google bought a h.264 streaming company last year).

Would there be scope for Apple/Google to buy all rights to h.264 and completely open it up and scrap the licence?

Not really, they'd need to buy up groups like Frauenhoffer and a bunch of others that all hold separate patents.

On a recent podcast they were commenting that If on a Mac you were to run an emulator (Like Parallels), running Windows, running Windows Explorer, running a Flash advert. It still uses less CPU than running the same Flash advert natively on the Mac.

Abode have totally failed to make a decent version for OS X and not they are acting all surprised that Apple don't want to support the format.

Yes - I am currently looking at this for a client. We have videos on the site which are at the moment opening in QuickTime Player (this is a Mac focussed site, BTW). The problem is that they don’t quite work on the iPad, so we’re looking at using the <video> tag.

Firefox (on the Mac at least) won’t play the H.264 format, BUT opens the files in a natively built in Flash Player. The video tag allows you to specify more than one file, and the browser will play the format it knows about:



It is a total [LIFTED] mess - just as Dave says - back to the 1990s. What this means is that the videos I want to include have to be re-encoded in a format that Linux versions of Firefox can cope with as they won’t have the luxury of the Flash player. The fallback stuff will be for browsers that don’t understand HTML5 tags, such as IE. Add that for the iPhone you also need ANOTHER format of video for GPRS playback, and you find yourself tossing around massive amounts of data for one video.

Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, tells Apple “go screw yourself”.

http://www.macworld.com/article/150537/ ... apple.html

having just sold $150m of devices that can't do flash in one week, Apple are losing --> <--- this much sleep.

Paul,

Firefox won't play h.264 on any platform, ogg only. They won't buy a licence for playing h.264, as it is open sourced...

Then, to contradict that, they use Flash also on Linux - it is part of the default packaging on most Linux distributions, although purists will probably exclude it.