Quote:
Originally Posted by scottjl
Some ex-Adobe engineers weight in on the whole Flash on iPhone matter.
A "Hello World." application, written in Adobe's toolchain, would result in an 8meg app for the iPhone. The same application using Apple's toolchain is "no longer than a few KB." Ouch. But then again that's what cross-compiling does to your apps. |
This is what the article you've referenced actually says, the numbers are a bit different, but still informative:
"A simple “Hello World” app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode, according to James Eberhardt, a mobile developer who has tested iPhone Packager."
So, 3.2 Mb overhead in file size for an app that does nothing. That says nothing about file size overhead for a real app, or runtime memory requirements or performance, which are arguably more critical and which the article leaves very much in question - but I'm not convinced that additional file size in and of itself is evidence that this approach is a dead end.
It's rare when a multi-platform toolset can outperform a native platform toolset (assuming best practices), nobody expects that it will. The question has always been (for Flash, Java, whatever) whether the performance tradeoffs are offset by the obvious, if sometimes elusive, benefits of 'write once, run many'.
It's all moot in this case since Apple has banned all such approaches, which is their right, and while it may not be to everyone's liking, they may well be making the best call for the success of their business (I'd like to see a credible argument that it is a bad business decision, if anyone has or knows of one). It remains to be seen.