View Single Post
Old 05-14-2010, 06:25 PM   #172
scottjl
Reader of Books
scottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with othersscottjl plays well with others
 
Posts: 1,632
Karma: 2697
Join Date: Oct 2009
Device: none
Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous View Post
Why should they care about having a web browser on their platform? Why should they care about having an ebook reader on their platform? Obviously, because they want to make a device that their consumers can use to access the content they want to access. If their web browser, for example, only supported. jpgs and not .pngs, people would complain. This is similar.
apple makes a device that consumers can use to access content, yes. but again, apple makes the device, and apple dictates the content you can and cannot access, regardless of type, jpg, png, avi, and flash.

Quote:
And we're not talking about them simply "not caring". I'm sure there are all sorts of apps they allow but they don't personally care about; if they're not the ones making the apps. We're talking about them actively trying to kill a certain form of content. Adobe is not asking Apple to make flash for them. They're just asking for the ability to distribute an app that they make. Many of their consumers want to make use of that.
i'd hardly say apple is trying to kill adobe. apple simply chooses not to support it and not to allow it and they have their technical (battery life, performance) and business (app competition, video competition) reasons for doing so. just because flash isn't on the iDevice platform doesn't mean it's going to go away tomorrow.

Quote:
Such claims just show you to be an ideologue. Flash may not be optimal in all sorts of measures, and certainly there alternatives that may be better in the long run, but to call it a parasite, when the vast majority of flash apps work perfectly well all the time, is just ridiculous.
you're mixing flash applications with flash itself. there are plenty of fine flash applications out there, and plenty of junk. you may not like my choice in terms, but flash is wholly dependant on the operating system and browser for its existence and use. flash is not an operating system, it's not even a browser, and it is very easy to write a browser that doesn't support flash. just look at mobile safari.

Quote:
It's just false to say that it's up to the "whim of the platform creators". Microsoft didn't have to *do* anything to make it the case that flash ran on their platforms. Adobe did. Apple wouldn't have to do anything to allow flash to run on their platform. The only difference in this case is that the iPad is so closed that nothing can be installed without their say-so.
that is a naive statement. apple would have to allow api's into the OS and mobile safari for flash to be able to run on the iDevice platform, and apple would have to continue to support those api's to allow flash to continue to run. just look at hardware accelleration on desktop macs, adobe only recently got the api's from apple to allow that. flash doesn't run as a separate application you can download from the app store, flash needs to hook into the browser to catch a mime type, then hook into the OS to render its content correctly, to catch responses from the user if needed, to store its "super cookies". there's a lot more to flash than just displaying a hulu video.

Quote:
Perhaps I'm confused about what this thread is about. We're not here discussing whose decision it was. We're discussing whose decision it should be, and what the best decision is. And on that score, it should be the consumer's decision, and the best decision is the one each customer makes.
actually i initally created this thread so some people would stop hijacking other threads with complaints that the ipad didn't support flash. didn't work.

Quote:
I'm not saying that Apple can't make that decision. I'm saying that they made the wrong one. You points are all completely and utterly irrelevant to that discussion.
this is where your argument fails. who are you to say that apple made the wrong decision? unless you're steve jobs in disguise of course. and to discard my points as "completely and utterly irrelevant" writes you off as close minded and unable to accept someone else's opinion, the same things you accuse me of.

Quote:
It's as if a friend gambled all their money away, and I said that was a bad thing to do, and you responded by saying that it was their money to spend. I wasn't saying it wasn't their money to spend. I'm saying they spent it poorly.
you sure like to be bossy to your friends. who are you to make the judgement that they spent their money poorly or wisely? it isn't your money. there's a famous quote about judge not.. or another about walking a mile..

Quote:
You seem to be confused about what the issues are. h.264 and flash are not competing technologies. Adobe has nothing against h.264, and I don't think they have anything to fear from IE9 using h.264.
i think you missed the point of microsoft's announcement. they are supporting h.264 as a video delivery system and not flash. the two are competing when it comes to a delivery system. yes, flash can continue to be used for other types of content, and even for video content, but it won't be natively supported in IE. and as i said, it's just a warning shot, microsoft has silverlight waiting in the wings. microsoft could easily block flash from running on the windows platform and push developers to use silverlight instead. adobe exists not only at apple's whim but microsoft's as well and could be shut out of either platform with a simple update.

Quote:
I have already discussed ways in which Apple's policies affect me even if I don't own their products. Saying the same thing over and over again in a way that doesn't address these concerns is not furthering the discussion.
i must have missed that posting. sorry. saying the same complaints over and over again doesn't bring flash to the ipad either.

Quote:
You seem to be taking a very odd attitude about this thread. You began this topic so we could discuss Apple's flash policy. But then you complain when people complain. This is a discussion board. It is for discussing. What did you intend the discussion to be like? A bunch of people saying how wonderful Steve Jobs is and how we'd be lost without his infinite wisdom? Where is it more appropriate to complain about the lack of flash support than in a thread on fighting flash?
no, i would have started a "worship steve jobs" thread, but personally i don't like the man, so you won't find me there. i find it funny that if you like apple's products people resort to calling you a "cult member" or say that you "worship steve jobs" instead of actually engaging in discussion on the topics at hand. if people want to accusing me of being in a cult then they have more than apple's to sign me up for, i use and like many products by HP, Sony, Segate, Western Digital, Microsoft, Dell, Canon, Nikon, Motorola, hell I even have a Chumby. That sure is a lot of cults. if spending money on technology counts as tithe then i'm going to heaven for sure!

Quote:
And complaining about these things IS the way they get changed. It's the reason, for example, that Microsoft's attempts to kill xhtml failed, and even IE9 will support its native mimetype. These were complaints by content providers, not by end users.
right, but if you expect change, then you ought to be complaining in the appropriate forum. i find it highly unlikely that jobs visits mobileread.

Quote:
Personally, however, Apple's policy wouldn't bother me so much if they had done even a semi-adequate job implementing HTML5. But since the implementation of HTML5 in Safari on the iPad is so poor, we are left with nothing in place of flash. That disappoints me, yes.
as a few people like to point out, html 5 isn't yet a set-in-stone standard, so guess we'll just have to wait and see what support updates bring us in the future. what browsers do support it 100% at this point?
scottjl is offline