Mehmet Alpsoy

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

No, they are not. You could download FLEX SDK for free and use it with a bunch of non Adobe products like Eclipse, FDT, Flash Develop etc. Also there is Red5, Wowza for Media broadcast which use open standart RTMP protocol and Socket Servers such as ElectroServer, SmartFoxServer etc. for real time user interaction which are built on JAVA, Python and Actionscript.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Web experience is not only based on video, there are many web apps that run on Flash to achieve lots of specified goals. No need to list them all.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

And most of those 50,000 games are re-productions of Flash games. But we are talking about mobile web experience not just iPhone, iPad or iPod.  So how many games are there playable on iPhone’s Safari?

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Yes, Seteve Jobs is right at this point. Flash Player has had many major security issues and still have some. But most of them are fixed by Adobe and if you are an experienced Flash Platform Developer it is easy to keep your Flash App secure. But Adobe has to admit that leaving some of these security fixes to be done by the developer is not a good idea.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

It is obvious that if non H.264 videos do not run on Flash Player which runs on a mobile device, most publishers encode it for the appropriate codec (which is H.264) here to make them available.
Also these old generation encoded videos are still not available on Apple Mobile devices, so this excuse of jobs is not that realistic.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

If Steve Jobs opens Twitter home page, there is a hover tool tip box almost on every interactive object. So this excuse is also not reasonable. So even a web page based on HTML & Javascript, they have to be rewritten for touch experience

Ok, this is not a fresh news which you hear from me. Besides I really don’t aim to announce that. I want to write about the iPhone Packager which is almost the only thing that many Flash Platform Developers expect from the new Flash. I will be talking about some concerns as we all are smiling after AdobeMAX 2009, and the positive sides are more than negatives. But…

First of all, it is good to see Actionscript based applications on iPhone, and Flash will be the strongest (media) platform ever. But many Objective-C guys will not be happy with that (as it is very painful to adapt that language if you are a Flash guy) as they were the only people who managed to build applications and make money (yes, money is the main thing that we build applications for). But here is the fact, they are actually right. Because in my opinion Apples’s AppStore will be a kind of junkyard after the public release of Flash CS5 as there are lots of Flash Developers (or people tend to be) out there. There will be a lot of silly games that are decompiled and graphically changed, and uploaded to AppStore, probably not free. This example should seem the ethic part of the story, and may be it is not that suitable, but I think you understand what I mean.

Also we will see more topics on Acrionscript forums than ever about iPhone Applications (come on, we all have seen a topic which says “I have just started to learn Actionscript yesterday and I want to build a Flash game, help me -this means send me the full source code-” once), also people who don’t know Objective-C or Actionscript will try to build applications with Actionscript because the Flash community is bigger than the XCode one, and there are more sources about Flash over the internet.

I think Apple shouldn’t have behaved stubborn about a native Flash Player on iPhone with browser support, as Adobe Engineers are way smarter than they imagine. So everything would stay clean, and there would be a difference between a native iPhone application and plug-in based application. Also the experience that Flash Player would bring to iPhone would keep hands of Apple stronger than ever.

So what now? Apple should really think about what to do to keep AppStore clean. Also the release of Flash CS5 will be the funeral of Objective-C for iPhone and many Objective-C Developers will only build applications for MAC OS X again. This is the awful truth.

One last thing. It is sad to find out that Flash Platform world is concentrated on iPhone Development as Flash Platform means more than that for me as the future of Flash is going to be brighter than ever in a couple of years. Also making money from a silly game will not make a Flash Developer’s career adorable, and money doesn’t last forever.

These concerns may seem meaningless now, and the Flash on iPhone may seem as a victory. But discovery of nuclear science was a victory too, until the cold war. And to be honest I will be developing applications for iPhone with Actionscript after the release of Flash CS5, (’cause I will be developing 5x apps with Actionscript than Objective-C), and leave Objective-C as a memory. Should I uninstall XCode now?

P.S : I live in Istanbul, and I am hearing from many digital agencies and know that people at these agencies are waiting for the release in greed, and they will exhaust the iPhone AppStore to make more money than ever, as most of the iPhone Applications built in Turkey are developed by software companies, and the big slice of share are going to these software companies. God save AppStore!

P.S. 2 : A topic with 8 popular tags from my blog? Nice one…

Today I installed Mac OS X Snow Leopard to my iMac and my girlfriends Macbook Pro. It is obvious that MAC OS X is still the best OS on earth.

You can find my opinions about the new features below.

Configurations are

iMac 20″  2.4 Ghz Intel 2 Core-duo - 4 GB RAM

Macbook Pro 15.4″ 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo – 2 GB RAM

First of all Snow Leopard is really fast.

Expose & Stacks : I always use Expose, and frequently use Stacks. New ordering view of Expose is very nice and works faster and reliable than Leopard’s.

Also new looks of these features are really nice. I think I will be using Stacks more frequently.

Time Machine : Time Machine is backing up my iMac, and backing up is faster now.

Shut Down Time : Tested on Macbook Pro, you see the desktop for a second, and the blue screen for another second and just a black screen. It is shut down

Quicktime : The new Qicktime X looks really nice, it is important that it includes all the features of former Quicktime Pro. Especially screen capturing feature works like a charm on a 1680 * 1050 resolution.

The most important new feature of Quicktime X for me is, it is able to play FLV and F4V files by default. So you do not need a Flash Video Player.

I haven’t tested iChat, and some other new features like Exchange Support as I work at home nowadays.

Last of all new battery life checking option on MacbookPro is nice (you have to Option + Click on the battery status to see it).

Both of the Mac’s have 32-bit processors so I can’t mention anything about 64-bit support, besides most of my applications are Adobe applications.

I think you don’t  have to have any concerns about switching to Snow Leopard if you are already using Leopard, it is not scary like switching from Tiger.

But remember to update your applications, especially like VLC (as former VLC versions on Leopard looks for Lucinda font, but Lucinda on Snow Leopard has an extension like *.ttc, and VLC is not able to find the font for subtitles and so it cannot  display subtitles. Just upgrade your VLC or change the default subtitle font from VLC Preferences).

But it was disappointing to hear my favorite text editor Smultron has only a BETA for Snow Leopard, and there will be no more new versions of the application. Smultron for Leopard works on Snow Leopard too, but I have to find a new Text Editor, and it will be difficult as I never liked the UI of BBEdit.

That is all for now about MAC OS X Snow Leopard features.

Finally, the price for the Snow Leopard is really affordable (29€ + TAX) for a new Operating System.

Ok, this happened at home before and I have solved.
One reason of the problem is a line located at the hosts file.
Changing line ::1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost is a solution.

Another solution is :

• Open Flash Player Debug version
• Control click
• Click Debugger
• Select Other Machine
• Enter 127.0.0.1
• Click Connect

But there is another problem with MAC OS. Sometimes Flex Builder MAC OS do not open the right Flash Player application. I don’t know why or how, but it occurs.

Today it happened at office, and I have googled a lot and found the solutions located above, but none of them helped me. So I decided to find the Flash Player instance that Flex Builder calls when debugging and the rest of the solution is listed below.

• Click Debug at Flex.
• You get the warning Waiting for flash player to connect to debugger at Progress panel
• Open Activiy Monitor and find Flash Player in the list, select it and click Inspect
• Click Open File and Ports
• If everything was fine then the first line should be /Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Players/Debug/Flash Player.app/Contents/MacOS/Flash Player

If you have the warning, absolutely it is not.

This occurs because you keep an unpackaged Flash Player Application file somewhere else for instance /Software/Adobe Flash Player, like me. And somehow MAC OS finds this file and opens it instead of the one that should be.

To solve the problem just delete the file that you keep somewhere else, or first archive it into a zip file if you want to keep for further usage before deleting. Click Debug again, and no more waiting.

Hope it helps…