Flash is a low performance platform. Not even mentioning high-powered 3D sites built in Flash (like my own, don’t call me a hater), if I take my MacBookPro for a stroll down, oh, say, funnyordie.com, or any news site (text + images), you can be GUARANTEED I’ll run into some CRAP like a VideoEgg ad, or several other HORRIBLY engineered ADS.

ADS. That’s what’s killing this. Ads. Yes it is, I make them, under the direction of people who don’t give a shit.

The funniest thing about all this, for me, was a conversation I had with some dick while working at VideoEgg. The iPad had just come out, and he and the rest of the team were all “Oh Jobs, what a NAZI! Adobe has proven that Flash runs great on mobile devices!”

What? What the FUCK? DUDE, you instruct me ALL DAY to BREAK best practices because Flash ALLOWS IT and we need to “get the product out the door.” This mentality is rampant in Flash development. Here I’m talking to a guy who SWEARS Flash will run on the iPhone (“I’ve seen it!”), meanwhile, he’s responsible for one of the GREATEST reasons that it WILL NOT.

Think about it. It’s all about engineering quality and the amount of instances. They showed ecodazoo at the beta demonstration…. hmmm… a SUPERBLY engineered site (a minority of Flash content), and it was the only instance on the page. Right after that, Hulu crashed repeatedly. Let’s not get started on a common news site with ads….

This is the point people: on a desktop, when you take your browser to a page with Flash ads, that browser INSTANTLY allocates excess in 100MB of RAM. Why? Because Flash is dogshit, when it comes to utilizing hardware. If NATIVE games on my Mac run great and look like XBox 360 but Flash runs like shit looking no better than PS1, how the HELL does anyone expect Flash to work fine on a mobile device with a less capable hardware? FLASH BRINGS DESKTOPS TO A CRAWL.

Furthermore, the landscape of utter BULLSHIT Flash content on the internet is vast. Jobs doesn’t want to retain control because he’s a “Nazi”; he’s trying to prevent iPhone OS from becoming Windows Ninety-Fucking-Five.

It blows me away that none of you realize any of this.

Moreover, they HAVE to retain control over the platform, because if Adobe doesn’t FULLY implement the API, then developers will not have full access to the device; developers are then at the behest of Adobe, not Apple, when it comes to expecting a usable API. That simply will fail miserably. And for all of you who think that Adobe will stay up to speed on that tip, tell me this: WHERE THE HELL IS MY HARDWARE ACCELERATED 3D IN FLASH AND WHY THE HELL DO WE STILL HAVE FUCKING PAPERVISION!?!?!?!?

So, instead of enhancing a platform that obviously needs it (even more than it obviously needs to ditch the plugin architecture and remake the Flash platform to DO THE EXACT SAME THING while exporting content in the form of WEB STANDARDS), instead Adobe would rather turn this into a pissing contest about how they shouldn’t have to act like REAL DEVELOPERS.

“We’ll show you Apple, you just watch! See, look it’s running grea… oh it crashed again.”

Sincerely,
- A devout Flash developer

At the end, it’s Adobe and their creative community that made Apple survive during their weak years. No Photoshop – no Apple. I can’t believe how “Microsoft” Apple has become. Software fascism.

Adobe should in response focus their developing attention on adopting the open HTML5 standard and build compilers that will translate flash into canvas code.

Beat Apple at their own game and provide a hugely missing element (GUI design of canvas) that would surely secure their place on the web for a long time even in an Apple world.

That said this is the license agreement for the iPhone OS 4.0, which isn’t out of beta until the summer, possibly the fall and that no rules are being broken for any apps submitted right now under the iPhone OS 3.2 license agreement. James Eberhardt, recently tweeted that his iPhone app that was made with Flash CS5 was approved this afternoon:
http://twitter.com/james_eberhardt/status/11850738164

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if this resulted in a lawsuit from Adobe & other companies. It’s one thing to ban the Flash Player, Apple could argue say battery life or other issues, but it’s something completely different to ban competing development tools. If a resulting native application is no different than any other native application made with Apple tools and has to be decompiled and inspected at the byte to tell them apart, then I think Apple could open themselves up to unfair competitive practices lawsuit. However, I’m a developer myself not a lawyer, so I’m just guessing here. Still Apple was investigated by the FCC for blocking Google’s Voice app from the iTunes store.