maemo.org - Talk - Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices

Quote:

Originally Posted by gerbick (Post 1121553)

You cannot develop nor enable hardware acceleration if the manufacturer does not open up their frameworks or os. That's why it never was something that was available for download. And it's a third party application that needed to hook into the resident browser. So if it were closed, then what?

Okay, that's fair for a large amount of mobile phones, but isn't Android's browser open (I genuinely thought it was, but it's possible I'm wrong)? The N900s browser UI isn't, but the engine is just armel-architecture Mozilla Firefox engine, if I recall correctly, which is open source. At the very least they could've provided a free-to-download armel port, with a disclaimer of no support - simple understanding of human behavior would tell them that communities of power users would do a decent chunk of the hacking needed to make it work with their browsers, and if they responded to complains about no hardware acceleration by openly pushing for cell manufacturers to open up their hardware or better yet standardize it a little more, eventually the public would catch on too.

Would it necessarily have forced change in the cell-phone manufacturers? No. But it would've been a better effort than what Adobe did do with Flash.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gerbick

Adobe makes no money off of Flash on desktops. They make money from the tools. Adobe open sourced the *.swf file format. They kept the Flash Player closed source. They kept *.fla file format closed. But you can make your own *.swf via HaXe and other open source means.

Adobe made their money elsewhere.

That was my point - except I see that as being a form of making money off of Flash. No one would give enough of a **** about the tools for them to be successful products if the plugin wasn't something users could get freely on desktops. "Flash", in that context, meant the entirety of their Flash offerings, where the free-to-download player is very much a way for them to make money by increasing demand for the tools that they do charge for.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gerbick

Blame the handset manufacturers for not opening up their devices. Blame the handset manufacturers for not making the situation better and more open. And if the handset was open, better hardware should have been picked - picking for now and not later, wrong move.

The only bastards are the folks that don't have HTML5 solutions in place while saying it's "the" solution... but yet it doesn't answer all fo the questions quite yet. I'm impatient too...

Oh, certainly, I'm happy to blame those people too, and I don't think I called Adobe bastards in my last post. I just think that there's plenty of blame to go around if Flash-on-mobile-devices fails, and part (though certainly not all) of that blame belongs to Adobe.