Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

OT :
Dear Trolls,
Now that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for Mobile Devices, please refrain yourself from asking " Where is Flash 10.1 for Meego/Maemo ". Thank you

On Topic : Apple won the battle..and was right ... oh well.. Good news for Meego/N9 and other Open Source OS i guess
Android OEMs just got majorly _____ over...i remember Samsung Ads : "Full Web Browsing Experience" to attract customers. What happens now? :P

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

Oh, great. Now we can stop asking for never-arriving-flash11, and start asking for hw-accelerated html5 video (that we also wont get, but don't have a working earlier version either)!

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

Now, NOBODY will have the full web experience. Flash will continue to live on the desktop for a while, and mobile computers will be locked out before it is ultimately replaced by another technology (HTML5, whatever).

But at least for a year or two forward, all devices that currently have Flash will continue to have it. So the argument about the "full web" will remain in their favor.

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

Well... let's see. Adobe has had:

HTML5 Converter for Adobe Captivate 5.5
Muse
Wallaby
Edge
Digital Publishing Suite for InDesign CS5+

Amongst other projects, all of them take Flash stuff into HTML5. It hasn't been a good ride for Flash on mobile devices. So this move, while seemingly confirming that Steve Jobs was right, means that Flash honestly has had a very good run but will be moving to desktop in a way that most do not seem to appreciate - Flash/Flex, AIR have moved to native code execution and deployment on iOS, Android and Blackberry as well as OS X, Windows and Linux.

With their purchase of PhoneGap, they have a way to bridge from AS3, JavaScript, HTML and whatnot to mobile devices as well.

So it means that I have to learn how to edit my output, but I'll have the same tools from a company I've used for over 19 years.

Oh well...

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

the flash to html5 equivocacy is blowing my mind. that is like saying we arent going to use gif anymore because of html4. As far as I know you can use an html5 embed tag for a flash object...

the real battle for apple was flash vs h264, but now I think maybe vp8 has a good chance with webM.

so many articles say Steve Jobs won, but not really yet, unless all html5 video tags end up with h264

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

This part... doesn't exactly make sense. Flash video, be it *.flv or *.f4v can be h.264 encoded. Flash has less to do with video since it accepted a wide range of codecs; it required the Flash Player plugin.

With that said... Flash cannot be fully replaced as of yet by HTML5 alone. It takes lots and lots of jQuery. Canvas isn't fully supported across the browsers. So the nice vector based animations aren't friendly across the board yet.

Flash is more than advertising banners too. I can directly query a DB among other things that I cannot do in HTML5 fully... yet.

But the <video> tag fight about codecs is far from over.

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

My uneducated opinion on the issue is that Flash would've prospered on mobile phones if Adobe weren't greedy ****s and allowed free-to-download flash players for mobile devices, instead of charging licensing fees for each phone.

If Adobe can make money off of Flash on desktops with free-to-download clients, they could've done the same thing with mobile devices. If they hadn't done that I'm pretty confident that Flash on mobile phones would've been far more succesful.

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

Mods, please merge this thread with:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=79827

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

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?

Imagine putting yourself in harm's way of that situation pertaining support. You'd rather not, that's what I'd take away from it.

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. 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...

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

I tried: looks like my privilege was taken away :(

Re: Adobe ceases development of Flash for Mobile Devices
 

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.

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.

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.