To quote the good sir Keith Peters: ”I like how they think flash = bad, but html5 will do everything flash does, but html5 will be good. Huh?”
As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.
The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.
The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.
But video is not what Flash is.
The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.
You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s. How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.
The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.
What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.
I wonder where Apple would be today without the Adobe products basicly making them a standard among most designers ?
[...] HTML5 will save us all from the evils of Flash! [Andreas Rønning] [...]
Great rant! Appropriately angry and mocking, and a point well-made.
Be careful with the Flash/Unity comparisons, though. Unity is a game engine. Flash is not. Flash is great for designing apps. Unity? Not so much. Unity can run fully 3D games in the browser. Flash cannot. (Don’t even SAY “Papervision”. That’s weak sauce as far as gaming is concerned). Flash is great for 2D game development (despite its lack of a physics engine, built-in advanced collision detection, etc). With Unity, it’s a bit of a fight to build a 2D game, but it’s possible.
They’re not quite apples and oranges … but they ARE quite like oranges and tangerines.
- Ryan
Love the article. About time someone pointed out the that video isn’t Flash. Flash isn’t going away. Hell, people are still using tags for positioning how many years after the introduction of CSS?
This coming from someone who develops in HTML, Flash and now Unity.
I do plenty Unity, so i know what you’re talking about
I suppose my point is that in the multimedia plugin realm, the real battle going down right now is visualization and games, and in that regard i think Flash and Unity are the only real combatants currently.
I stopped reading when you started going caps but anyway; the App Store is doing pretty good as far as indie developers go, open or not. Maybe if Adobe decided to open up their compiler the community could hack some decent performance into what currently has the performance of Super Mario on 1000 times more powerful hardware.
Keith Peters highlighted the biggest problem with developing indie Flash games (and being able to eat food etc.) during his speech at Flash on the Beach, the only monetization strategy he had was banner spam during the loader.
I stopped reading your comment when it started being about Apple and Flash performance
Besides, i reserve the right to use caps when portraying the opinions of dumb people.
Well said. I got here from a twitter link on that “flash-killer” HTML5 experiment site http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ Which by the way, had my 3ghz Mac Pro running the processor at !00%
I think it’s BS. Though I don’t think Apple considers Silverlight, Flash, OR Unity3D when looking into Games for the iPad. They think users will play the Games made by iPhone devs. And they will. iPad is for dummy users, I’m sure it would be fun to play around with. But to do real work on, I really doubt it’s all that productive. They need to add several features to it though, and maybe a little more innovation?? I didn’t really see anything NEW.