…and astonishingly, does so without his usual rhetoric, condescension, or the patented reality-distortion field. You may actually find yourself switching to the Weather Channel to see if Hell really did freeze over.
In an online essay entitled "Thoughts on Flash," Jobs steps back from the rancor of the recent Apple vs. Adobe spat regarding the non-support of Flash code on iDevices — and Flash-developed apps in the App Store — and calmly, methodically states his case. Some salient points:
- Apple and Adobe started out as best friends; the former was a 20% investor in the latter, and it was the marriage of Apple hardware (the Laserwriter) and Adobe software (PostScript) that jump-started the whole desktop-publishing revolution.
- Jobs makes a convincing case that, despite Abobe's claims to the contrary, Flash is not an "open" system: "Adobe‚Äôs Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc…By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."
- Jobs concedes that the iDevices themselves are proprietary, but the software behind them — HTML5, CSS, Javascript — is not. In fact, Apple's own HTML5 open-source rendering engine Webkit is not only at the core of Safari, but has been adopted by Google, Nokia, Palm, and (very shortly) Blackberry for their browsers.
- Jobs shoots down the "full web" video-support arguement, pointing out that many Flash-video sites also support the iDevice-friendly h.264 video format. (This writer can attest to that: having a chance to play with an iPad on April 3rd, I promptly logged into YouTube and Vimeo, and was frankly blown away at the crisp video-streaming experience.)
- Flash and battery life in portable devices is a HUGE sticking point for Jobs; while h.264 video can be efficiently decoded in hardware, Flash videos require software decoding, which means an extra drain on the battery.
- Jobs also argues that Flash was designed for PC's with mice, resulting in a heavy reliance on rollovers to trigger popup events. Since multitouch devices don't even know what a "rollover" is, the effort to recode Flash sites to support touch-based devices might be better spent using the aforementioned HTML5 and Jscript.
Jobs concludes that Flash was a product of the PC-era past, and simply isn't appropriate for a present — and future — defined by low-power devices with touch interfaces and open web standards.
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As much as I hate Flash, Steve’s bending the truth just a ‘little’ bit;
http://www.osnews.com/story/23224/Jobs_on_Flash_Hypocrisy_So_Thick_You_Could_Cut_it_with_a_Knife
Partly, but not entirely correct. If Jobs wants to walk down memory lane, he should also mention, that the Adobe founders were working at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) before starting their own business. Yes, THAT research lab, where Jobs saw a demo of window computing with a mouse as interaction device and – he admitted it – missed network computing, which they had also up and running. He makes it look, as without him there would be no Adobe. It’s the other way round: without them, the success of Apple would probably a footnote in computer history.
About the Flash controversy: LET THE MARKET DECIDE! Whenever single individuals decide for the rest of the world, there is great danger, that this is going completely wrong. Remember the big shots saying “Internet? Naaah, won’t have a future, Compuserve and AOL will…”. Also Uncle Steve can be wrong (remember Newton?). So, let Flash happen on the iPhone and see if the user want that or not. It’s that easy…
I think it’s funny that Mr Jobs plays the white knight defending open standards given its “as closed as technically possible” politics with iphone and ipad. But even more funny, the “device-friendly” H.264 he opposes to the devilishly-closed-and-battery-draining flash is a totally not open (and very expensive to implement) standard…
I would have been really surprised if he had promoted the theora format, now i can see the logic behind all this. The open web standards thing is just nice rhetorics to play the nice guy.
As much as i love my iphone, and my mac, i’m really getting tired of his continuous attempts to close the web. His vision of internet and computing is not that far away from what AOL promoted few years ago. I just hope customers won’t get fooled by it..