Bingo! QuickTime 3, as ancient as it is, met or exceeded Flash's capabilities until just a few years ago, but few web developers ever used QuickTime for anything beyond simple video playback. Superior features lost to development simplicity. Macromedia Flash (the application) was less expensive, more widely available, better known, and easier to pick up and use than LiveStage Pro.
Even if HTML5 becomes a viable Flash competitor technically, it will take one heck of a good, free, multi-platform, point-and-click development application for it to compete with Flash already coming right along with Photoshop and Illustrator in Adobe's product suites.
Well, given what's been demonstrated here, I'd not say that such a development hurdle is that far away (developer also points to a WordPress implementation of feature/coding; showing its possible to package this methodology into developer-centric solutions such as templates or snippets relatively easily). The challenge is the politics/economies, and that part Flash has a win with - for now.
On Flash: after that post on the Flash blog was shown that only two of the sites in question were wholly dependent on Flash I'm surprised anyone "in the know" is still making the "what will replace flash" argument. CNN, NYT, Youtube and the now infamous Bang Bros sites all accessible without flash. Hulu has dumb execs who tried to block Boxee because of some nebulous threat to it's bottom line will try to hold out. but when millions of their customers are on devices that cannot access their website lets see what they do.
Millions of prospective customers *are* on devices that Hulu won't support - for whatever reasons (development, publishing agreements, etc.). They've already gotten the point that they missed the mobile bandwagon; however, publishing rights for content providers are held in much higher esteem than usage rights for advertisers or viewers.
Well, given what's been demonstrated here, I'd not say that such a development hurdle...
I'm aware of that clever bit of markup and like it very much. However, while it is truly nifty, it covers only video embedding. I know you're aware that Flash does a bit more than that.
I'm aware of that clever bit of markup and like it very much. However, while it is truly nifty, it covers only video embedding. I know you're aware that Flash does a bit more than that.
Indeed, just highlighting part of a point. The rest of interactive (browser, widget, ???) development could be handed with JS - but that's indeed something that development environments and developers would have to consider.
Would be neat to see what could be done with that code, and a bit of interactivity - could be pretty neat - albeit, probably not as useful across all browsers/devices depending on the amount of JS.
Bingo! QuickTime 3, as ancient as it is, met or exceeded Flash's capabilities until just a few years ago, but few web developers ever used QuickTime for anything beyond simple video playback. Superior features lost to development simplicity. Macromedia Flash (the application) was less expensive, more widely available, better known, and easier to pick up and use than LiveStage Pro.
Even if HTML5 becomes a viable Flash competitor technically, it will take one heck of a good, free, multi-platform, point-and-click development application for it to compete with Flash already coming right along with Photoshop and Illustrator in Adobe's product suites.
I think we should be honest. A lot of the reasons why QT did not take off was due to rampant anti-Apple thinking among the corporate crowd. It took me ages to get my place of employ to deploy QT as a part of the standard image. I won't even discuss keeping it up to date. Simple put, they see Apple and eye-roll. As you poined out LiveStage had a nice means of putting interfaces on QT movies way back to the OS 9 days.
The iPad (and its kins iPod Touch and iPhone) won't need Flash. The sites that currently have Flash will make specific Apps of their sites tailored for the iPad's screen, just like the way Apps have been made for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Apple gets to count more Apps in the AppStore and developers get to tout their special iPad-designed user experience for their site. The iPod Touch and iPhone don't currently have the full web, but do users care if they have "an App for that"?
Even if HTML5 becomes a viable Flash competitor technically, it will take one heck of a good, free, multi-platform, point-and-click development application for it to compete with Flash already coming right along with Photoshop and Illustrator in Adobe's product suites.
HTML5, as per its rough specifications, does not meet the capabilities of Flash 5 in the layouting/display/DOM area. JavaScript road map so far is stuck with ECMA committee's incompetence (that's why Adobe decided to abandon the attempt to make AS3 fully ECMAScript 4 compliant), and CSS never really took off as the thing it was planned to be (unified, same-implementation-everywhere styles, mainly due to the insane idea of each browser engine developer that their DOM model and canvas is the best). You can have all the tools you want, what Flash (as a technology, I won't even mention various IDEs) offers today out of the box, HTML5 + JS + CSS3 won't be able to provide in years to come. And Adobe is finally serious enough to improve the AVM2 and the Flash rendering engine, so don't think they'll wait for HTML to catch up.
As for the Flash IDE, after the CS5 there probably won't be any Flash IDE - everything is moving towards using the whole CS package as a content builder system, and leaving the ActionScript/MXML part to the Flash Builder (ex Flex Builder), and connecting everything seamlessly via the Flash Catalyst. Which actually is a good thing - leave the coding to the developers, plenty of crappy Flash sites/implementations are done by designers that cannot grasp the development side of the story.
Well, given what's been demonstrated here, I'd not say that such a development hurdle is that far away (developer also points to a WordPress implementation of feature/coding; showing its possible to package this methodology into developer-centric solutions such as templates or snippets relatively easily). The challenge is the politics/economies, and that part Flash has a win with - for now.
While an interesting concept, and surprisingly clean one at that, I can play 1080p videos in full-screen on YouTube through their crappy player (it really is crappy, people just don't seem to notice) without my almost 3 years old machine breaking a sweat, and that is using the 10.0.32.18 debug version of the Flash Player plugin which does not support H.264 redirecting to the GPU. That low-res Theora on the site maxes out CPU usage and stutters even in normal mode, in full-screen it's choppy as HQ videos on YT on my N900! So, `the savior` HTML5 cannot beat Flash in the only area where it might have some advantage, how do people possibly think that it can replace Flash for some things that are not even in the wildest imagination of the W3C group?
On Flash: after that post on the Flash blog was shown that only two of the sites in question were wholly dependent on Flash I'm surprised anyone "in the know" is still making the "what will replace flash" argument. CNN, NYT, Youtube and the now infamous Bang Bros sites all accessible without flash. Hulu has dumb execs who tried to block Boxee because of some nebulous threat to it's bottom line will try to hold out. but when millions of their customers are on devices that cannot access their website lets see what they do.
Ok, care to explain to me how can I stage a video conference via HTML5? Or how can I capture web cam / mic via JavaScript? Or how can I open several concurrent TCP/IP binary sockets for a parallel real-time encryption channel? Or how can I ope any kind of a socket, anyways? And while you are at it, I'd really like to know how to smoothly play vector animation in HTML5 (vector based animation != runtime switching of SVG files), something that Flash could do, you know, before it was even called Flash - a good 14 years ago? And I'd dearly like to know how can I pack a full encryption library in 30KB implemented in JS (and I'll even accept avg 5x slower execution in that case).
And to think that Nokia had, has?, everything ready for this market and decided to cut EXACTLY on that?!
You might say that Nokia had everything ready for this shape or this design, but market? What market?
The iPad is an ebook reader and stand-alone media player that as a bonus, can even run iPhone applications... It's not "the next big thing", it's just an iPhone that you are supposed to use on the couch instead of standing up on the bus stop.
As for the lack of Flash: I am not a huge fan of Flash myself, and I kinda like it that Apple is making pressure for people to move away from Flash and anything on top of the browser. They brought the focus towards OS applications again. I like that. It always feels funnny to me that one of the good aspects of Maemo is to support Flash, that I dislike so much.
But it would be good if these applications were more platform-independent, of course...
(The above comment is quite good. I would just like to point out that while I dislike Flash, it doesn't mean I think it's easy to substitute it for anything else! )
The iPad is an ebook reader and stand-alone media player that as a bonus, can even run iPhone applications... It's not "the next big thing"...
The iPad is "the next big thing" to many of the big newspaper companies. They've been starving for some time and desperate for some chance at grabbing a portion of their lunch money back after blogs and free, online news aggregators stole their readers.
Most of the major book publishers too have fallen all over themselves to sign deals with Apple. For the Kindle, Amazon demanded inflexible pricing well below where the publishers want to position their ebooks, and no one else has had a platform large enough to even give the publishers some leverage in negotiations.
Additionally, textbook publishers are talking of including multimedia and timely updates to their books, an effort to keep them timely and useful as the Internet assails that industry as well. Plus, eliminating that pesky used textbook market would be...pleasant.
Apple won't have to work to market the iPad. The big media companies have good reason to make sure the public is aware of Apple's new wonder device.
The web browser is ending the traditional method of winning control of the operating system market--and the hardware underneath: have the apps. For the next round, Apple aims to wield content.
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