Come on Adobe
Just do the right thing and stop developing Photoshop for Mac. I would love to hear all the 'creative' Apple latte sipping fanbois whine when that happens.
After calling Flash a "CPU hog," Steve Jobs has given Adobe the chance to live down this now famous insult. And Adobe is taking it. Steve Jobs also called Flash "buggy" and littered with security holes. And he summarily banned it from both the iPhone and the iPad - even when it's translated into Jobsian machine code. But with …
There are no real alternatives to Photoshop on any system. If we use Open Office as a comparison, it's taken years for it to become mature enough to stand up to MS Office. If Adobe said "screw you Apple, no more flash, no more CS" it's not just graphics artists that would cry.
Apple needs Adobe more than Adobe needs Apple, if Photoshop became Windows and Linux only, it would be impossible to justify the cost of a Mac + Windows over a PC + Windows, or even a PC + Linux.
Photoshop is an industry standard, it's not something you can replace with 3 months worth of development and a coating of "ohh shiney" that Apple would produce (also neglecting the fact that Apple's would be Mac only, you need a standard which is cross platform).
I disagree VERY much with your comment that there isn't any real alt. for Photoshop. Photoshop is in exactly the same situation that MS Office is in. It was the first graphics editing program to go big time on early PCs, and First does get you something. It gets you early name recognition and early market-share in the world of Big Biz. There are several other really nice, full featured software packages out there that perform the vast majority of functions that the VAST majority of users use. Corel acquired Paint Shop Pro from its creator, JASC several years ago and now markets it as Corel Paint Shop Pro PhotoX3. I still use the JASC version, but have heard very good things about Corel's version. The one REALLY BIG advantage of PSPPX3 over Photoshop CS is price. PSPPX3 is currently priced at $89.99. Photoshop CS5 is now pre-order priced from the Adobe web-site at $699!!!!!! For 98% of users (my personal guess), PSP does everything they'll ever need at 13% of the price.
Paris, cause she's SO perfectly beautiful she never needs touching up...
You're looking at GIMP, but ignoring the pile of commercial apps already out there.
Also, Adobe couldn't simply pull P-Shop off the market for OSX and leave a vacuum... it would take at least another version, which in turn takes years. This is time that, say, a company with $40bn USD in the bank could use to build up a viable alternative, or simply buy an existing alternative and bolster it up.
Currently, Windows 7/Vista is more advanced than OS X in regards to APIs, GPU acceleration, SSD and power management.
With the iPhone craziness, Apple has lost some focus on Desktop and they do crazy things like cancelling 64bit Carbon support (read:Photoshop) last minute telling programmers to convert 200M line application to Cocoa, like a basic shareware.
"Currently, Windows 7/Vista is more advanced than OS X in regards to APIs, GPU acceleration, SSD and power management."
That's some good preaching to the choir, but it isn't actually true. Apple's 2008 approach to a GPU acceleration API is OpenCL (subsequently standardised through Kronos, but Apple's originally). It adds closures to the programming language and adds a few C calls to issue them. The OS is responsible for figuring out available hardware and distributing tasks. It will distribute automatically to any available GPUs or CPUs, applying normal OS scheduling rules.
Microsoft's 2008 approach is DirectCompute. It sites within DirectX, so what you have to do is go through the normal DirectX API, query for available GPUs, query for GPU capabilities then explicitly issue your blocks to the GPUs you want to execute them. They're never executed on the CPU regardless of how a system is configured.
You're also accusing the company that sells the laptops with independently verified ten hour battery life of having poor power management?
Apple are way behind on developer relations but not on technologies.
Make Windows the lead platform for new features and functionality and then backport them to OS X. Given how hostile Apple has been to Adobe I would think that makes sense.
Jobs whines how buggy and slow Flash is but the reality is that the browser plugin API sucks on the Mac. Plugins are windowless so they rely on the browser to paint them and push messages to them. And (as reported) there currently is no hardware accelerated support for 3rd party code. Is it any wonder Flash is slow? I wouldn't be surprised if Silverlight, VLC or any other demanding browser plugins suffer similar issues except Flash gets it in the neck because some sites fire up 4 or 5 instances.
It already is...
Your argument would carry water if Flash's (and the rest of the shite Adobe peddles) worked well on other platforms too, but it simply doesn't. None of the other available browser plugins have problems, and the problems don't just affect Safari either--Flash is shit in Firefox *and* Chrome too. It's *just* Adobe.
>"Flash gets it in the neck because some sites fire up 4 or 5 instances." That'd be because it sucks. That Flash defence has got to be about the worst I've seen! Pathetic...
Don't be stupid. The performance difference is very noticeable between Windows and Mac and the biggest reason by far is the broken NPAPI architecture in the Mac. Sure Flash can be improved but it is pure nonsense to pin the blame just on the plugin.
I expect Silverlight would suffer many of the same issues on the Mac if it were so widely used. As will HTML5 when it starts being used in the way Flash is now.
It is also quite obvious that the more instances you have open the more performance is going to suffer. This is true of any application. If it upsets you that much, install a flash blocker so your browser only opens flash apps you want to use rather than random sites that are plastered in ads.
As much as this is welcome news, I have to agree with jobs - flash is a CPU hog. Not particularly the video part (which is OK, but not great), but all the rest of it. I recently saw a flash-based site eating >50% cpu time (on a 2.8ghz core 2), just to display a slightly fancy menu. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to uninstall flash entirely.. if only it wasn't pretty much required :/
Is the crappy plugin architecture on the Mac. On Windows, most Flash plugin are created as windowed plugins. This means they can create an HWND and be responsible for handling messages and painting whenever they like. They could even be running on separate threads with relative ease because they're not bound by what the browser is doing.
On the Mac plugins are always windowless so all messaging and painting through the browser. The browser renders the plugin in with the rest of the page so painting a plugin may not be trivial either. So imagine a couple of plugins shouting at the browser 30 times a second to be repainted and the browser repainting part of its page 30 times a second and no wonder its slow.
So Flash primarily suffers is because of the architecture. Apple could propose to enhance the NPAPI architecture or supply hooks so demanding plugins can paint quicker. Whatever the solution Apple needs to help supply it. Blaming Adobe for their own broken architecture is a pretty pathetic response.
"I recently saw a flash-based site eating >50% cpu time (on a 2.8ghz core 2), just to display a slightly fancy menu."
What I want to know is why does anyone CARE that flash uses CPU cycles? Is it currently the trend to have blisteringly fast processors, only to whine about an application using some of the power?
Badgers . . .
I care about flash using CPU cycles because it destroys battery life. My normal 3 - 4hr battery life was reduced to around 45 mins because I had gone off power with a browser tab (not displayed, mind) which was on the home page of Sky or Channel 4 or one of those annoying sites with a spinning carousel of their "amazing" content.
It was when I got the battery warning ridiculously early that I realised what I had done.
Looking at it another way, what is the carbon footprint of all those flash widgets causing CPU cycles to go off the scale? There is probably a financial impact for businesses for having Flash enabled, in terms of additional power and cooling costs.
How much more power does a PC running flat out use than one idling?
Flame in case you use a laptop running flash on your lap....
Flash itself is more of a web designer/graphics package but adobe have created a language for us old fashioned proggies called Flash Builder.
As a programming language, I see it as a mix between C and Pascal is quite easy to pick up and there are loads of instrucional videos from Adobe available.
Download a free trial from http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/.
Regards
Gareth
It's a 64bit resource hog that doesn't keep step with other releases and doesn't use the GPU for h264. The GPU bit is supposedly because there isn't a suitable API function available, but a chap from nVidia disagrees and offered to help - you can find the offer in the comments if you wade through enough of them.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different_problems.html
More details of the Mac hardware acceleration here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
Still practiced. You forgot the flip side of that coin though: have a public tantrum to cover your back room deals.
You'll notice how Adobe isn't pulling Photoshop from the Mac. You'll also notice there's not much hubbub about any SaaS version of Photoshop that would benefit, say, Google. (Read up on Photoshop express, and note how nobody talks about it any more.)
Wheels within wheels. The next decade of megacorporate consolidation in the tech center will be interesting, to say the least.
A better solution than to stop CS5 for OSX would be to reduce the price of CS5 for windows. It would mean more sales (enthusiasts that would be able to use a legal copy), and at the same time it would give management suits in companies the choice of spending less for placing their graphic creators on windows, or spend more, AND GAIN NOTHING by keeping them on fruit-cases.
An even cuter solution would include making CS6 for OpenSolaris. ;)
//Svein
Except that as all Macs in the last five years run Windows, so there's no need for companies to buy new hardware... as was pointed out the last time you made pretty much the same point and made the same fruit case 'joke'.
As for saying that enthusiasts would be able to use a legal copy, they already can. if they can't afford to, there are a lot of options out, which don't involve piracy.
... I was going to joke about how that is in the recycle bin, but that is harsh.
Flash is alright, it can be a cpu hog, I hate the fact Chrome freezes for 10 seconds when loading it up in the background, and I hate how advertising scum used it to scream their advertisements at me before adblock came around... but without it, we wouldn't have had half as many mario brother spoof games freely available on the web, stick men martial artist animations, and we wouldn't have half as many pretty websites (sometimes taking hours to load, but I digress)... and we wouldn't have had html5 and silverlight trying to get in on the act, and making the web just that little bit more interactive.
Like all things - flash has it's place, but a lot of people misuse and abuse it.
A beer - now can't we all just get along! :D
"Make Windows the lead platform for new features and functionality and then backport them to OS X"
How is this different from what Adobe have been doing for years, exactly? (Premiere, Adobe Acrobat, 64-bit, Cocoa, hell even the Mac OS X migration...)
Are Adobe a 'Microsoft Gold Certified Partner', one wonders?
By the way, perhaps the Register can tell us how Apple "killed" Flash on the iPhone and iPad, given that Flash wasn't on these devices to begin with...? (and full Flash isn't on any shipping smartphone today, as far as I can tell)
the reg can say apple killed flash on iphone and ipad because they did! Adobe has had flash fully ported to iphone for over a year from what i've heard, they were just waiting for apple approval. Apple killed it.
your ability to tell what is shipping is suspect. Flash lite ships on nokia s40 and s60, winmo, blackberry and android. Blackberry has full flash, android has full flash in beta. Winmo has a full flash beta, but adobe cancelled it for winmo 6.5 since ms is vaporwaring win phone 7 already.
Apple not giving access to GPU until 10.6.3. GPUs do h264 decode for a long time, at least they do wonders with mpeg2 regardless of their age...
Adobe should have directly blamed Apple for "CPU hog" claims and should have asked them why on earth they can do the same thing on Windows XP while, it has to be Intel 10.6 for Apple... That is, instead of doing some stupid things like wasting their time for Flash on iPhone...
I'm always told how good flash is at building applications, farmville seems to be the most popular. And I know people with >2GHz dual core windows machines who gave up on FV because their computer is too slow, and let's be honest, we oldtimers have seen better than that on our C64s some 30 years ago.
I've just Googled, and the oracle tells me that Flash for Blackberry is claimed to be arrived in "H2 2010", i.e. not at the present time. I'll reiterate that full, proper Flash doesn't seem to be on any mobile device at this moment. Call me again when that changes.
I think that in a few years, no-one will be able to believe that there was so much brouhaha over this. No-one's getting upset at Java not being included, are they? I suspect Flash will go the same way (and good riddance frankly, on any platform).
You could say the same about OS X..., relatively not many people would even care if it disappeared off the face of the planet. In fact it would probably be better as software developers could put more time and effort into developing on better platforms without having to conform to dictatorship lock-downs that Apple enforce.
It's a very unhealthy situation that Apple are trying to promote! Choice should be with the user, not chosen and enforced by the vendor! It's a shame really, Apple have some good ideas but as before it will come crashing down around them because of the way they try to control everything, they have not learned from their mistakes.
"Choice should be with the user, not chosen and enforced by the vendor!"
Try removing Flash from your system and then getting a full web experience.
Not that I'm saying Flash is the only product you would have similar problems with, but for some quite popular sites there isn't an actual "choice",just "use" or "do not use".
Don't like Apple? Buy someone else's phone/music player/computer.
Don't like IE? Use Firefox/Chrome/Opera/whatever
Don't like Flash? Use erm.........oh.
It's ok if the site is something that's nice to have fluff like YouTube, but what it it's your online-only banking site?
So yes, choice good, but don't delude yourself that we have it.
All the people on this and the other related posts saying flash is dead, get a clue.
Do you seriously think web designers are going to give up on flash just because it won't work on the iphone and doesn't work well on OS X? Forget Apple's shiny PR maneouvering for a minute and compare the number of other computers on the internet capable of running flash fine with the number of macs and iphones, you'll notice a bit of a difference in the numbers.
It took years for people just to stop using tables in their HTML and for IE6 to go away (still happening), the death of flash and the adoption of HTML 5 video aren't going to happen in some spontaneous revolution once the standards are finalised.
@Ramshackle: I'm a Flash and web developer but must confess that I have currently reduced or stopped using it, mainly because whenever I mention the gorgeous sites I've developed to people, they immediately get out their iPhones to have a look and cannot access it. This proved particularly embarassing with clients who took the line that if most people in the meeting cannot access the site on the leading mobile browser, then the site needs to change as that was somehow representative of their target audience. Frustrating to say the least...
If this was just one or two people I wouldn't think much of it, but I can't remember the last person I talked to that didn't have an iPhone these days (including me lol) Overall, I think this is having a very big effect on Flash developers (as to how much, this depends on whether you develop whole sites or just banners or just cartoons etc.) as everybody with an iPhone/iTouch/iPad is unable to access it, and those are pretty big numbers...especially if you look at the ad space hits from such devices.
So let's get this into perspective, flash introduces hardware acceleration in version 10.1 which is not even out yet...And at the same time Apple is helping Adobe by publishing these API's...
Funny all this talk about bad architecture etc as before this version Flash didn't use hardware acceleration on Windows either....So what was the excuse before this version for the bad performance?
No, what will kill flash is every man and his dog installing stuff like ClicktoFlash - and not bothering to ever click on it.
No clicking = no obtrusive advertisement taking over your screen = no hits = no money. Hopefully, eventually, the purveyors of Flash crap will get the message and give up on it.
At 10% and rapidly rising with madly high customer satisfaction Microsoft would start a small war to have themselves, the Mac platform is here to stay.
99% of developers could hardware decode video on Mac: just not Adobe. Qucktime does much more, with about 3 lines of code - Create a quicktime movie object from a URL, attach it to a MoviePlayer view, tell it to play.
The new API (which I've looked at) is for decoding individual H264 frames. You've now got to fetch them yourself, unpack the frame, send it to the HW (via the API), get it back (via a callback), and the draw it on the screen. LOADS more work, and only people working on a few specific apps will need it - that's not to say it's not a useful API, but most people want to create/edit/play/save video which QT does. This is for people who JUST want to DECODE it.
It's simply Adobe not wanting to do things to fit in with the OS. Adobe are still programming for MacOS 7, because after 10 years they're only just waking up to the fact that Apple are serious about this new fangled MacOSX.
'Basic' says: "Who the hell wants to use quicktime as a format? It's awkward, doesn't play well on anything except a Mac and (let's be frank) pretty annoying"
Well, anyone using the open standard H.264 video format, which uses a container format that looks rather like QuickTime (because it essentially is.)
(QuickTime is a container, not a video codec.)
Adobe Flash needs an API that supports individual hardware decode of frames, rather than pushing the entire H.264 stream through (as already supported by the QuickTime API for a long, long time) because they need to be able to compose other graphics on top: those writing the ActionScript behind many of the Flash-based video players want to be able to add DoGs, adverts, etc. on top of the video "on the fly."
The statement that Adobe couldn't use hardware acceleration before is incorrect. Apple has always offered hardware acceleration via CoreVideo, but Adobe chose to use its lousy port from Windows and therefore wanted the ability to access the hardware directly (which is not allowed on Macs for security reasons).
Let's look at the reality.
1. Other companies doing much more hardware intensive things than Flash managed to get by with the public APIs. Why couldn't Adobe?
2. Even other Adobe apps do far more complex things with the public APIs, why not the Flash group?
3. Adobe always had access to hardware acceleration if they chose to use it. CoreVideo provides hardware acceleration, but Adobe wanted to write their own insecure, buggy software to bypass Apple's safeguards.
4. The hardware API that Adobe was whining about affects only h264 video. What is Adobe's excuse on everything else? My MacBook Pro goes to 120% CPU usage simply by opening a Flash page that doesn't even have animations on it. Why is that?
5. Adobe STILL doesn't have a full version of flash that will work on mobile devices. Even 10.1, (even if it does come out this summer as delayed), will only work on devices with 800 MHz A8 or above - which is an almost insignificant number of devices.
6. Even this 'new, improved' Flash with hardware acceleration still sucks CPU cycles like crazy. Look at Engadget's results. On the i5 system, it actually uses MORE CPU cycles than the old version. But even the i7 result tells you something. If it's taking 50-60% CPU on a Core i7 with multi-GB of RAM and fast video card, how do you expect it to work on a 400-600 MHz mobile device with 128-256 MB of RAM?
How anyone could blame Apple for Adobe's incompetence is beyond me.
Not an apple fanboi by any measure but Jobs is hardly reaching calling Adobes software for the last 5+ years, shite. My girlfriend rails on the UI on photoshop these days so I am pushing for her to learn the GIMP. Doing whatever it takes to secure my boxes and this always starts by removing the bloated malware portal Adobe software has become regardless of platform.
I guess that explains it. It's Apple's problem - they simply didn't give Flash the necessary permissions to access the API's Flash needs to help boost performance. The minority of Mac users are the only one's encountering the CPU hog issue. The majority of users on Windows run Flash perfectly fine.
If Apple doesn't want Flash on their iPhone or iPad even though it could run perfectly fine and stable, then it's their loss. Their users will not be happy to see Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile smartphones soon running Flash perfectly fine. Nothing but lies = Apple.
"...what will kill flash is every man and his dog installing stuff like ClicktoFlash ....."
Yes, that would work. However, this 'ere sense of proportion sez that actually only a percentage of tech site commentards are doing this.
....and even their dogs ain't bothered.
The massive and silently deafening "meh" from the great unwashed is probably why the Great Stampede Away From Flash amongst web monkeys has a slight problem. Nobody bothered to turn up for it.
Jobs should sharpen his critcism of Flash: it is a bolt-on technology into a webpage that is not completely aware of the host page it is enbedded within nor is the host page totally aware of what the flash element is doing.
To have such awareness would improve efficiency and user experience, where the flash content could react to what the user is doing with other regions of the page for example. (Well, please correct me Flash-developers if I'm wrong, but I think my general point about bolt-on holds).
It is not possible to stop Flash animations that irritate (unless someone knows of a 3rd party browser plug-in).
It is not possible to mute the sound coming from Flash content, per browser tab. Annoying if you are browsing multiple sites while listening to your favourite music only to find that an auto-start-on-loading Flash component on a page crashes over this with its own music.
There you go, Steve, give them that.
As for the comment "closed and proprietary" about Flash. Perhaps true, perhaps nothing wrong with that, but doesn't the iPhone platform have elements of closed-and-proprietary-ness given that every app has to be approved, apps can only be developed on Apple platforms, and that the platform is a commercial product and not an open-source one.
Haven't got an issue with closed/proprietary; business is business. But when one company calls another that, when both are then that's simply hypocritical.
The first thing I install on Firefox is "FlashBlock" that, well, blocks all Flash in Webpages. No nasty ads, everything cool. When I *do* need flash (for a menu, video, game or whatever) I click on that *particular* flash and have it all well.
So what's the big problem with flash ? Once a friend wanted to post a video on his webpage, and with Flash we could do that in 10 minutes.
"A company spokesman says that Mac hardware acceleration will arrive with an incarnation of the Flash Player due "shortly after" version 10.1, which is now on its second release candidate."
Just a brief reminder here - There is currently NO reliable Flash application for ANY mobile phone currently on the market. [read again]
Adobe has be promising for over 10 years to get Flash working correctly on the Mac. We're still waiting. Flash 10.x is still vaporware. Flash for mobile phones is still a long ways off...even with Google's Android help.
My compliments to the hundreds of thousands of developers who are currently creating software for the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad without ever using Flash. With over 4 billion downloads of your products, it seams that the buying public is voicing their opinion about the need for Flash in a mobile environment.
And my compliments to the hundreds of thousands of developers who are currently creating software in the Flash environment and are, it seems, more than willing to forgo a market of 100 million users instead of rising to the call of learning how to properly develop an application for Apple's products. My friends, you have stones of steel and more power to you.
I know I would have a difficult time walking away from that size of a market (and one that is growing every quarter). But these diehard individualists, these buggy whip manufacturers in a time of automobile supremacy, these Greyhound Bus travelers in a time of wide-bodies super jet, in a time of Manchester United they stand for Birmingham, these mavericks are toeing the line and sticking to their principles of holding the flame of antiquity and proclaiming loudly, "WE WILL NOT CHANGE. THEY REST OF YOU CAN SOD OFF!"
Let's remember that Steve Jobs' main goal is to make money for Apple and his holier than thou attitude with regard to open standards is a joke.
It's amazing how many people equate Flash with annoying banners or advertisements. So tell me something, when amazing new HTML 5 comes along (whenever that happens - years before most people are using a browser that fully supports it), are you telling me that HTML5 won't be used to create the same annoying banners - or will HTML 5 developers be far more restrained with this stuff?
It's seems obvious to me that Android will be by far the most popular smartphone OS in a couple of years and will also rule the waves on tablets. Steve Jobs realises he's made a mistake with the whole anti flash stance and is now deparately trying to trash it before every other smartphone supports it over the next few months.