Re: Thoughts on Flash

Nowadays, a web application is a bit of a frankensteined creature. But, even though we’ve got a long way to go, the standards are indeed brewing, and will eventually catch up. The way it stands today, we already have some flavours of persistent storage, animation, video, vector graphics, client-server communications, and some interesting frameworks on top of it all to make things a bit more seamless.

The performance and slickness isn’t all there, but it’s becoming painfully obvious the browser is the new OS. We are heading in the direction of something at which operating systems failed — providing a standards-driven platform to bring the same experience to all devices regardless of their software and hardware.

So where exactly does Flash fit into this picture? Proprietary, platform-dependent, buggy, and bloated, its lack of accessibility and direct search engine friendliness just doesn’t jive with where the rest of the web is heading. While a bit of a radical move on Apple’s part, I think keeping Flash off the iPhone OS will be for the greater good of everyone in the long run. Either way I’m sure Google is just as unhappy about Flash on showing up for their platform as Apple is.

What I can’t agree with Steve on, however, is the justification for excluding Flash as a tool for iPhone app creation. It’s not as much about Flash anymore; I couldn’t really care less about its ability to author apps. It’s more about the new, completely unnecessary level of dictatorship on Apple’s part.

Much has been written on the topic. The bottom line is, to me, that it should not matter what the application is written in so long as the user is satisfied with it. The App Store is for users, the developer tools are for developers. If the product meets the user’s expectations, who cares what it was written in?

There is a reason people prefer CPython to C despite the former compiling to C in the end. If all we cared about was code as optimized and cleanly written as possible, we probably wouldn’t touch Python. However, the fact that writing Python is so much more convenient and enjoyable, and that the hardware today is fast enough at running code translated from Python for us to simply not care, we choose ease of use and speed of development over performance because it allows us to deliver our product much faster.

The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms.

So what? Those using Flash will be more than aware what limitations their tool of choice imposes. Want convenience over the latest APIs? Use Flash. Nobody is complaining that they can’t write OpenGL games in JavaScript. I look at it the way I do at Opera Mini on the iPhone — it’ll remind people of just why it’s worth to go for the real deal in the first place.

And who is to say that the standards of quality the Objective-C apps set are somehow higher? Has Steve not been in the darker corners of the App Store, where design guidelines and provided UI controls are thrown out the window and replaced with hideous interfaces and code that crashes apps after going there, then here, then clicking back? How do those bugfests make it into the store? If anything, the App Store approval process has shown just how easy it is for a buggy flashlight clone to make it through, yet have a unique but ‘questionable’ app wait in the queue for weeks just to be rejected for a reason explained in fewer characters than a typical tweet. 

I feel like I’m rephrasing things already said before but I can’t help feeling betrayed and oppressed by Apple. If this does not have a major impact and cause them to think again, I’m afraid to wonder what other ideas might pop into Steve’s head.

2 years ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments