Today “Steve Jobs” published a blog/article/story called “Thoughts On Flash” at Apple.com. It’s a painfully boring read, mostly because we’ve read it all before. He adds nothing new, and in fact, continues to spread lies and 1/2 truths about Adobe and Flash.
His points are so easily debunked, I’m not even sure why he published this:
First, there’s ‘Open’ : The Flex SDK is open source. You do not need Adobe tools to create SWFs. Apple’s development tools are proprietary too, and getting restrictive by the day. H.264 is not open source either by the way. End of story.
Second, there’s the ‘full web’: Huh? No, most web sites use Flash and Flash animations. Sorry, that is just the way it is. A few sites have adopted HTML 5 instead, but it’s not universal, and not cross-browser compatible. Also, there are at least 100,000+ Flash games on the web, far more than on the iPhone.
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. : Flash has the most security issues and causes the the most crashes, because it is THE MOST USED SOFTWARE platform. End of story. See Windows. Mac OS has been free of a lot of these headaches because people don’t write a lot of software directly for it. Viruses are written for Windows because it’s everywhere. They exploit the technologies that are the most prevalent. Don’t think for a minute that crooks don’t target the Mac becasue it “pretty”. They don’t target it because they don’t make much money off of it.
Fourth, there’s battery life.: Only video is mentioned, and there is no real evidence given. Games with graphics and sound sap battery life too, no matter what they are built-with. that’s just the way the world works. My iPod Touch can only play Yahtzee for about 2 hours before it dies. That’s not Flash’s fault.
Fifth, there’s Touch.: Flash can easily be made to work with touch-based apps. All the events are there in CS5. However, with Apple blocking technological advances, it’s much tougher, isn’t it? Also, just try to make the HTML 5 Canvas do the same thing. It’s painful.
Sixth, the most important reason.: The software layer argument. Yes, all software would run better if it was written in Assembly Language too. The APIs Apple has created are layers that make things inefficient as well. Why not just get rid of it all while you are at it? However, we have come so far from that point developing modern software, that this argument makes no sense at all.
Honestly Jobs, just forget it. Most of us have given-up on your platform (as far as Flash is concerned anyway). You make neat stuff, but the limitations just make our lives much harder as software developers. We *will* learn HTML 5, and we *will* learn the Canvas. We will find workarounds to the enormous deficiencies we have already found right on the surface (no pun intended), and we will get things to look fairly good. That is because, as modern web software developers, we HAVE TO BE FLEXIBLE and willing to learn new things and accept new ideas as well as old ones. I’m sorry that is not that case for Apple or their leadership.
Still, most Flash developers just don’t agree with your stand on the technology. A blog that simply reiterates the same tired and debunked arguments is not about to change that.