By now you have probably seen Apple’s surprisingly lacklustre HTML5 showcase (or not if you don’t want to install Safari). The demo’s have drawn criticism for the use of browser sniffing, vendor specific prefixes, reverting to the quicktime plugin on the iPhone and the use of the patent-backed H.264 video codec (part owned by Apple). Which would be fine if this was presented a tech demo, but its being promoted as a wholesale, standards compliant replacement to Flash that you can use today.

In response, Antonio Holguin has put together an alternative Flash showcase that of course, works on all browsers. While its exciting to have a competitor to Flash (Adobe really needed an accurately placed kick) Apple’s own demos show Flash is not a “old” technology and for the foreseeable future HTML5 is simply not ready for real world deployment.

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Breaking News.. pot calls kettle black

Its strange to hear Steve Jobs profess concern about a open web when everything else his company does is so militantly closed. This is the company that first put DRM into music, that won’t let your change your own battery, will tie to you to one phone carrier and will only let you install software from their store.

OK, but we are talking about the open web, not Apple’s OS…

People tend to associate Flash content with two things; video and games. Fortunately Jobs provides alternatives for both, for video he cites the H.264 codec. Which is fine, but isn’t H.264 a licensed, closed technology? so much so that the Firefox developers want nothing to do with it. Apple are also the company that have their own propriety, closed video plugin – quicktime, something Jobs appears to have forgotten all about.

As for games, Jobs mentions the 50,000 games in the App store, you know the same marketplace where you have to buy a Mac, pay a yearly license fee and pray Apple deems it worthy and does not pull it for some arbitrary reason. Ironically, a lot of those App store games are Flash ports, which otherwise could have been universally viewable on nearly every device with a internet connection.

Flash is not closed as you might think

The ActionScript 3 runtime (Tamarin) was open sourced, as was RTMP. The SWF file format has had its specification published so anyone can build a tool to output SWFs. AS3 is based on EMCAScript, XML parsing uses E4X – both open standards. The Flash IDE is easily extendible and the Flex SDK is 100% open source. Using Flex Builder, built on top of the open source Eclipse engine you can create Flash content created with open sourced tools. The plugin itself can never be 100% open sourced as it relies on licensed technologies like H.264 (Steve’s replacement to Flash video). However, as the xbox & PS3 have demonstrated its open enough to allow 3rd party companies to develop their own version of the plug-in.

There is also a huge community of Flash developers who for many years have been sharing code and helping each other out. The are many open sourced code projects (tween engines, utility classes etc ). I’m not saying that Flash is open is the strictest sense, but its not a closed as Jobs is making out and its a hell of a lot more open than the App store alternative.

A truly open web is not the preserve of one company

Any sensible vision of a open web, inludes the option to download applications made by anyone and install any plugin you want. Jobs appears to be heralding HTML5 as an exciting replacement to the “outdated”, “pc era” Flash, but really he knows its in such early development that for now its a non-starter. What he is actually saying to developers is please use our closed, tightly controlled App ecosystem so we can make money either by taking a cut of the sales price or through our iAd advertising platform.

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Apple CEO, Steve jobs has posted a extraordinary, lengthy article about his feelings towards Flash. It’s surprising that Jobs feels the need to attack another companies product this publicly. If you are a Flash developer it’s pretty grim reading, with Jobs claiming Flash is not a “modern” technology and has no place on mobile devices:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

While he provides a number of plausible sounding reasons, it is important to note that he does not reveal his business motivations. Adobe’s Flash exporter would have meant it would have been very easy to target multiple mobile devices thus losening the Apple developer stranglehold. Flash and Air would have also posed a significant threat to the lucrative App store. Finally the fact the he throws around words like “propriety” and “openness” around with no sense of irony, means his reality distortion field is clearly cranked up to 11.

View Steve’s thoughts on Flash

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Google have been working with Adobe to seamlessly integrate the Flash Player Plug-in into Chrome. This means when you download Chrome for the first time you will not have to install Flash. Chrome also automatically updates, which means so will the Flash Player. This means fast adoption of new versions and better security.

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It’s just over two weeks until Adobe’s official CS5 launch. If you are curious as to what the next interation of Flash has in store, check out this excellent video overview by gotoandlearn.

Highlights include:

• iPhone export
• swfObject now the default embed method
• New xml based file format
• Custom class code hiniting
• New text layout framework
• Support for RTL languages

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There has been a lot of misinformation about the future of the Flash Player recently. Fortunately Jan from the Streaming Centre has avoided the political/fan boy nonsense and conducted an exhaustive performance comparsion between HTML5 video and Flash video.

The bottom line is that if Flash video is hardware accelerated (A feature of 10.1) the performance difference is negligible. Now if Adobe (with the help of Apple) could just sort out the mess that is the Flash player on OSX, the CPU hog perceptions might start to disappear.

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AnandTech have put the Flash Player 10.1 prelease through its paces. The bottom line is a massive improvement in video performance. CPU usage is greatly reduced and as a result playback much smoother.

This is great news for Flash developers and well, anyone who watches video online. Since nearly every Nvidia card is supported you will also be able to play Flash HD video on your smartphone.

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You can now grab the prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 from Adobe labs. The main new feature is hardware acceleration, but don’t get too excited, this only works with H.264 video and is currently limited to the Windows plugin. The good news is that Adobe have focused on optimization, so your existing projects should benefit from a performance boost. Other highlights include multi-touch\gesture support and local microphone access.

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The truly excellent Greensock tweening platform has hit another milestone in the form of its version 11 release. We have been using tweenMax exclusively for sometime now and can not recommend it enough. If you are still using tweener, or perhaps Adobes own offering, give Greensock a run and you will be amazed by the speed and flexibility of the platform.

New features include TweenNano: a ridiculously small (1.6k) tweening engine and TimelineLite\Max which make managing sequences and tweening groups mind numbingly simple.

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Its been a long time coming, but Flash has finally made it onto the iPhone – in the form of, wait for it – standalone applications. For reasons beyond us (obviously not technical), there is still no Flash Plugin runtime for the iPhone version of Safari. Nevertheless this is good news for Flash developers as it provides new opportunities developing for an established platform.

Some sample applications are already on the App Store, made with an pre-release version of Flash CS5, which exports/converts Flash projects into “native” iPhone apps. It will be interesting to see how these perform as traditionally anything built with Flash is quite resource hungry (compared to truly native applications) .

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