9 ms·
Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife
- aneth 16y agoThe only people I know defending Adobe and Flash are Flash developers and Adobe itself. Everybody else tolerates Flash begrudgingly. I miss a few flash games here and there on my iPhone. Beyond that, good riddance. Flash is the RealPlayer of the decade.
- tdfx 16y agoI am so glad you used that metaphor.
- CoryMathews 16y agoI personally hate developing in flash and I hate flash websites. However I enjoy flash videos and flash games. I don't want someone telling me I can no longer play these games.
- apphacker 16y agoI started using Amazon Video which uses flash. I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. I doubt Amazon would make this a direct video since Flash permits some form of rights management for content owners. If it were just a video I could download it and distribute it how I wanted. Which while ultimately is a nice idea but studios would just then not permit things like Amazon Video and so I like that Flash has enabled me to enjoy the content I want the way I can.
- stcredzero 16y agoI like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. Silverlight?
- MichaelGG 16y agoDefending Flash overall or for iPhone? I hate every Adobe product except Photoshop, yet I still am upset with Apple's decision on blocking other runtimes and forcing C.
- schammy 16y agoThe whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS. Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
- zmmmmm 16y agoI defend Flash in the same way I defend people people's right to free speech even when I violently disagree with them.
- pohl 16y agoI wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so. But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.
- Confusion 16y agoIt's so hard to grasp that the author even uses 'hypercritical' as an adjective to denote an instance of hypocrisy.
- mascarenhas 16y agoThis was obviously a typo to me, I just skipped it and kept reading. By now several other comments here have shown that the Jobs' letter is indeed hypocritical by the accepted definitions of the term. I will even link another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy.
- crad 16y agoRight, not using all the tools available in an OS is quite different than not being able to do so because of the development environment.
- pohl 16y agoSee...in the subtext of your post, there is the ghost of a moral claim. † So now we're getting close to the requirements for hypocrisy. Now you would just need to create a closed platform and ship it. † One that Jobs did not make, and that I do not agree with — I think any platform can make its own rules, and game consoles have set the precedent for the more closed model.
- mclin 16y agoiTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!
- mr_justin 16y agoReally? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system. That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
- mclin 16y agoI don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is. It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread. I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing. This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.
- Terretta 16y agoOut of curiosity, is your library on an external disk that sleeps? Mine was, and it seemed to hang while waiting for the disk to spin up. I moved it to an always on disk, and the hangs stopped.
- jws 16y agoI was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so) Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball. Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app. Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball. If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever. Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?
- digitallogic 16y agoWhile I do think that the Jobs letter is littered with hypocrisy, I don't think comparing iTunes to Flash is a fair analogy. One is a single self contained application, and the other is a framework/runtime.
- S_A_P 16y agoI see some of his points, but he is missing the bigger point. (And Steve's letter actually fails here too) They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.
- archgrove 16y agoThe author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument. Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened. He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
- nkassis 16y agoI think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.
- rimantas 16y agoI hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company We cannot. I strongly disagree. At least in the web space there is a lot of innovation comming from or strongly supported by Apple.
- tlrobinson 16y agoiTunes sucking on Windows doesn't make them hypocrites, it helps prove their point. I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.
- CoryMathews 16y agoiTunes sucks on windows because it does not take advantage of windows. If windows was the iPhone and iTunes was an app it would have been banned a long time ago.
- tlrobinson 16y agoExactly. Replace "iTunes sucks on Windows" with "Flash suck on iPhone" and "Windows" with "iPhone SDK" and you're making his argument for him. Not that I agree with their policies, but this article's arguments aren't very good.
- boucher 16y agoIt's an incredibly simple claim. Apple is engaging in hypocritical policies. Apple forbids actions on its own platform that Apple uses to make money and gain market share on other platforms. I don't see how you can interpret this any other way.
- tlrobinson 16y agoSee the top comment in this thread by pohl: "it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so."
- chc 16y agoThat isn't hypocrisy. Jobs isn't saying he believes that people must never create cross-platform apps — he's just saying that they suck (as this author acknowledges Apple's cross-platform apps do) and thus he doesn't want them on his system. It's like the owner of McDonalds not wanting to take his wife to a McDonalds for their anniversary — he's not saying nobody should eat there, just acknowledging that it's rather low-class for the given situation.
- mattmiller 16y agoI don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention. It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend. The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
- tomlin 16y agoWindows users don't hate Flash nearly as much as OSX users. Performance plays a role, no doubt.
- commandar 16y agoMac users seem incapable of distinguishing between a bad format and a bad port. Flash on OS X is the latter; Flash runs about the same on my 2.16GHz C2D MBP as it does on my 1.6GHz Atom netbook. I don't run around foaming at the mouth about how irredeemably bad Flash is, though.
- slantyyz 16y agoThat's a pretty sweeping statement. I hated Flash on Windows. I happen to hate it more on Mac. I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a good format.
- schammy 16y agoThe whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS. Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
- akkartik 16y agoFake Steve Jobs: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-gizmodo-doors-being-broken-down-etc.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-...
- youngnh 16y agoI was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote: If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718 http://www.marco.org/500743718
- jaimzob 16y agoWhat happened to OSNews? I remember it being a pretty good tech news site a while back but now it seems that every day there's another over-written, hyper-ventilating, peanut-gallery-baiting "opinion piece" like this. Good for selling ad impressions I guess.
- mbreese 16y agoI stopped reading it a few years ago when the frequency of Thom's rants got too much for me to handle. For example, he was in way over his head when he was trying to describe what his ideal OS of the future would be. I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
- schammy 16y agoYou didn't actually read the article, did you? It makes a lot of very good and perfectly valid points. Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?
- jaimzob 16y agoMy point is that, as you’ve ably demonstrated, there are innumerable sites I can go to to indulge in juvenile tech tribalism. OSNews used to be a cut above these sites but it doesn’t seem to be any more. I think that’s a shame. With regard to the author’s points, they may be sincere but I don’t find them convincing. For example, no matter what you think of the quality of Windows iTunes, the idea was never to commodotise the underlying operating system. A calmer and more convincing argument against Job’s statement would simply be to ask what if Microsoft decided to “preserve their UX” by banning any agent that rendered HTML5?
- kqueue 16y agoumm. I don't think the author knows what hypocrisy means.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y agoYES Thank god. The video codec is 100x worse than flash. At least SWF is open, so you can generate SWF files royalty free from adobe. H264 aint quite that. I tunes sucks, hate it, and no itunes for linux. Hey remember itunes + palm? Yea? We're open my ass. If Apple is so devoted to breaking people free of proprietary crap explain the itunes-palm pre wars.
- rafa8a 16y agoThey have the right to control their platform. We as consumers can decide to buy or not to buy those products.
- hackermom 16y agoOh, look, it's Thom Holwerda with a new pair of blinkers on his head covering all possible perspective than what's in front of his own nose. zZz.
- navyrain 16y agoThe author really took the microsoft analogy a bit far. "adobe": 10 times. "microsoft" 12 times.
- almakdad 16y agoMS Windows developers aren’t dependent on some third party cross-platform technology to adopt the latest iTunes APIs changes. Whereas, iPhone developers using third party cross-platform tools such as Adobe’s Flash will be at the mercy of Adobe and can only move as fast as it can. http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thoughts-on-flash http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thought...
- jsz0 16y agoI also do not understand how it's hypocritical unless you believe the idiot assumption that one has to commit fully to open or close standards exclusively. Jobs has a much more pragmatic view and I cannot recall any point in which he suggested otherwise. The one thing his open letter makes clear is that Apple is not very interested in advancing other companies closed platforms especially if it undermines their own. That's completely a completely rational approach. I'm not sure why people are so compelled to project these idealogical purity tests on others. It's childish.
- hartard 16y agoDo you like giving hand jobs? Do you like getting hand jobs? That makes you a hypocrite too.
- stcredzero 16y agoHolier than Adobe - this is not a very high bar!
- aufreak3 16y agoI buy Apple's lines on this one. For long, I've been going "Grrrr...." over Flash heating up my macbook pro when run under MacOSX, but running much cooler (as in temperature) under windows on the exact same hardware. So much for cross-platform-ness. ... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads. Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!
- aufreak3 16y agoI don't mean that AK is involved in scratch, but that's the kind of educational stuff that seems to be on his radar.
- codingthewheel 16y agoAs much as I dislike Apple's current philosophy, most of Jobs' complaints are on the money.