Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch posted some thoughts on Flash, HTML5, the iPhone/iPad, and more yesterday. I didn’t see anything really new relative to all the discussions that have taken place here, so I’ve been slow in blogging it.
Now, however, Kevin has posted an interesting follow-up via the comments. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are bits I found significant:
For those wondering, the main computer I use is a MacBook Pro, and I’ve been using the Mac (and developing software for it) since it came out in 1984. […]
Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today. […]
Before we release a new version of Flash Player we run more than 100,000 test cases and have built an automated system that has scanned over 1 million SWFs that we use for testing from across the web. Our QA lab has a very large variety of machines to represent the machines in real use on the web.
Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10. From the comments across the web there may either be an upswing in incidents or there is a general piling on happening — we are looking into this actively and will work to resolve any real issues. If you are experiencing issues please report them directly to the Flash engineering team via the public bug database and the team will investigate and resolve each. […]
Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on — for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.
Good news to start the day with John. Hope we’ll see Flash CS5 soon.
This is great. I’m not a fan of flash (I actively block most of it via Click2Flash and FlashBlock) but anything to make it faster on my mac is welcome news.
It’s kind of crazy when a top of the line iMac C2D pauses for 5-8 seconds when you fullscreen a youtube video.
I’m a web developer by trade and have been steadily moving away from flash in recent years. I’m not fully there yet because including experimental HTML5 technologies in client pages creates massive headaches and extends development time, but I can see in the future being able to completely go with standards-based controls.
I’d love to see Adobe double down on HTML5 and leave flash to the niche like election results and other complex interactive components. Unlike most people who dislike Flash and Silverlight, I realize there are things which are very hard to accomplish in javascript even with sophisticated libraries like JQuery, Prototype, Mootools and YUI.
In any event, faster flash may not guarantee iPad/iPhone inclusion but I welcome it with open arms.
Very good news. Hope to ear something more at PSW.
“It’s kind of crazy when a top of the line iMac C2D pauses for 5-8 seconds when you fullscreen a youtube video.”
Every time on everything no matter what. I mean I can understand reasons why it would, it just feels so broken for a second.
Great news about the Core Animation work, guess Apples bullying is paying off already
John,
Great post! It sounds like I’m in the minority, but I never seen crashes with Flash. I don’t know what websites people are visiting but I don’t see problems. I do have to qualify that I’m running a mac pro with lots of ramso maybe that helps. Who knows.
I have kinda been down on Flash in the past couple of years.
However coding and usage of Flash has a great impact on performance too.
Take for example Youtube XL and BBC iPlayer on the PS3. Both use Flash and both are designed for TV use. iPlayer has rarely crashed on me. I don’t even bother with Youtube XL as it trashes the PS3 in seconds.
A great example of slick and smooth Flash is wonder-wall.com
It really points to the fact that well developed software is what everyone wants, whether that be the flash plugin (please work on the PS3 one) or the Flash site/app running in the Flash plugin.
I’m going to take a blind shot at this – but perhaps the Mac OS is just simply not the most efficient OS? If I’m reading Mr.Lynch numbers correctly.
I find it very interesting that based on a machine with the same hardware one could have a 35% vs 16% difference in the performance – Is it really possible
I have worked in the web/advertising industry for some time now IMO I’ll be taking a huge pay cut if my development doubles / triples if a project that once took one month to complete in Flash now takes 2 months because the mixed bag of tools don’t play nice – clients will not pay what the project is really worth in time spent.
Flash used properly is a wonderful tool – I’ll be the first one to point out it has it’s issues but nothing that would make me walk away from the product or give up finding a solution. HTML5 sure if required I’ll learn it – but I have to say the sample I have seen so far developed that clients would pay for were being created back in Flash 4 / 5/ MX
Flash has been the king of the hill for years and has continue to evolve and push a number of industries forward. Adobe keep doing what you’re doing someday maybe others in the play ground will catch up.
can’t wait to see this play out
-a
Is there a possibility that AJAX scripts in combination with Flash are responsible for at least some of the crashes and slowness?
A news site I visit regularly runs no less than 15 .js files (272 KB in total) *plus* Flash ads.
Some of those JavaScripts are for eye candy — the sort of thing that Flash is criticized for.
Developers need to adopt best practices, and cut down on page bloat.
Meanwhile, Kevin Lynch’s informative and candid response is welcome: some of Adobe’s earlier posts did not do the company justice, IMO, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation.
Um…yeah…its possible for a piece of software to be so terrible as to drag performance down that much. Welcome to technology. In other news, software can cause some cars to accelerate out of control.
That’s an easy test. Use a flash blocker like ClickToFlash. It will become apparent very quickly what the problem is (making something go away until you need it has that effect).
Good for you.
I don’t care.
Stop crashing my browser. As Metallica said, nothing else matters.
Stop Crashing My Browser.
[Way to parrot Welch. Anyway, you’re of course right that Flash should never crash. My beef is that suddenly we hear this HUGE groundswell of people saying that Flash is bringing them to ruin. Could it be that maybe–just maybe–some of these claims are overstated out of some tribalism (a desire to be close to Apple)? I mean, people identify with groups of multimillionaires who theoretically represent some nearby city in sports, so it’s not hard to see why they want to identify with the people who make the devices they use all day.
I’m not saying that Flash never crashes. I’m saying that a certain corps of people are eagerly overstating the problem out of some desire to bond with Apple, to be part of something bigger and shinier than themselves.
The beauty part for them is that the claims are unquantifiable and unfalsifiable: I guarantee you’re not seeing crash log data from Apple, so unless we go to your house and watch all day to see whether your browser ever crashes (and if then the problem is actually due to Flash & not, say, Saft, Glims, Inquisitor, etc.), we’re talking about impressions, not real data. –J.]
“if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.”
Flash has such a remarkably high utility relative to its crashiness and performance that we’ve all coped with it.
The upswing is that Flash is used more widely. I go to pages with several Flash items on it from different sources: an embed of a video, ads, banner.
When you used to go to a page and watch a Flash movie, it put different demands on the browser and OS. It also seems to me anecdotally that Leopard and Snow Leopard are worse at coping with Flash (or Flash is worse at dealing with those OS releases) than Panther was.
People are now casting the Franz Kafka vote: that is, no Flash is better than Flash.
I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy line, too, about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:
“In other words – and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. ”
Sounds like you are well and truly stuck in the past. People don’t want gimmicky multimedia crap anymore, they want media.
This is a welcome statement for the most part. I can’t see how he’s using identical hardware to many who are experiencing trouble with the plugin and haven’t experienced the same problems. None of us are lying about our experiences. One good bit of information Mr. Lynch said was that Apple was helping with the task. We were told from the Flash team that Apple was unwilling to cooperate. Hopefully some results will come out of these efforts. Just wish Adobe could do what it’s doing with CS5 with a rewrite. Feedback I hear from CS5 app testers say they’re fantastic.
@andrew: Best analogy I have for this is that the Flash plugin is like trying to shoehorn a Japanese car part into a Ford. It’s just not going to work as well or at all doing that, and well ALL of Macromedia’s apps were like that.
That’s great news for Mac and Flash users (and developers). Looking forward to 10.1 🙂
Although I am not a big fan of Flash, I can see its merits for certain rich applications.
Furthermore, I appreciate this kind of open communication by Adobe and any efforts to improve the performance of the Mac version.
Thanks John.
Thanks for pulling out the juicy bits, John.
Dustin: “I can’t see how he’s using identical hardware to many who are experiencing trouble with the plugin and haven’t experienced the same problems.”
Here are some diagnostics to find which part of a configuration may make the critical difference:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html
jd/adobe
http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash
“As for why such crash resistance was worth implementing, Serlet explained that, based on data from the Crash Reporter application built into Mac OS X — the thing that asks if you’d like to send crash data to Apple after a crash — the most frequent cause of crashes across all of Mac OS X are (or at least were, pre-Snow Leopard) “plugins”.”
“Serlet didn’t name any specific guilty plugins. Just “plugins”. But during the week at WWDC, I confirmed with several sources at Apple who are familiar with the aggregate Crash Reporter data, and they confirmed that “plugins” was a euphemism for “Flash”.”
CTO Kevin Lynch and all the Adobe employees are liars and lazy, just like Steven Jobs calls it.
LAZY
Between denying the crashing and the sudden realization that Adobe can improve Flash’s video performance on the Mac (after swearing up and down it was impossible), I don’t see why I should believe anything this guy says.
[Who said that it couldn’t be improved? I’ve heard accurate statements that to improve things fully (e.g. to use hardware acceleration for video), Adobe needs Apple to add some support that’s missing on OS X. I hope they’re doing that, but I’m not in a position to discuss the details. –J.]
Let’s see an update that fixes the crashing and improves performance. I’ll give it a try, and if it works I’ll believe you. But right now, the software is still crap. For now, words are just words.
[You’re of course right to demand proof, and I think you’ll get it. In the meantime, we thought you’d appreciate some insight into where things are heading. –J.]
Nothing like mixing 3rd party off-the-record hearsay with ad hominems.
You’re a wonderful individual. Don’t let anyone stop you from your mission of making the web a better place.
On a side note, Serlet’s quote means nothing without context. For instance, what exact percentage was “plugins”. It can be the “most frequent” with 5% of the total, depending on how the data is broken down. My anectdotal experience: Flash seems ok on my Mac.
Yeah, all those crash logs that accumulated in Apple’s Crash Reporter are hearsay. Flash fanboys are so hillarious, trying to defend a dying unstable platform.
I find it interesting that everyone who complains and is quick to mention that you can use tools to disable Flash. Why are these people still complaining how buggy Flash is? Shouldn’t they be in web browsing nirvana with Flash disabled? Or could it be because the web is severely hampered and rather boring without Flash?
“…Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.”
Uh, do not forget Windows, please…
[I wouldn’t worry about that! Windows retains ~95% market share. As Kevin pointed out, a lot of the FP code is shared between platforms. –J.]
All of this is addressing the symptoms, not the underlying problem with Flash: It’s a proprietary, closed source solution to a problem the web is rapidly replacing. Flash filled a niche, and that niche has since been replace with SVG, high performance JavaScript engines, and the video/audio tags.
[No, it hasn’t–at least not if you care about delivering content to more than a minority. Here are recent usage stats. The majority of browsers out there support neither SVG nor the Video tag. Even Video tag support is fragmented between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.
I’m not crowing about any of this or saying that it’s as it should be; I’m simply pointing out that there’s a hell of a gulf between theory and practice, and that if you want to deliver content to a critical mass of people today or in the near term, Flash provides a solution (except, obviously, on the iPhone/iPad; Apple is effectively requiring that content creators make multiple versions of their files). –J.]
If Adobe truly is serious about being a company that makes great tools then they should put their money where their mouth is and build a tool that allows web developers to author complicated HTML5 sites that have the same features as Flash in a product similar to the Flash composer that ships with CS4.
“the sudden realization that Adobe can improve Flash’s video performance on the Mac (after swearing up and down it was impossible)”
What Adobe employees were saying before was that it is impossible to use the GPU on Macs. As Apple does not provide a public API for Flash to pass the decoding to the GPU like QuickTime currently does. Using the GPU brings down the
That hasn’t changed, as what Kevin is talking about is that Adobe has made improvements to video decoding when it’s just pure CPU. So Flash video on a Mac should take as much CPU on a Mac, than with a Windows machine which GPU chip is not supported yet in Flash Player 10.1.
Also that Flash video will see an improvement on a Mac isn’t completely new, as seen in the following benchmarks of video inside of the Flash Player 10.1 beta on a Mac:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=6
This was long before the iPad announcements with all the new complaints that Flash is so slow on a Mac. However, what Kevin is saying that the release version of Flash Player 10.1 should be even faster.
Parrot Welch? Maybe, but even you admit the point is valid. And for the record, I don’t own a single. Apple. Product.
I do, however, work as a Systems Administrator within the US Federal Government, and have a number of WINDOWS computers in my domain that can’t access flash heavy sites because *the* *browser* *locks* *up* *and* *then* *crashes*
It’s not just a Apple/Mac phenomenon. I personally don’t give a toss about Apple.
I care that my users browsers are crashing. I care that *my* browser crashes.
Stop Crashing My Browser.
@tristan
‘It’s a proprietary, closed source solution to a problem the web is rapidly replacing.’
LOL RAPIDLY? I’m wagering HTML NEVER catches up to Flash in producing the caliber of RIA’s Flash / Actionscript is producing NOW! 6-7 years before we see anything like prezi.com if ever!
I for one, AM NOT WAITING! I’ll be a skeleton by that time! You HTML5/Mac fanboys kill me with your chest beating rants about how HTML5 is gonna kill flash. Mark my words, HTML7 won’t kill flash!
@Frank “Grayhawk” Huminski
you’re either lying, exaggerating, or you have buggy machines (in which case what does that say about you as an IT admin?). Fix your boxes or get new ones dude. Most people (and I mean 95% or more don’t experience flash crashing).
You have hard numbers to back that up?
Lets put it this way: there’s a reason almost every web browser has moved to sandboxing plugins into their own processes so that when they crash they don’t take down the browser. Gee…what’s the most “successful” plugin that gets used *everywhere*, for better or worse?
I’m in IT too and I see a _LOT_ of Flash related problems.
Tribalism? Desire to Bond?
J – Am glad to see that PSYCH 101 class was not wasted.
[Am I wrong? If so, how?
I think the answer has little to do with the merits/deficiencies of Flash specifically, or any other single technology. It has more to do with basic human needs to define ourselves in part by saying what we are not. People are & always have been afraid to die, so they need to be part of something more enduring. At this cultural moment, the solace provided by religious affiliation & national identity has been shredded. Thus people cast around for something to join. I know, because I used to be just the same way with regard to the Mac–and that was back in the 90’s when being an Apple fan was *really* challenging. –J.]
I am, typically, in web browsing nirvana with Flash turned off.
You seem to think that we’re mad at the amount of content out there, short of maybe the Ads that are done in flash, that’s not the case. The problem is that Flash uses a retarded amount of resources, and causes browser hangs and crashes, and has done this for a long ass time. Playing a youtube video shouldn’t eat up and entire Core on my CPU. but it does.
I’ve been testing SEVERAL machines with flash and haven’t experienced one crash. Sooo funny. I’ve been to computer labs, even best buy and just started loading up several of flash RIA and HD video stream pages on dozens of machines. how many crashes did I get? ZERO. Fix your boxes. update your browser/plugs, reinstall. Bottom Line: You have a corrupt installation.
Besides ALL the complainers I’ve found out to be mac fanboys! So, explain why Apple won’t allow even Java Plugin Architecture on the iPad? Geez, maybe he wants everyone to only download from the App Store! DUH! Thats BORING! I want to be able to download/interact with the WEB, not the JUST THE APP STORE! Better than a laptop my arse!
http://hollywooddigital.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/mac-osx-running-7-complex-adobe-flash-ri/
Reporting a flash player bug via “If you are experiencing issues please report them directly to the Flash engineering team via the public bug database and the team will investigate and resolve each. […]” is quite complicated for the average non programmer
Rereading it I was a bit worried you’d be offended, John, but it looks like you took it the way I meant it: a challenge. Prove me wrong, man! 🙂
And YES, thanks for sharing the plan. 🙂
Here’s something I don’t understand. How is it Mac users can complain about Flash being a closed system? Really?
You use a Mac, the most closed hardware/operating system environment combination currently available as a main stream option, and you complain that Flash is closed?
iPhone – closed system.
iPad – closed system.
Apple’s reasons for doing so are there’s and I’m not commenting on whether it’s a good or a bad thing (clearly there are pros and cons), but to keep a straight face and tell Adobe that Flash is wrong because it’s closed whilst typing on your Mac and singing the praises of Apple?
Gimme a break!
“there’s” should be “theirs”, of course.
Bad Phil.
John Gruber is so over the top that it is hard to take him seriously, even if he has some interesting things to say.
Example:
He sees one HTML 5 video player and he says it’s “…better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.”
Ladies, gentlemen, children of all ages, it’s not HTML 5 that’s gonna kill Flash. It’s the iPad. It was beauty killed the beast.
Kidding aside, I’m going to be happy if Adobe can halve Flash’s CPU usage on the Mac. That’s my main gripe. The other gripe is the way it takes over my browser and turns web pages into cartoons. But whatev.
“Uh, do not forget Windows, please…”
*rollseyes*
Adobe, Stop. Crashing. My. Browser.
>If Adobe truly is serious…[they should] build a tool that allows web developers to author complicated HTML5 sites that have the same features as Flash
Dreamweaver and Flash CS5 have shown demos and will have some level of support but where’s Apple’s solution? I love Apple as much as the next fanboy but designers like myself will use whatever it takes to get the job done and that sometimes means using Flash.
Apple can talk as much trash as the next flash hater yet they don’t have an authoring solution either. You would think Apple would have at least *some* kind of export in Motion 4 (even rudimentary) for (since they damn well invented it) but they don’t.
Hi John,
Wondering what you make of this: http://9to5mac.com/adobe_v_apple_4567234
Also on a side note, will Photoshop ever go to linux. If not, why not?
I often have discussions about the future of OS’s (yeah, fun times). A lot of big 3D apps are moving to linux obviously to allow cheap render farms. Just wondering where Adobe, or Photoshop stand on the issue.
Best.
Way to play the “it’s just the fanboys” card.
[It’s not “just the fanboys,” and I didn’t say it was–but nor is it all legit. –J.]
great! flash works on macs now — how about getting some proper 64bit support on linux? (debugger and peformance) be nice to your developers and they will be nice to you — otherwise you are pissing away potential profits
Mind if I ask about optimizations for linux? Will adobe release 32 bit and 64 bit flash for linux with the same awesome performance as on Windows?
16% of CPU to render an applet on a page? Too much. A page is composed of several elements and even 16% is too much CPU. This is why it crashes. Adobe tests on machines with lots of CPU power and memory. Real average people have crappy machines with small amounts of memory. 16% of Adobe tests will be 60% CPU on a crappy machine and this combined with huge swaps on disk will crash the browser or even hang the machine.
Apple receive reports from people complaining about Flash hanging. Apple would be the first to support flash, but a CPU drain like that on an iPhone or iPad will render the device unresponsive.
The other point is: what is really using flash today? Content? No. Flash major use is to create advertisement. So, no flash, no ads on sites, a dream coming true.
From Mattie’s link:
“Adobe completely missed the transition to Cocoa, and tried to extend the use of Carbon, causing problems for both users and Apple. They have only now started to work within the programming environment, however, the first beta of the new Creative Suite 5 remain incomplete and unstable.”
Truth, due to Adobe’s laziness, no 64bit Photoshop CS4, no Cocoa, still limping along with the outdated legacy codebase of Photoshop. No wonder Steve Jobs called out Adobe as LAZY, very fitting indeed.
[You’re too profoundly ill-informed for me to educate here. In lieu of that, have fun rocking out with your Carbon iTunes, brought to you by the obviously stupid & lazy iTunes team. (I mean, there’s no other explanation for using Carbon, right…?) –J.]
I’m pretty surprised the QA group can’t get Flash to crash on a Mac. Let me help with a reproducible set of steps:
1) Open a browser — Firefox, Safari, Chrome.
2) Open 10-20 tabs to the top 10-20 sites on the Internet. News, sports, blogs, etc.
3) Click 10 links in each.
4) Boom.
I upgraded to Snow Leopard explicitly so I can kill the Flash process when it starts dragging my computer into the mud. Result is like having a new machine. Safari never crashes now; it turns out it was Flash the whole time. Even Silverlight is more stable!
“RG”, that’s a good example of a “bug report” that doesn’t work… all it takes is one person using 10-20 tabs successfully to disprove your recipe.
Here are tips on “finding the difference that makes a difference”:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html
(btw, why are you choosing to post anonymously? You’re not disproving the theory that certain computing companies are astroturfing. If you own your words, the conversation’s easier.)
jd/adobe
I don’t disable Flash. I never install it. The license is unreasonable. The web is not boring, as suggested by nick. Gnash will play most videos and other stuff I can do without. I have heard Adobe employees bragging about how insecure their product is, so I don’t really have much incentive to worry about why I can’t use it.
Here’s a flash crash bug that has been around for the last 2 years:
http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/
Does not crash for me, John. I’m using the latest 10.1.x release from http://labs.adobe.com/
Does not crash for me either on Flash Player 10,1,50,416 in Chrome 4 or IE 8.
What a retarded comment. It will be interesting to see what type of blocker will remove an HTML5 blinking lights ad. Do all the flash hating morons really believe that ads will go away if flash does?
AMAZING!!!!
Using Snow Leopard, so it doesn’t crash the whole browser, but the plugin obviously crashes.
Anyway, thanks Adobe for fixing flash. It really sucks currently.
update your browser to the latest dev build if possible, and use the latest 10.1 flash player everyone.
quit complaining.
and yes, apple is ‘trippin’.
How come companies never fight back against Apple? XCode was a piece of crap when Mac Intels first came out. You couldn’t code or debug ANYTHING! And, it wasn’t ready for real application development for two more years. Why would it be any easier for companies to move to Cocoa and 64-bit when Apple is so closed, deprecates API’s and their development tools are so crappy compared to MS’s development tools? Other than Adobe and Apple, what other companies even make software for Mac’s? I can think of VMWare and Microsoft, but nothing else. Mac’s are a pain to develop for. If Apple can’t even port Final Cut Pro to 64-bit while being privy to all OS and hardware changes, it’s a bit difficult for other companies while they are in the dark on Apple’s frequent changes. By the way, Apple took 2 years to support copy+paste for iPhone. Who’s lazy now!
Howard,
Plenty of companies release software for OS X. Apple is very open. Autodesk (SketchBook Pro, Autodesk Maya, Alias*, Autodesk Smoke), Corel (Corel Painter), Citrix, Sun, Avid Software, Media 100, Graphisoft, Nemetschek, The Mathworks, Wolfram Research, Waterloo Maple, National Instruments, Newtek, Siemens PLM Software (NX 7), Parellels, Ableton, Steinberg, Propellerhead, Image-Line software, Cockos, Quark, The Foundry, and more. Of course a boatload of Apple software too.
Are you crazy? Looks like you have no clue. The tools are very good. More and more companies do port advanced high-end software to the mac.
Every OS deprecates old APIs. Microsoft does it all the time.
nVidia can and does release their own drivers outside of Apples channels (system update), and they could have release experimental support with new drivers just as they did on Windows. Apple don’t need to create an API for them, (as they don’t want to use quicktime), they could have relayed the same demands they made towards Intel, ATi/AMD and nVidia as they did on the Windows platforms (it was up to the graphics vendors to support flash decode acceleration). They just don’t communicate. Apple don’t need to be involved to develop a beta. The drivers don’t even need the be signed. Cuda drivers are separate for example. It’s just lousy excuses it’s not that they could just use the standard APIs and leave the drivers as is and be happy with it in Windows either. Graphic vendors must choose to implement what Adobe demanded and communicated to them. Nothing is stopping them to do the same for OS X. But the different groups developing flash doesn’t seem to communicate with each other even. OS X aren’t iPhone OS firmware, and Adobe has yet not released any Flash 10.1 flash player for mobile platforms, should Apple wait years and years for Adobe? They didn’t think so. I’m sure they are open to it when it’s possible though. Stop being so ignorant towards each other.
what about issues with photoshop crashing on macs when used in conjunction with capture one pro?
[Would you elaborate on that so I can track down info? –J.]
when working on several machines i have had issues with capture one pro having major issues working while running photoshop. Many people i know have had the same problem.
[I’m afraid that doesn’t provide any specifics, though I will try to find out what I can elsewhere. –J.]
You’d probably consider me a Mac fanboy, despite being a developer for Windows, iPhone and Mac. I don’t have any problem with Flash being “closed,” I just find it impractical.
There’s a set of problems it purports to solve, some of which it’s a unique solution to on the web. But it does so with such a lack of grace that I’m simply not going to miss it on the iPad.
I’d rather have something that works 80% of the time and fails predictably and gently than something that seems to work 95% of the time and crashes 1% of the time. (And Flash’s crash rate has historically been much higher than 1% on the Mac.)
I think the onus has been on Macromedia and now Adobe to produce something that is more stable, and better performing.
Put it this way: If the next version of Flash on the Mac isn’t such an embarrassment, I’ll not only be sympathetic, I’ll want Flash on the iPhone/iPad myself!
John Dowdell: you’re certainly right that the bug report is non-reproducible.
At the same time — you do *NOT* get to insinuate that a customer is astroturfing for other companies. It simply isn’t done. And it leaves a very bad impression of Adobe as a company.
Oh, your users aren’t all trained software testers? They don’t give reproducible bug reports? And they post anonymously to a blog that doesn’t verify identity? Well, we’ll just call them astroturfers.
Stick to the technology. Let the other guy look foolish. When you react emotionally, you only make Adobe look like it’s filled with bullies.
I follow a number of technical forums. Adobe seems to be one of the few companies that doesn’t put its employees through a “How to behave in online forums” training class.
That’s a perfectly reasonable position.