Why Flash sucks
zeroskillz
Registered Users Posts: 8 Beginner grinner
I keep seeing stuff on this now that Apple has banned flash on some of it's mobile products.
I hear constant complaints of the player crashing, browsers crashing etc.
While I personally have not had these experiences, here's why Flash sucks:
Flash makes it easy for anyone to hack together an app.
Flash provides an IDE that is accessible to anyone using most any modern software application. The result is a lot of very poorly written stuff floating about. Consider a slideshow put together by someone who has worked with flash for less than a day. Or odd stuff spit out of other apps as flash--that never seems to go very well.
If Flash crashed your browser (and you computer isn't out-of-date), blame the developer, not the platform. The current language is just a hair off Javascript, which has improved the end product considerably, but still most Flash developers cling to the old version, which has it's problems. It's the developers, not the platform.
Now it will never work on your iPad or iPhone, but it will on the current version of Android (although I'll hold out for some solid independent tests). But a crappy app is still going to run crappy, regardless of the device it runs on.
Flash requires real memory management skills, which is largely overlooked. Again, poor development. Most browser-based content ignores this entirely.
I look forward to receiving the new books coming out this month on HTML5/JS/CSS3 and doing some wicked cool stuff with it, but it doesn't (yet) match up to Flash's cross-platform, cross-browser, in or out of the browser capabilities. Ultimately that would be the platform/language for me...
So to the Flash bashers, it's the developer that wrote the browser-crashing app that should receive your flames, not the platform (still, Adobe does have it's work to do).
Thoughts?
-Ted
PS, if you have examples (urls) to sites with real bad flash apps, post the url (bad as in makes something break, not just ugly apps
)
I hear constant complaints of the player crashing, browsers crashing etc.
While I personally have not had these experiences, here's why Flash sucks:
Flash makes it easy for anyone to hack together an app.
Flash provides an IDE that is accessible to anyone using most any modern software application. The result is a lot of very poorly written stuff floating about. Consider a slideshow put together by someone who has worked with flash for less than a day. Or odd stuff spit out of other apps as flash--that never seems to go very well.
If Flash crashed your browser (and you computer isn't out-of-date), blame the developer, not the platform. The current language is just a hair off Javascript, which has improved the end product considerably, but still most Flash developers cling to the old version, which has it's problems. It's the developers, not the platform.
Now it will never work on your iPad or iPhone, but it will on the current version of Android (although I'll hold out for some solid independent tests). But a crappy app is still going to run crappy, regardless of the device it runs on.
Flash requires real memory management skills, which is largely overlooked. Again, poor development. Most browser-based content ignores this entirely.
I look forward to receiving the new books coming out this month on HTML5/JS/CSS3 and doing some wicked cool stuff with it, but it doesn't (yet) match up to Flash's cross-platform, cross-browser, in or out of the browser capabilities. Ultimately that would be the platform/language for me...
So to the Flash bashers, it's the developer that wrote the browser-crashing app that should receive your flames, not the platform (still, Adobe does have it's work to do).
Thoughts?
-Ted
PS, if you have examples (urls) to sites with real bad flash apps, post the url (bad as in makes something break, not just ugly apps
) 0
Comments
…although I must admit that when I saw the title, I immediately thought "…so what's his problem using flash? I mean Nikon's CLS is so easy to use, where's the problem?"
- Wil
I hadn't even considered that. yes I love my Nikon SB900. Wish I had a couple more...
I read this blog post from the SmugMug owner:
http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/04/14/apples-new-policy-is-good-for-you-me-and-the-web/
While I agree with some of his points, in general I disagree with closed systems. With Apple's decision to exclude anything compiled outside of their IDE, Apple becomes the big brother it wanted so hard to be the antithesis of back in 1984:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Flash is only one of the technologies blocked by this decision. It'll be interesting to see if they blur the line and simply disallow Flash, and apps cross-compiled from the Flash IDE.
flash is a system to make computer animations :fish
has nothing to do w the flash photographers use
smileys7.gif
/ɯoɔ˙ƃnɯƃnɯs˙ʇlɟsɐq//:dʇʇɥ
Philiophically I agree with the stance that a uniform experience is important and that the user interface should be tuned to the target platform. Certainly many cross-plaform UI frameworks violiate this prinicple by giving apps developed in that framework a distinctly different flavor than the enviroment. However as an application developer I also believe that the user interface layer of a should be kept as thin as possible and that the underlying logic should be written to be as portable as possible.
As a developer I would think long and hard before developing a significant amount of application logic in Cocoa because of major overhead involved porting and maintaining parallel source trees. For applications where it is reasonable build most of the applcation logic in the cloud with Java or ASP.NET that is clearly the way to go. However when developing a mobile application which requires a significant amount of local application code this policy will force me to target Android and Windows Mobile as my primary platforms.
Apple is behaving as if it has a monoploy on the smart phone market. Right now that is practically true, but phones have a short liftime and a high turnover rate so the marketplace can shift fairly rapidly. There will come a time when the smart phone is a commodity just like the desktop PC is today and devopers who invest too heavily in Cocoa will find themselves with a shrinking marketplace and the difficult problem of migrating to survive.