Dan's New Blog

Don’t worry, she’ll hold together!
(You hear me, baby? Hold  together.)
– Han  Solo, to the Millenium Falcon

Adobe engineers are saying the exact same thing this morning as the final production release of Flash for smartphones has been released. One boo-boo and Steve Jobs will be all over it, saying “I told you so.”

I don’t know if this is bad news or good news, but early-adopters like me are cut out — you need Android 2.2.

Via.

First it was Google. Back in January Steve Jobs called the Big G’s “Don’t Be Evil” corporate motto “bull****”. This was yet another episode in the two companies’ long and drawn-out parting of the ways. (Although a couple of months later Steve and Google CEO Eric Schmidt did meet publicly for coffee. Why do the pictures remind me of this?)

Today it was Adobe. Steve decided to “jot down some thoughts” about why Flash will never ever make it on Apple’s mobile devices:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short … 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.”

Boom.

You have to hand it to Steve, though.  He’s all about equal-opportunity. You don’t have to be a big corporate competitor to get the Steve Jobs treatment — all you gotta do is “find” an iPhone and post it on the Web.

ReadWriteWeb reports on a recent head-to-head test of Flash vs. HTML5 video. The results? “Flash isn’t always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.”

Flash works best when it can take advantage of hardware acceleration. This is generally not a problem under Windows, so in many cases Flash actually runs more efficiently than HTML5. This is one of the benefits of living in the Windows world, which is run by a Putin-esque dictator who sees the big picture and wants to work with other countries in order to enhance his own power.

Linux and Mac OS X are another story, however. Due to the Balkanization of Linux, it doesn’t have a standard API for Adobe to use for video hardware acceleration. Thus, Flash is going to hog CPUs for the forseeable future. (Which is why I have to use Flashblock on the linux laptop on which I am now typing. Otherwise it slows to a crawl and I have to fight the urge to fling it against the wall.)

The Dear Leader of Mac OS isn’t interested in anyone else’s economy. He wants to control every aspect of his own, which (he’s convinced) will lead to world domination. So he treats hardware acceleration as a state secret:

“Apple isn’t allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load … In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it’s simply not an efficient technology … and that’s true for now, considering how it’s set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?”