[s219]

Job's moves with Flash was probably to cripple Adobe in hopes of being able to buy them up at some point and make Photoshop/etc. all part of the Mac OS X. Kind of like the whole Final Cut Pro deal. Not working. Kind of a shame to deny millions of Apple users a legitimate part of the web. The claims were that Flash could not work well on mobile. Luckily RIM/Adobe have dis-proved this. Apple could have done it.

Not even close. Jobs has been quoted in recent years (way before the Flash debate) saying Adobe makes some really lousy products. The last thing he would want is to pull them into Apple. I have been a Photoshop user forever, and tend to agree that they have lost their way, going to non-native cross-platform UIs that suck on all platforms. They are a shadow of the former Adobe that did have Jobs' respect, back in the day when both Apple and Adobe were innovating desktop publishing.

I am a software developer, and to be honest, Flash is like the neighborhood pedophile of the software world. It has it's fans, but no smart company is going to put their products (=children) in bed with Flash if they have better options. And many do. Native iOS apps blow away what Flash can do, as do native Android apps, and native WP7 apps. Native QNX apps will do the same if we ever see the SDK (it's the only reason I give a crap about developing for the PlayBook -- all other alternatives are weak at best).

No good mobile developer will choose Flash as a first choice. They may choose it as a less desirable alternative, but it will never be the first choice, trust me. It really does have pedophile status among high end mobile developers. Not surprisingly, this is the crowd that Jobs actively courts for iOS. He doesn't want Flash, and they don't want Flash. Most mobile developers are fully booked for native development at $150-250 per hour, and they just don't need Flash.

Honestly, I would feel better if RIM never got in bed with Adobe. They have a spotty history of bringing Flash to mobile touchscreen devices, with perpetual beta states, and improvements that are always "coming soon" (sometimes for *years*). RIM has now hitched their wagon to Flash and Air, and I think it will come back to bite them.

As far as current Flash performance, browse your PlayBook over to hyundai.com and try to tell me the experience doesn't suck. There are many, many more sites like this, which only serve to illustrate why Jobs was right to snub Flash. To this day, despite all of Adobe's talk, it still does not offer a consistent good experience on touchscreen devices. I don't consider this the "full" web, if standard websites don't properly work on the device. RIM can do better than this, but the longer people buddy up with the software pedophile, the worse it's going to get. In the meantime, Steve and Apple are selling all the iOS devices they can make, and customers seem pretty damn happy without Flash.

[MisterMe11]

"As far as current Flash performance, browse your PlayBook over to hyundai.com and try to tell me the experience doesn't suck."

The experience doesn't suck!! I just went to the site and it seems to work just fine. It's funny, the Jobs appologists keep saying that flash sites don't perform well on the playbook and I keep visiting their example sites, which work just fine (I know there are the odd sites that have issues but as far as I'm concerned, running 99.9% of the web = running the 'whole internet') I have not had any issues at all with the sites I frequent.

[Jake Storm]

"As far as current Flash performance, browse your PlayBook over to hyundai.com and try to tell me the experience doesn't suck."

The experience doesn't suck!! I just went to the site and it seems to work just fine. It's funny, the Jobs appologists keep saying that flash sites don't perform well on the playbook and I keep visiting their example sites, which work just fine (I know there are the odd sites that have issues but as far as I'm concerned, running 99.9% of the web = running the 'whole internet') I have not had any issues at all with the sites I frequent.

Works for me too.

ps. The new Equus looks pretty nice

[grover5]

"As far as current Flash performance, browse your PlayBook over to hyundai.com and try to tell me the experience doesn't suck."

The experience doesn't suck!! I just went to the site and it seems to work just fine. It's funny, the Jobs appologists keep saying that flash sites don't perform well on the playbook and I keep visiting their example sites, which work just fine (I know there are the odd sites that have issues but as far as I'm concerned, running 99.9% of the web = running the 'whole internet') I have not had any issues at all with the sites I frequent.

Yeah, that site loaded fine on my playbook too.

[Jake Storm]

Yeah, that site loaded fine on my playbook too.

Hmmm, yeah dfg912 just joined a couple weeks ago... I smell a troll

[jvictor77]

Not even close. Jobs has been quoted in recent years (way before the Flash debate) saying Adobe makes some really lousy products. The last thing he would want is to pull them into Apple. I have been a Photoshop user forever, and tend to agree that they have lost their way, going to non-native cross-platform UIs that suck on all platforms. They are a shadow of the former Adobe that did have Jobs' respect, back in the day when both Apple and Adobe were innovating desktop publishing.

I am a software developer, and to be honest, Flash is like the neighborhood pedophile of the software world. It has it's fans, but no smart company is going to put their products (=children) in bed with Flash if they have better options. And many do. Native iOS apps blow away what Flash can do, as do native Android apps, and native WP7 apps. Native QNX apps will do the same if we ever see the SDK (it's the only reason I give a crap about developing for the PlayBook -- all other alternatives are weak at best).

No good mobile developer will choose Flash as a first choice. They may choose it as a less desirable alternative, but it will never be the first choice, trust me. It really does have pedophile status among high end mobile developers. Not surprisingly, this is the crowd that Jobs actively courts for iOS. He doesn't want Flash, and they don't want Flash. Most mobile developers are fully booked for native development at $150-250 per hour, and they just don't need Flash.

Honestly, I would feel better if RIM never got in bed with Adobe. They have a spotty history of bringing Flash to mobile touchscreen devices, with perpetual beta states, and improvements that are always "coming soon" (sometimes for *years*). RIM has now hitched their wagon to Flash and Air, and I think it will come back to bite them.

As far as current Flash performance, browse your PlayBook over to hyundai.com and try to tell me the experience doesn't suck. There are many, many more sites like this, which only serve to illustrate why Jobs was right to snub Flash. To this day, despite all of Adobe's talk, it still does not offer a consistent good experience on touchscreen devices. I don't consider this the "full" web, if standard websites don't properly work on the device. RIM can do better than this, but the longer people buddy up with the software pedophile, the worse it's going to get. In the meantime, Steve and Apple are selling all the iOS devices they can make, and customers seem pretty damn happy without Flash.

Well written piece - but it seems RIM can't put a foot right can they? This is me abandoning them and rushing over to the 'cult'....NOT!! Methinks this looks like high-end trolling

[s219]

Well, I honestly think RIM would have been better off not getting in bed with Adobe, since it detracts from the true quality of the platform. I think the real story will be the native SDK. They really should have put all their efforts behind that, gotten a solid foundation for pro developers to use before the device shipped, and only then started supporting second tier technologies. Instead they did it backwards, and not even completely. Right now there are no proper native development options for pro developers to use to make a *shipping* product, and that is not good. I think it's one of the reasons the app market is so paltry right now.

If you look back at the history of webOS, they had the same kind of growing pains, and as a result their app ecosystem never really took off (what happens under HP is anyone's guess). They inflicted web apps on developers for a long time, and when the native SDK appeared, nobody cared anymore. RIM needs to be careful not to fall in the same trap.

[MisterMe11]

You have a point, but offering the alternatives enabled RIM to have a few thousand apps ready shortly after launch - and several of these are useful/fun. As long as the NDK arrives fairly shortly (summer), and it is well thought out, RIM will be OK.

Well, I honestly think RIM would have been better off not getting in bed with Adobe, since it detracts from the true quality of the platform. I think the real story will be the native SDK. They really should have put all their efforts behind that, gotten a solid foundation for pro developers to use before the device shipped, and only then started supporting second tier technologies. Instead they did it backwards, and not even completely. Right now there are no proper native development options for pro developers to use to make a *shipping* product, and that is not good. I think it's one of the reasons the app market is so paltry right now.

If you look back at the history of webOS, they had the same kind of growing pains, and as a result their app ecosystem never really took off (what happens under HP is anyone's guess). They inflicted web apps on developers for a long time, and when the native SDK appeared, nobody cared anymore. RIM needs to be careful not to fall in the same trap.

[sportline]

at least the music player is good.
as long as i can get what i installed on my torch running on my pb, thats good enough.