Wolfire writes: “Today, Apple announced the new iPad and humbly claimed that there will be a “gold rush” of native apps for the App Store. Sure, but what I find more interesting is that Apple also ironically created the most promising open web app platform, which may eventually undermine the App Store itself. […] The iPad is the first mainstream device which combines all of the following factors: reasonably powerful hardware, a (potentially) huge user base, a mature WebKit implementation, and constant 3G internet capabilities. All the dominoes are in place, and I think that the iPad will knock the first one down.”
And I’m inclined to agree. Let’s first start by making a straight forward assumption to work with: Apple’s goal is quite clear—they want this to be at least as successful as the iPhone. Let’s imagine that it is—that for all the winging of geeks—just like the iPhone the iPad goes on to absolutely dominate mindshare.
That makes a sizeable, affluent, and important market group that does not have Flash, nor can they even get it. This is serious. You can bet Adobe are not happy one bit. They sell expensive tools that cannot target this market group and any web developer with half a brain will realise that Flash is best avoided as there is no way you can develop with it and support the iPhone and iPad, and may as well code using HTML5 / SVG instead of duplicating effort.
Success of the iPad [and/or ChromeOS] will ensure a sea-change of web developer habits. If company X asks you to develop a website and it can’t support the iPhone/iPad, then what the crap are they paying you for? They’ll hire someone who has ‘iPhone/iPad’ on their CV.
No Flash means that you cannot distribute video with Flash. Think of that. How many sites a day do you come across that use Flash just to play video? They are turning away customers if they can’t support the iPad—and that means only one solution: HTML5 video.
Or more accurately—H.264 video, because Apple don’t support anything else. That is most worrying. If you are a small developer with a personal site and you want to get video to iPhone/iPad users, you are forced to use a riskily licenced video codec that means by 2011 you could end up with men in black suits knocking on your door demanding payment. Apple are encouraging a web where by only the major players can participate.
What about advertising? Ads use Flash all the time (much to the annoyance of users). Flash advertising has always made the assumption that everybody has the optional Flash runtime. It may be near ubiquitous, but Flash is not made by Microsoft, it’s not made by Apple. It’s purely a third party plugin and always has been.
I am not stealing from advertisers if they happen to use a delivery mechanism that I don’t have.
The iPad not having Flash is a serious concern to many. The majority of sites (or more accurately, advertising companies) now have to contend with a market group that do not have Flash. How are they going to advertise to them!?
The writing is on the wall already. If the change the iPhone instigated in mobile web browsing usage (much to AT&Ts surprise) is anything to go by then prepare for a surge of web-app usage unlike anything seen before; and this time there is no Internet Explorer to even speak of. Doing it properly is going to be the only way to do it.
Update: Via John Gruber, Adobe have blogged about the ‘omission’ of Flash.
If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab — not to mention the millions of other sites on the web — I’ll be out of luck.
Adobe and more than 50 of our partners in the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliver to any device, so that consumers have open access to their favorite interactive media, content, and applications across platform, regardless of the device that people choose to use.
My reply?
And Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate and JibJab will move away from Flash and to either HTML5 video or native applications if the iPad becomes as popular as the iPhone.
Your Open Screen Project is a spear head to ensure the continued use of Flash where it doesn’t belong. I’ve created Video for Everybody, which does truly play video “across platform, regardless of the device that people choose to use†because it uses HTML5 video where available and falls back to Flash where not available, all without JavaScript. Video for Everybody plays on the iPhone and by extension the iPad.
Flash is needed but so is java… Yea applets are near dead. But there are many of business JavaApps that I would love to run an iPad. System Monitoring Tools, data interface exchanger dashboards etc…
Having the one way development model for the iPad will only create a situation where once companies catch up they will eat apple.
Surprisingly, if you don’t develop with Java, and instead use JavaScript and the other stuff, then it works on many web browsers on many platforms and not just on the iPad.
Getting rid of Flash and Java for client-side regular-joe use is the best thing Apple can do for the web, ever.
I think he was referring to desktop Java applications Kroc.
Adobe are making Flash Pro CS5 compile Flash into a native (but essentially ugly) application to be force fed through the approval process. Could Java do the same?
Apple’s gateway policy is a different kettle of fish to discuss. A kettle that doesn’t exist in the web browser (if you excuse no-plugins).
There are three options. Not good options, but options if you want to devote a lot of time.
The flash compiler uses llvm. llvm isn’t a compiler, it’s a low level virtual machine which can be compiled (or JITed) to a bunch of real architectures (including arm, x86, ppc, alpha, .net, etc). llvm and java vm are both documented (and open source), so in theory a jar file could be converted to llvm and compiled to arm (or another target). Of course it’s not that simple since jvm is stack-based and llvm is register based and much lower level than the jvm, but it could happen.
GCC now includes a java compiled which can (optionally) compile to native code. There’s also an llvm-gcc fork which compiles to llvm code. How about marrying the two up? Last I checked (which was a few years ago), the gcc jcc used its own backend and I don’t think llvm-gcc supports java but if you switched the jcc backend to use the standard backend it might work.
The third option is using get to compile your java to a javascript web app.
You have clearly missed Steve’s diabolical plan. By aligning with AT&T Steve ensure that your ‘always-on’ 3G connection is, well, not ‘always-on’, and thus creates an impetus for developers to create AppStore apps rather than Web apps. Genius 🙂
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PS. Seriously though, the iPad sure is a great device, for me anyway … and I can see my 3yr old using it too … so I guess I’ll be in for a couple.
In Europe, things should be much better for 3G. My immediate reaction when they announced their “breakthrough†pricing for 3G was “ARE THEY INSANE!?â€. Is America _really_ that backwater!?
Edited 2010-01-28 18:22 UTC
Try living outside a major city in the US for that real feeling of “backwater”.
It’s a huge country and most of the people can’t even see a need for public transport, so yes, the U.S.A. is really that backwater. 😀
You also have to remember that those carriers using GSM are far behind the curve in 3G support. EVDO networks attached to CDMA carriers were available as far back as 2006 to towns with populations of 100,000 or more.
Anyway, I think the iPad is interesting, but too big to be truly portable and the resolution (1024×768?) too small to be useful for movies and current widescreen t.v. Would 1280×768 have been such an unreasonable size?
The lack of Flash is confounding to a lot of people, but advertisers seem to be just fine in several of the applications I use. If Adobe could modernise Flash to not take over the system at the slightest event, they might have a chance. I believe their developers are inept and feature bloat and/or revenue is driving management.
Still, iPad will likely become something of great proportions, figuratively, once Apple can secure a worldwide market for books, magazines, and newspapers but not today.
http://cappuccino.org/ is the bomb. My wife does the web design. Let me see what is there.
I wonder if there will be other browsers, What quality will they be, and if the P.A. Semi SoC is x86-like or PPC/RISC like
It’s almost certainly ARM (Did Steve say this on stage, I think he did, but I can’t recall for certain?) for iPhone compatibility, and simply because ARM is a good choice. It may well be a very customised ARM, but similar enough nether the less.
I’m still waiting to know the UK price. They always over price it. £300 would be a killer price, £400, acceptable. Anything above and it’ll be universally ignored.
It’s a rebranded ARM chip all the way. Nothing Apple-designed about it.
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/1/27/apple-a4-soc-unveile…
Will make a news item out of it later this evening.
Cool, good find.
You folks need to stop believing everything you read on the internets. Components? Probably. Not of their own design, unlikely.
Thom,
The A4 is a SOC (system-on-chip) designed by the former PA Semi which was purchased by Apple.
It is, it’s fair to say, incorrect for Steve Jobs to have stated that it is a CPU designed by Apple because it’s not a CPU.
However, the chip is a whole was most certainly designed by PA Semi from licensed components, including an ARM Core. We don’t know if/how that core was modified.
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Edited 2010-01-28 19:18 UTC
Untrue.
As per your observation about HTML5 tags and used codec:
and considering that you have made some videos available to the public, as per :
I will then assume that you have paid the fee for H.264 codec usage ??? What a load of c….
Replacing one proprietary technology (flash) with another (H.264) defeats the purpose of HTML standards. Good on you for your “contribution”
Bingo. You can guess what I’ll be doing 2011—removing the MP4s.
I made VfE specifically for the other websites I visit to provide me a means to view their content, including those willing to pay the H.264 licence in the future.
It’s pragmatic, rather than political—so sue me
edit And—I expect people reading the code to be smart enough to make their own decisions. You can’t blame me for developers who decide to encode H.264s. That’s their choice, their actions and nobody else’s.
VfE exists for occasions just like when Loading Ready Run moved to the Escapist, and now, I can’t view their videos any more because they are hidden behind a Flash player instead of QuickTime or YouTube which they used before. The Escapist are already using H.264 files for Flash—I can’t make them make that decision already—but I do wish they were using VfE so that I could _access_ those H.264 files.
The H.264 onus is on the publisher—not on the viewer and that’s the big difference when it comes to the codec issue (where it used to be the onus of the viewer to go get the right app quicktime/real/wmp &c.)
Edited 2010-01-28 19:46 UTC
What I object to, in both your article and your reply, is the fact that you don’t see inclusion of a proprietary codec in a standard as a problem but you seem to have a problem with a proprietary technology. And yet somehow you manage to drag the open source term in all of this. As far as your reply and the “onus is on the publisher” …
Inclusion of such technologies (proprietary) in HTML standards is by far worst then using flash. I would even go as far as to say that maybe apple should consider revising their iPhone OS and enable multitasking.iPhone OS users would definitely be thankful for that.
No codec is specified as part of the HTML5 standard. That said, there is the problem that Apple are pushing for a de-facto standard, helped by the fact that many publishers have their content already in H.264 for Flash purposes.
But do you think that Apple are going to suddenly adopt OGG? There’s nothing I can say or do to make that happen. Apple’s direction is clear, they have invested heavily in H.264 hardware and infrastructure, it’s here to stay, 2011 and beyond. OGG has a long way to come yet, and I’m waiting on Google to do something with On2 to hopefully bring some light to the end of the tunnel.
edit emphasis.
Edited 2010-01-28 20:19 UTC
And your point of your article is ???
This is what I got from your article:
Apple is good … good for open source too. Yay, let’s stick it to the evil adobe and flash by using html5 video tags (I know that I have to use H.264, but I don’t care) Apple made this possible and they are “great”, as long as they help us get rid of evil flash … long live HTML5 video tag …
And here are some facts:
1. HTML5 is not a standard … yet
2. Ogg was part of HTML5 standard candidate, as in :
But further to Apple’s, and Nokia’s objections it was removed, which sparked a number of reactions :
http://abbadingo.delcorp.org/2007/12/12/removal-of-ogg-vorbis-and-t…
http://rudd-o.com/en/monopolies-of-the-mind/removal-of-ogg-vorbis-a…
To even remotely imply that Apple has ANYTHING to do with open source is, therefore, preposterous and down right misleading.
Over and out
edit: added quote from the article
Edited 2010-01-28 21:53 UTC
Perhaps I was not clear, article goes:
• iPad does not support Flash, likely never will.
• Current web sites and web developers will have change
• H.264 is a problem, despite HTML5 video being better than Flash
Show me where Ogg Theora is recognised as an industry standard and I’ll accept it should be included by default in another (albeit draft) standard…
What industry are you referring to?
Software by Apple is just a means to an end to sell their hardware: it is the value-added proposition that they want to be known for, the total user experience. If they can gain enough force of numbers to get some other software (which tends to make a system look bad due to unreliability and being very suboptimal on anything but Windows, and even on Windows, I’m not so sure about reliable) to bow out of the race and not have to support the whole mess, all while supporting their own, that’s all the better: then people don’t have nearly as much logical reason to avoid buying their hardware.
If Apple were all about the software, and that was their main focus, why would they have gone out of their way to make it feasible for people to install Windows on their Macs of the Intel era? Ultimately, if people buy their hardware, even if only to run Windows, Apple wins, because they make a high-margin hardware sale, compared to a typical commodity PC maker: the OS doesn’t matter in this case, as the Mac has always been fairly open, with no AppStore. On the other hand, the model Apple has taken with the iPhone and now the iPad includes a tight control of the software ecosystem like that which is done by many other small systems (game consoles and many phone makers for various, though not all, models) because that’s a selling point for a large enough group of actual and potential customers that aren’t geeks and extremists: something that works in a predictable manner, with a desired user experience. Clearly, it won’t appeal to all the tweaker-geeks and those that want things that Apple doesn’t allow: is this any different from a game console in that respect?
The iPad is most probably going to be a commercial success for exactly the reasons that a lot of the tweaker geeks hate it: because it has a certain amount of flexibility and power, but not so much that it requires a tweaker geek to make it remain functional, combined with the form factor for casual use, largely on the couch, with no concern about blocking off air vents or anything like that, or looking for outlets all the time, and for a price lower than a lot of the more powerful laptops, though more than most netbooks, but without the management overhead of having more power than most users know how to manage, or simply want to manage.
If it started at $999, especially in these economic times, Apple would have a flopper on their hands, almost certainly, but the price is sufficiently low that they’re likely to make inroads into the market in a meaningful way, not only because of what it already does out of the box, and not even just because it does it at the price it does it, but also the other big reason: even if 99% of the available apps are crap and of no conceivable use to any single person, there’s still (as of yesterday’s announcement) over 140,000 pre-existing applications to run on it, as-is, that are designed for a touch-based GUI from the start: while Android and Palm’s WebOS do that to some degree, as of yet, they simply don’t have that many applications available that are already known about, and they’re also not as easily found by the casual user for site (iTunes AppStore has SO MUCH it’s a mess to navigate!) precisely because there are other places you can/must get certain applications, and, because there are so many available with a single store via the AppStore, so much of the available software is somewhere between dirt cheap and free: Apple may get a lot of revenue from the AppStore, but likely make a rather small amount of profit directly from it, as, again, it exists… to sell hardware. If that weren’t the case, what would be the logic of Apple releasing iWorks for the iPad for a grand total of $29.97 (before tax) for Keynote, Numbers and Pages? Surely Apple isn’t going to make a meaningful amount of money on an office suite for $30 if that were the purpose: it’s there to sell hardware, and, perhaps, undercut Microsoft from being able to compete in terms of software price. Sure, Microsoft Word and Excel are more powerful word processors and spreadsheets than Apple’s offerings, and there are things I know how to do with both that simply cannot be done with Apple’s: but how many people use enough of the more powerful features to justify their price?
I think what we can see now is where Apple is going. They are moving more and more into the direction to become a full gateway. What they have achieved with the IPhone and the AppStore is to make themselves the gatekeeper to what you can do on your computer. I think they started with ITunes, but with the AppStore they have become the gatekeeper to not only content but Apps as well. I think with the IPad it shows that they want to move general computing into the same direction. In a way they are going more head-to-head with Google than Microsoft. Google wants to be the gatekeeper to your information, mainly leveraged on open standards. Apple realised they will have to find a way not to give Google that position, are trying to become the gatekeeper for all your computing and they are leveraging their hardware popularity. They were smarter than MS, who are trying to go directly head-to-head against Google (Bing), instead they are setting they lever deeper to “outlever” (is that an english word?) google.
I disagree that Apple are going to be the spearhead for new standards based webapps, that is against their strategy, because they would give Google more power. Look at Apples approach to the internet and Blogs for example. They are total control-freaks, they can’t stand not being able to control what is being said about them (they succeeded very well in all the hype around the IPad).
The big conflict in the future will be between Google and Apple MS has missed it.
Forgot to add, the Apple TV also showed Apples desire for control and their strategy quite nicely. Fortunately it failed.
Edited 2010-01-29 02:24 UTC
Hold on Kroc. What about Safari? If Apple does intent to pursue a slightly better web for us, by helping us unleash Flash, why wouldn’t they also block in on Safari?
Maybe you’ll say they would lose market share. But if HTML5 was indeed ready I could see other browsers also following the trend.
So I naturally see this Flash approach with some confusion. They might be doing to protect their product and Apple Store, to make sure the iPhone/iPad don’t halt due to an inefficient Flash app (I know they all are), or to do build a slightly better web for everyone?
Because Mac OS X is an open platform and Mobile OS X is not. Anybody can, and will, install plugins on OS X. Apple cannot now remove that feature from the OS. It would make no sense, given that the other browsers would support plugins, and the blocking of Flash would only see a mass migration away from Safari to Chrome/Firefox.
But, the iPhone/iPad represents a new computing platform where there are no plugins, and never will be, so Apple are not ‘blocking’ Flash, so much as creating a device and platform that is simply not compatible with the idea of Flash.
If Adobe were to open the specification, and provide an open source (MIT) implementation, then the WebKit team could integrate the Flash interpreter into the core of WebKit, using native APIs, and Apple might possibly accept it then.
The real reason they haven’t included Flash on the iPad:
The trouble for Flash is that being a browser plugin, it runs as a separate task to the browser. In a non-multitasking OS, the rest of your web site would stop working while the flash is being played.
Not a good user experience. In fact, I’d say that flash broken that badly would be worse than no flash at all, especially when you’ve got HTML5 as a ready substitute.
OS X on the iPhone does multi-task, it’s BSD underneath, there’s probably Grand Central Dispatch in there! The UI doesn’t present a multi-tasking paradigm, that’s all. Apple have specifically decided that app sandboxes cannot multitask.
The reason is for UI experience. At no point should the iPad ever feel slow, for nothing. No matter how long you’ve used it, no matter how many apps you install. The computer, shouldn’t do technical things that require technical explanations to the end user. Users do not, and cannot understand the under-the-hood implications that cause a computer to run slow, only we can grasp that.
Apple cares more about what the experience the user *has* than what we geeks *want*.
Well you could archieve that by using a realtime kernel .. the thing is Apple has no such kernel.
…except it is a multitasking OS.
There’s always going to be a format war for video online – or at least I hope there is, to keep pushing the formats forward. That’s why, Kroc, your work on video for everyone is going to be the way forward. This only covers our playback though.
I’m very interested in seeing how the advertising industry reacts to the lack of Flash support. My hope is that it shifts the industry’s attention to html5 and css – where it should be moving!