Kevin Lynch Van Adobe: Flash For Mac
Kevin Lynch Van Adobe Flash For Mac
“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on the iPhone and iPad if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.” — Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone–and soon the iPad as well–might not be a death knell for Flash, but it will surely hasten its decline, if Adobe isn’t careful. Certainly, the fact that the iPhone’s lack of Flash hasn’t really hurt it suggests that Flash may not be quite as important for the Web as Adobe (ADBE) would like us all to think. And now, with some new video players ably demonstrating the promise of HTML5––the company is clearly worried about Apple’s (AAPL) unflagging exclusion of Flash and CEO.
So much so that Adobe is publicly promising to. In comments appended to a blog post about the, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said his company is working to improve Flash performance on the Mac. “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,” he wrote. “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.” Elaborating, Lynch catalogs progress to date.
“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 CoreAnimation, 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.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.” Welcome news. But enough to prompt Apple to suddenly reverse course and begin supporting Flash on its mobile devices? That seems unlikely. Apple’s repudiation of Flash on the iPhone and iPad seems–to me, anyway–quite a bit like its. It’s a move that inevitably generates great controversy and criticism, but ultimately proves to be ahead of its time.
Macromedia caught a big break when Microsoft agreed to distribute Flash with Internet Explorer 5. That gave Flash a rapidly installed base even as Microsoft worked diligently to thwart the progress of Sun's Java and Netscape's web browser as competing threats to Windows, and as Microsoft Apple's QuickTime as the medium for distributing web videos. Aided by Microsoft, Macromedia's Flash rapidly took over as the web's preferred method for distributing video, animations and interactivity.
Because Flash was closed and proprietary to Macromedia, no open community could foster any real threat to Windows via web apps, at least not for nearly another decade. The growing popularity of Flash led Macromedia to focus on web development tools, inducing it to nearly KeyGrip. Apple, noting the importance of salvaging one of the last major products to be build around QuickTime, stepped in and acquired the project, eventually selling it under the name Final Cut Pro. The success of Final Cut Pro in helping to sell PowerMacs to a new audience threw Apple an important lifeline. Additionally, in hiring Ubillos, Apple again became a developer, churning out titles like iMovie and making new acquisitions that led to the development of Logic Pro, GarageBand and a series of other Pro Apps and iLife and iWork titles.
By 2005, Adobe decided to stop competing against Macromedia and instead simply acquired it, citing Flash as central to the $3.4 billion purchase. It's no surprise why Adobe began staunchly defending its key asset once Apple released its first iPhone two years later without Flash support, and as it subsequently watched iOS grow in stature at the expense of Flash among mobile devices.