Adobe clutches chance to bury Steve Jobs 'hog' insult After calling Flash a "CPU hog," Steve Jobs has given Adobe the chance to live down this now famous insult. And Adobe is taking it. Steve Jobs also called Flash "buggy" and littered with security holes. And he summarily banned it from both the iPhone and the iPad - even when it's translated into Jobsian machine code. But with …
There are no real alternatives to Photoshop on any system. If we use Open Office as a comparison, it's taken years for it to become mature enough to stand up to MS Office. If Adobe said "screw you Apple, no more flash, no more CS" it's not just graphics artists that would cry.
Apple needs Adobe more than Adobe needs Apple, if Photoshop became Windows and Linux only, it would be impossible to justify the cost of a Mac + Windows over a PC + Windows, or even a PC + Linux.
Photoshop is an industry standard, it's not something you can replace with 3 months worth of development and a coating of "ohh shiney" that Apple would produce (also neglecting the fact that Apple's would be Mac only, you need a standard which is cross platform).
I disagree VERY much with your comment that there isn't any real alt. for Photoshop. Photoshop is in exactly the same situation that MS Office is in. It was the first graphics editing program to go big time on early PCs, and First does get you something. It gets you early name recognition and early market-share in the world of Big Biz. There are several other really nice, full featured software packages out there that perform the vast majority of functions that the VAST majority of users use. Corel acquired Paint Shop Pro from its creator, JASC several years ago and now markets it as Corel Paint Shop Pro PhotoX3. I still use the JASC version, but have heard very good things about Corel's version. The one REALLY BIG advantage of PSPPX3 over Photoshop CS is price. PSPPX3 is currently priced at $89.99. Photoshop CS5 is now pre-order priced from the Adobe web-site at $699!!!!!! For 98% of users (my personal guess), PSP does everything they'll ever need at 13% of the price.
Paris, cause she's SO perfectly beautiful she never needs touching up...
You're looking at GIMP, but ignoring the pile of commercial apps already out there.
Also, Adobe couldn't simply pull P-Shop off the market for OSX and leave a vacuum... it would take at least another version, which in turn takes years. This is time that, say, a company with $40bn USD in the bank could use to build up a viable alternative, or simply buy an existing alternative and bolster it up.
Currently, Windows 7/Vista is more advanced than OS X in regards to APIs, GPU acceleration, SSD and power management.
With the iPhone craziness, Apple has lost some focus on Desktop and they do crazy things like cancelling 64bit Carbon support (read:Photoshop) last minute telling programmers to convert 200M line application to Cocoa, like a basic shareware.
"Currently, Windows 7/Vista is more advanced than OS X in regards to APIs, GPU acceleration, SSD and power management."
That's some good preaching to the choir, but it isn't actually true. Apple's 2008 approach to a GPU acceleration API is OpenCL (subsequently standardised through Kronos, but Apple's originally). It adds closures to the programming language and adds a few C calls to issue them. The OS is responsible for figuring out available hardware and distributing tasks. It will distribute automatically to any available GPUs or CPUs, applying normal OS scheduling rules.
Microsoft's 2008 approach is DirectCompute. It sites within DirectX, so what you have to do is go through the normal DirectX API, query for available GPUs, query for GPU capabilities then explicitly issue your blocks to the GPUs you want to execute them. They're never executed on the CPU regardless of how a system is configured.
You're also accusing the company that sells the laptops with independently verified ten hour battery life of having poor power management?
Apple are way behind on developer relations but not on technologies.
Make Windows the lead platform for new features and functionality and then backport them to OS X. Given how hostile Apple has been to Adobe I would think that makes sense.
Jobs whines how buggy and slow Flash is but the reality is that the browser plugin API sucks on the Mac. Plugins are windowless so they rely on the browser to paint them and push messages to them. And (as reported) there currently is no hardware accelerated support for 3rd party code. Is it any wonder Flash is slow? I wouldn't be surprised if Silverlight, VLC or any other demanding browser plugins suffer similar issues except Flash gets it in the neck because some sites fire up 4 or 5 instances.
It already is...
Your argument would carry water if Flash's (and the rest of the shite Adobe peddles) worked well on other platforms too, but it simply doesn't. None of the other available browser plugins have problems, and the problems don't just affect Safari either--Flash is shit in Firefox *and* Chrome too. It's *just* Adobe.
>"Flash gets it in the neck because some sites fire up 4 or 5 instances." That'd be because it sucks. That Flash defence has got to be about the worst I've seen! Pathetic...
Don't be stupid. The performance difference is very noticeable between Windows and Mac and the biggest reason by far is the broken NPAPI architecture in the Mac. Sure Flash can be improved but it is pure nonsense to pin the blame just on the plugin.
I expect Silverlight would suffer many of the same issues on the Mac if it were so widely used. As will HTML5 when it starts being used in the way Flash is now.
It is also quite obvious that the more instances you have open the more performance is going to suffer. This is true of any application. If it upsets you that much, install a flash blocker so your browser only opens flash apps you want to use rather than random sites that are plastered in ads.
As much as this is welcome news, I have to agree with jobs - flash is a CPU hog. Not particularly the video part (which is OK, but not great), but all the rest of it. I recently saw a flash-based site eating >50% cpu time (on a 2.8ghz core 2), just to display a slightly fancy menu. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to uninstall flash entirely.. if only it wasn't pretty much required :/
Is the crappy plugin architecture on the Mac. On Windows, most Flash plugin are created as windowed plugins. This means they can create an HWND and be responsible for handling messages and painting whenever they like. They could even be running on separate threads with relative ease because they're not bound by what the browser is doing.
On the Mac plugins are always windowless so all messaging and painting through the browser. The browser renders the plugin in with the rest of the page so painting a plugin may not be trivial either. So imagine a couple of plugins shouting at the browser 30 times a second to be repainted and the browser repainting part of its page 30 times a second and no wonder its slow.
So Flash primarily suffers is because of the architecture. Apple could propose to enhance the NPAPI architecture or supply hooks so demanding plugins can paint quicker. Whatever the solution Apple needs to help supply it. Blaming Adobe for their own broken architecture is a pretty pathetic response.
"I recently saw a flash-based site eating >50% cpu time (on a 2.8ghz core 2), just to display a slightly fancy menu."
What I want to know is why does anyone CARE that flash uses CPU cycles? Is it currently the trend to have blisteringly fast processors, only to whine about an application using some of the power?
Badgers . . .
I care about flash using CPU cycles because it destroys battery life. My normal 3 - 4hr battery life was reduced to around 45 mins because I had gone off power with a browser tab (not displayed, mind) which was on the home page of Sky or Channel 4 or one of those annoying sites with a spinning carousel of their "amazing" content.
It was when I got the battery warning ridiculously early that I realised what I had done.
Looking at it another way, what is the carbon footprint of all those flash widgets causing CPU cycles to go off the scale? There is probably a financial impact for businesses for having Flash enabled, in terms of additional power and cooling costs.
How much more power does a PC running flat out use than one idling?
Flame in case you use a laptop running flash on your lap....
Flash itself is more of a web designer/graphics package but adobe have created a language for us old fashioned proggies called Flash Builder.
As a programming language, I see it as a mix between C and Pascal is quite easy to pick up and there are loads of instrucional videos from Adobe available.
Download a free trial from http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/.
Regards
Gareth
It's a 64bit resource hog that doesn't keep step with other releases and doesn't use the GPU for h264. The GPU bit is supposedly because there isn't a suitable API function available, but a chap from nVidia disagrees and offered to help - you can find the offer in the comments if you wade through enough of them.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different_problems.html
More details of the Mac hardware acceleration here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
Still practiced. You forgot the flip side of that coin though: have a public tantrum to cover your back room deals.
You'll notice how Adobe isn't pulling Photoshop from the Mac. You'll also notice there's not much hubbub about any SaaS version of Photoshop that would benefit, say, Google. (Read up on Photoshop express, and note how nobody talks about it any more.)
Wheels within wheels. The next decade of megacorporate consolidation in the tech center will be interesting, to say the least.
A better solution than to stop CS5 for OSX would be to reduce the price of CS5 for windows. It would mean more sales (enthusiasts that would be able to use a legal copy), and at the same time it would give management suits in companies the choice of spending less for placing their graphic creators on windows, or spend more, AND GAIN NOTHING by keeping them on fruit-cases.
An even cuter solution would include making CS6 for OpenSolaris. ;)
//Svein
Except that as all Macs in the last five years run Windows, so there's no need for companies to buy new hardware... as was pointed out the last time you made pretty much the same point and made the same fruit case 'joke'.
As for saying that enthusiasts would be able to use a legal copy, they already can. if they can't afford to, there are a lot of options out, which don't involve piracy.
... I was going to joke about how that is in the recycle bin, but that is harsh.
Flash is alright, it can be a cpu hog, I hate the fact Chrome freezes for 10 seconds when loading it up in the background, and I hate how advertising scum used it to scream their advertisements at me before adblock came around... but without it, we wouldn't have had half as many mario brother spoof games freely available on the web, stick men martial artist animations, and we wouldn't have half as many pretty websites (sometimes taking hours to load, but I digress)... and we wouldn't have had html5 and silverlight trying to get in on the act, and making the web just that little bit more interactive.
Like all things - flash has it's place, but a lot of people misuse and abuse it.
A beer - now can't we all just get along! :D
"Make Windows the lead platform for new features and functionality and then backport them to OS X"
How is this different from what Adobe have been doing for years, exactly? (Premiere, Adobe Acrobat, 64-bit, Cocoa, hell even the Mac OS X migration...)
Are Adobe a 'Microsoft Gold Certified Partner', one wonders?
By the way, perhaps the Register can tell us how Apple "killed" Flash on the iPhone and iPad, given that Flash wasn't on these devices to begin with...? (and full Flash isn't on any shipping smartphone today, as far as I can tell)
the reg can say apple killed flash on iphone and ipad because they did! Adobe has had flash fully ported to iphone for over a year from what i've heard, they were just waiting for apple approval. Apple killed it.
your ability to tell what is shipping is suspect. Flash lite ships on nokia s40 and s60, winmo, blackberry and android. Blackberry has full flash, android has full flash in beta. Winmo has a full flash beta, but adobe cancelled it for winmo 6.5 since ms is vaporwaring win phone 7 already.
Apple not giving access to GPU until 10.6.3. GPUs do h264 decode for a long time, at least they do wonders with mpeg2 regardless of their age...
Adobe should have directly blamed Apple for "CPU hog" claims and should have asked them why on earth they can do the same thing on Windows XP while, it has to be Intel 10.6 for Apple... That is, instead of doing some stupid things like wasting their time for Flash on iPhone...
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