My first personal computer was an apple computer, a PowerPC edition. I have used and purchased other mac products over the years, but I switched over to PC for a number of reasons for most things.
Mainly I switched, because of the fact that certain programs I use were not available on the mac until recently when macintosh came out with intel chip macs which could duel boot into windows if you wanted. Basically making all macs have the ability to be windows and mac. However, you would have to buy a separate copy of windows operating system to install on your mac.
A few years ago when I had the money to upgrade my machine, I decided I could build my own PC and have a more powerful and upgrade capable machine. For me this was another reason to go PC, because I could not afford a mac PRO, and the lower end macs are all-in-one devices.
I do not trust all-in-one devices as much for a desktop computer, there is too much that can go wrong and the upgrade capability isn’t there.
I don’t hate macs or anything like that, and for many years I loved them with all my heart. I was scared of working with PC computers and windows for a long time because it seemed to technical for me as an artist.
I live on a tight budget, and macs are more expensive. Since they are a smaller market share of computer sales, and because they ran on their own proprietary operating system, less publishers have historically been willing to publish software and games.
When the iPhone came into the picture, it broadened the love for mac products. Everyone on an iphone loves their iphone, except when their auto correct features do something naughty or inappropriate. :) http://www.autocorrectfail.org/
I was thrilled about the iPhone myself until I learned it would not support Flash. Why does this matter to me? Well because I had spent nearly ten years working with flash, learning it, developing stuff, and I saw no reason why the iphone should not support it. All my websites designed using Flash would no longer even work.
Html5 is cool, there are some neat things you can do with it. Have a look here to see what I mean.. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/48-excellent-html5-demos/
However, as an artist I found the environment of working in Flash to be more visual and artist friendly. In particular with website design. It became more like designing a graphic than a website, because the positioning of elements is not required to be set using code. So I can simply place this graphic here, and that button there, placing my elements visually on the page easily.
With html5, everything is written with code, and to place objects in a position requires some forethought on how the page will be split into different images, etc. Making a big change to the layout after you have propagated your design to multiple pages is a pain, even if your trying to use html templates.
Flash is a tool that is better for artists and visual designers, and even better is that you can get impressive results without a lot of programming at all. Flash however did start to pick up a bit of a bad reputation for being abused by advertisers and idiotic web developers who posted Flash advertisements everywhere. In the right hands though and with an intelligent use, Flash can be a big enhancement to websites.
Html5 is a tool which is better suited for programmers, not artists. There are some talented programmers who are also artist that are doing amazing things, such as in the link above, but most artists who are not good at programming might find working with html5 and java script to make artistic websites to be a challenge.
So Steve Jobs put out a letter about why he didn’t want to include Flash, basically it is because Adobe wouldn’t work with them to make Flash optimized enough so that it would no eat up battery life faster. So essentially Apple blames Adobe, and then Adobe blames Apple for not working with them.
Now we are on iPhone version 4G or whatever, and there is still no Flash support officially. I don’t think it is going to happen now, I had hope, but now it seems it isn’t ever going to happen.
Personally, I think it is that Apple computers simply wanted to maintain greater control over what they sell and it has nothing to do with battery life.
Its pretty obvious that the more complex the animation on screen is, and the more processor intensive the more battery life your consuming. Flash is going to process code and draw graphics between 15 to 30 times a second which allows it to create interactive animations. That is going to be power intensive than an html page which is not constantly re-drawing.
Certainly though, this is much less battery and processor intensive than running a 3D app on your iphone. A 3D app will also process code and draw the graphics between 15 and 30 times per second.
Flash media usually does not go anywhere near the intensity of processing a 3D app might, so by this logic of Apple saying that Flash is just too power hungry is crap. That would mean all 3D apps are too power hungry to be acceptable.
The user makes a choice interacting with content that is highly complex in terms of processing and visual re-drawing which ultimately affects their battery life. If you have an iPhone, you know you cannot play games on it all day if you want to have enough battery to still have it reliably make calls and check important emails.
So if say Flash was supported, I think that if you spent all day on websites that had Flash embedded in the site or you were able to run Flash apps that had a lot of complex processing and animation, it would eat up your battery life just about as fast as if you had played with some 3D apps all day. Maybe even slightly less battery would be consumed than using 3D apps.
Apple wants to have their own proprietary marketplace, where everything you buy is through them and limited to only their system. I don’t believe that an iPhone could not run Flash, I just believe they want more money for themselves. Unfortunately that means everyone working with Flash now has a lot of headaches to deal with to make workarounds just specially designed to deal with Apple iOS devices.
It makes the cost of development go up, and everything just takes longer to deal with. What a mess.
