For today’s myth, I want to cover one that has its roots in some fundamental misunderstandings around video technologies. That is the idea that H.264 Video (deployed via the HTML5 video tag) will kill Flash. This is a more recent meme, which has spread with the growing awareness of the forthcoming HTML5, but is unfortunately based on some fundamental misunderstandings about Flash, video capabilities, and the web in general. First, we need to clarify a few things.

As you probably noticed, yesterday Adobe ran some ads expressing its thoughts on the importance of open markets. I think Adobe’s position is best summarized in an open letter from Adobe’s founders, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke: When markets are open, anyone with a great idea has a chance to drive innovation and find new customers. Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors….

Today I wanted to look at a more recent misperception around Flash. That is the idea that Flash cannot work on devices with touch screens. If you know your Flash history then you will probably find this a bit ironic, considering that Flash was originally created specifically for tablets with touch inputs. Regardless, lets take a closer look at this myth. The myth began with the publishing of this article. I have already covered this topic in another post, but I wanted to address it again as it seems to have spread lately.

This is one of the most prevalent misperceptions associated with Flash. Basically, the myth is that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU compared to other, similar technologies. Before looking in more detail at this misperception, I think it is important to point out that when one makes the statement “Flash is a CPU hog”, they are making a comparison of Flash CPU usage to some baseline. This then begs the question: Flash uses a lot of CPU compared to what?

Interview with Kevin Lynch at Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Covers Adobe, Flash, innovation, HTML 5, thoughts on the direction the web is moving, competition, and omniture. Highly recommended. You can view the video on YouTube

A little over a week ago Apple released a new draft of their iPhone developer program license which contained the following clause: 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.

I have just posted information about FlashCamp San Francisco, a free developer / designers event that we will be holding in the Adobe San Francisco Office on Friday night, April 16th. This will be similar to the other world wide FlashCamps going on this spring, with this event focusing on Flash Player 10.1, Flash CS5, Flash Builder and Flash mobile development. Register for FlashCamp San Francisco From the event page:

There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference. One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.

Two of the things that Flash is often criticized for is that it: Uses too much CPU Performs significantly worse on the Mac than on Windows This got me thinking about whether some quick tests would bear this out, and if so, whether it was isolated to just Flash content. Below are some raw numbers showing CPU usage of various rich content across different browsers and operating systems. This includes video deployed via HTML 5, JavaScript / Canvas animations, Flash Video, and Flash animations.

Here are my slides from my FITC Amsterdam talk titled Building High Performance iPhone Applications with ActionScript 3 . Sorry I ran a little short of time, but you can find all of the info in the slides. Here is the link to the Simple Game Framework which I discussed during the session.