Apple’s Steve Jobs: Adobe is lazy. No Flash on the iPad
First the iPhone and now the iPad shun Flash. Steve Jobs says it’s because Flash is buggy, and the world is moving to HTML5 anyway.
What does this have to do with GIS? If, like me, you believe Jobs is right, then a lot. Flash front ends have been gaining popularity with web GIS developers. Flash (and Microsoft’s Flash counterpart – Silverlight) have thrown many a GIS shop into costly detours. Fancy Flash interfaces have taken countless hours to build, only to subsequently annoy countless users. If Jobs is right, all this may be for naught.
Self-described geonerd Michael Weisman (@mweisman) tweets: "Does Adobe not understand that no Flash is a feature?" Just like a child once cried out: "The king has no clothes!"
[UPDATE 01/31/2010 3:38 PM EST] Michael Weisman's original ire was directed at TheFlashBlog for implying that without Flash support the web would be broken. Michael just sent me a link to a follow-up to the original TheFlashBlog post, showing that all but two of the showcased sites already have H.264/HTML5 versions.
[UPDATE 02/03/2010] Sean Gillies concurs.
Posted by Atanas Entchev at 1/31/2010 7:20 PM 
Categories: Mac,iPhone,Technology,Flash,Opinion,blog,GIS,Software,HTML5,Apple,Online Mapping,Adobe,Twitter,Jobs,iPad,Business
Tags: Mac iPhone Technology Flash Opinion blog GIS Software HTML5 Apple Online Mapping Adobe Twitter Jobs iPad Business
Categories: Mac,iPhone,Technology,Flash,Opinion,blog,GIS,Software,HTML5,Apple,Online Mapping,Adobe,Twitter,Jobs,iPad,Business
Tags: Mac iPhone Technology Flash Opinion blog GIS Software HTML5 Apple Online Mapping Adobe Twitter Jobs iPad Business
Actually I think flash and Silverlight have a place with GIS viewers. See before this map tile craze Google started you could easily build a GIS site with nice maps and unlimited layers because you were only sending 1 static image over the line. So you really didn't' need anything fancy like flash because all the processing was taking place server side. But now that ESRI has joined Google and its tile craze you need flash like technology to handle the load and processing power it takes to handle all these damn tiles.
It works fine for Google because there offering a set number of tiles with most data aggregated as points. Which are easier to display then polygons. I don't believe this scales well with traditional GIS needs. Thats why there is this great push by James Fee and Dave Bouwman to build simple focused sites. It decreases the load on javascript and html.
I believe if you want a gis site that does anything useful, its going to need to use either Flash or Silverlight.
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I just received a feature-function web GIS wish list from a client, which (the wish list) contains pretty much all basic functions of a desktop GIS. Beyond the question "Can we do it, and for how much?" lies the question "Why?".
"Anything useful" is a broad characterization, and should be the subject of rigorous discussion between client and developer. Only through such a discussion can the optimal balance between features, performance and cost be achieved.
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HTML 5 will probably replace flash & silverlight, but it will take at least 4 or 5 years until the spec is implemented correctly by all major browsers. Plus then you have to wait for the frameworks to be built on top of it to make it easy to work with for each particular niche, such as GIS viewers.
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Considering one of the HTML 5 editors is on the Apple Inc payroll, what else did we expect Jobs to say.
HTML 5 still has 10-15 years of development for the full spec. Flash and silverlight wont be idle.
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML5_be_finished.3F
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