html5
What is Missing in Apples iBook Author? Adobe Flash
January 26, 2012 | 
Author Adobe Flash.
iBook Author got a lot of fan fair in the past month with many trial software runs. The video below shows iBook Author in action:
Steve Jobs has had a well deserved legacy of continuing top rank innovation. But Steve also had a darkside. He believed he could copy or steal anybody else`s ideas; but once they had been applied to Apple hardware or software they were Apple’s “magic”alone. Nowhere is this dark trait seen more tellingly than in Steve’s treatment of Adobe Flash.
In Walter Isaacson`s biography Steve traced the fault to 2003 when Adobe refused to comply with Steve`s request to develop a version of the newly rewritten Premier Pro video editor for the Mac. All sorts of reasons can be postulated for this refusal but Apples development of its own Mac-only competing top-end video editor, Final Cut Pro plus Apple`s GarageBand music editor and Apples Aperture as a photo editor all competing with key Adobe products inevitably played a part in the refusal. Also, Adobe’s top brass still had to swallow the bitter taste from a decade earlier when Apple`s Truetype copied Àdobe Type 1 font technology but Apple released Truetype to Adobe’s surprise as open and free software and in the process killed a lucrative font business for Adobe.
Fast forward to 2010 and Steve Jobs refusal to allow Adobe Flash Player to be run on not just iPhone but any iDevice. In an “Open Letter: Thoughts on Flash” Steve sought to justify his stance by raising 6 problems with Flash.
First, Flash ‘is 100% proprietary…Flash is a closed system’. Yet Flash player is free, available on more OS platforms and has more open APIs than Apple QuickTime, Windows Media Player and other competing media or animation players . Also Jobs ignores Adobe’s Open Screen Project and its standardizing work.
Steve wrote “that the loss of Flash Player was slight to iDevice users.” He cites the many Apple game apps made up for the loss of Flash games and the fact that Flash videos were replaced by .H264 videos. Steve fails to note that a)Flash is used on 47% of the 17,000 most popular websites and Flash animations not videos comprise more than half of Flash usage. Finally, millions of Flash-based websites built by Mac users were now unavailable to iDevice consumers.
Third, Steve trashes Flash security, reliability, and performance. “Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009″. What Steve fails to mention is that Apples own QuickTime had an even worse security record in 2009. And for the past 4 years Adobe’s Flash Player and Apple Quick time have had the same number of security advisories at Secunia ‘s respected security service. This despite the fact that Adobe Flash Player offers many more features , coding services, and platform support in comparison to Apple QuickTiime.
Steve cites bugs “We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. “ but fails to note Apple’s own QuickTime and its continuing buggy behavior.
“In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” And then – “Fourth, there’s battery life.”These are the very worst of Steve’s Reality Distortions. Apple was late in delivering the Apple Accelerator APIs to Adobe and within a month of his notes publication and 2 months of delivery of the APIs from Apple , Flash Player was running on a variety of mobile devices plus matching Quicktime performance on the Mac for speed and battery life. See here, here, here, and summarized here for the real facts.
“Fifth, there’s Touch.Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.” This objection is testament to how isolated and out of touch Steve was on the Flash Player state of the art. Within a month of Steve’s letter a new Flash Player was released with a complete set of touch capabilities.
“Sixth, the most important reason….Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.” Steve baldly states his I-want-a-monopoly case.No customer choice[if Flash Player apps don't rate customers won't buy them] allowed. But there is definitely the added burden for software vendors and businesses of having to develop another set of code for their mobile apps. Steve offers up HTML5; but as Steve well knew, HTML5 is not ready in standards, features and performance for primetime animation and application development. Rather Steve will make the biased decision for his users [if they did not like Flash, they simply would not use - but use on Macs belies that]. But in order to enforce a closed, proprietary and non-cross platform application development – Adobe Flash, Java, and cross platform code generators are all banned on iOS.
And so here we have the Steve Jobs Darkside – willing to destroy the work and business of hundreds of thousands of Mac-based Flash developers to create his own Apple iOS monopoly. The FBI report on Jobs is closer to the truth than Isaacson’s biography- Smart, Tough, Dishonest.
Ye Editor also got to witness an iBook Author session and 8 things stood out about iBook Author:
1)It is simple and fairly easy to use given templates and iWorks-like interface;
2)Users can import text from some Office and most iWork apps including styling; but after that import options fall off notably;
3)Adding images, video, HTML5 snippets and widgets and aligning them is really easy [text and object flow around drag and drop operations] making for savvy chapter layouts;
4)It can turn out large iBooks but they are huge files about 1.3 GB for a 100 page, with 10 or so large “animated” illustrations;
5)it can be slowwww at times in design and creation particularly importing 3D objects and perfecting live effects;
6)it does not have advanced and compelling animation features familiar to Erain Swift3D [Mac, Win] , Toon Boom Animate [Mac, Win], SwishMax [Win], Anime Studio [Mac, Win], as well as Flash CS5.5 [Mac, Win] developers;
7)As usual of late from Apple, iBook Author is highly proprietary, with a very limited set of legal imports and also export possibilities;
8)It produces proprietary iBook 2 files which handcuff you to the Apple ecosystem.
As substitutes for Flash animation, iBook Author supports a smorgasbord of specialized widgets, HTML5 snippets, Collada 3D models and interactive quiz drop-ins none of which match the full range of features and options available in Flash. As for animation, Apple’s Quicktime is again found missing in action. This is ironic because QuickTime had many of the same or even worse battery-power, security-risk, and performance problems that Steve Jobs attributed to Adobe Flash. The result is that iBook Author has problems in performance, storage efficiency and the range and robustness of animation features which are routinely available in Flash.
Meanwhile HTML5 is still not a viable animation solution as Canvas, SVG, CSS and JavaScript all vie for small portions of the full Flash animation feature set. In sum, iBook Author is proof of the fact Apple simply does not have a replacement for Flash for its millions of Mac graphic artists and designers. Yet Apple’s case against Flash is highly suspect . iBook Author just underlines the case of deficient products being provided to loyal Mac graphic designers and developers when many products much better are available not just Adobe Flash but Toon Boom, Anime Studio, Erain Swift 3d among others.
Bottomline: Apple Owes Its Graphics Community a Viable Animation Tool
iBook Author reveals the huge gap in Apple’s software line-up. Having sunk Adobe Flash on dubious if not illegitimate grounds on the iOS platform and doing the same on Mac OS, Apple owes the Mac animation and graphics design community a viable alternative to Adobe Flash. Apple Quicktime is not that. HTML5 animation tools like Sencha Animator or Adobe’s own Edge [based on jQuery JavaScript] are not that. If Apple chooses to eliminate something of indisputable value in their software ecosystem, then they must replace it with something of equal value. To date, Apple has not. Perhaps a tiny chunk of the $100 Billion currently in Apples cash coffers could be devoted to that replacement.
Posted in 
HTML5 Insights: Fall 2011
Infoworld has a good overview of HTML5 from earlier this year. See here [ and for real insight compare it to an InfoWorld Html5 Deep Dive report from a year earlier]. Combined with HTML5test this is a great combo for finding out a)what is important in HTML5, b)who is implementing what among the many sections of the HTML5 standard and c)whats missing, in conflict, or just not getting worked on[some key features].
Ye Editor’s top HTML5 concerns:
1)Canvas and SVG are barely getting used by major vendors – due to varying implementations by browsers?
2)Webkit vs Firefox Gecko vs Opera Vega vs IE Trident – means trouble in CSS3, touch, gestures, etc
3)Web database is a brawl right now as SQLite is abandoned for various IndexedDB alternates.
4)IE 9 and 10 are still so far behind all other browsers in HTML5 adoption.
5)HTML5 offline is still emerging.
The net result is that HTML5 is still not close to being the cross platform development tool that Steve Jobs promised. In fact Flash in the form of AIR is one of the only viable cross platform tools available for both desktop and mobile given its continued viability on Apple’s iOS x up to 5. And the problems with HTML5 is based not just on missing/incompatible features, but cross platform consistency, reliability, and performance. Web developers will have to, like in the opening scene of Shakepseare in Love, keep the browser vendors feet to the fire.
Adobe Abandons Flash!
Okay Adobe only abandons Flash on Mobile OS – iOS, Android and Playbook. Adobe will continue to develop Flash on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Here is the crux of the announcement:
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.
Readers should check out the announcement for the comments – there is an unadorned sense of abandonment. Often it is seen as giving in to Steve Jobs and Apple where the Flash Player has been unfairly blamed for Apple’s own poor graphic performance.
Ye Editor sympathizes with many of the Flash commenters. First, Apples beefs were largely on trumped up charges; even Apples own Quicktime was having reliability and performance problems at the same time as Steve Jobs was dissing Flash. Second, Flash Player has improved notably in speed and reliability in the past year. Third, the computing power that is arriving with Quad-core processors amkes performance a non-isue for most mobiles. Fourth, the AIR runtime is permitted on iOS as this how-to shows the packaging of dozens of .swf file with AIR for iOS.
But there may be some Adobe finesse and strategy here. AIR is truly the superior vehicle for getting SWF onto iOS and now other mobile devices – with 3D graphics, offline operation support and a host of new AIR features. Why fragment Flash performance between AIR and Flash Player on mobiles? Oh and one more thing – make it very hard for Apple CEO Tim Cook to kick AIR off of iOS. After all, Adobe is fulfilling all of Steve Job’s conditions – abandoning Flash Player on mobile devices and transferring saved monies to HTML5 development. Beside Tim Cook knows that the only cross platform development tool available to IOS is AIR since Java, WinDev and other tools are banned. Tim may need this AIR fact to fend off DOJ antitrust investigators.
Sencha HTML5 Animator
Because of its HTML5 output, Ye Editor has been following Adobe’s HTML5 Animation tool, Edge, with two looks at the evolving preview edition. So it was a surprise when Sencha appeared in Mid-September with the first completed HTML5 based tool called Sencha Animator:
The Sencha IDE for Animator
At first glance Sencha Animator appears to be an Adobe Edge clone:
2)Same simple drawing tools – dont go to either one to do your basic animation drawings.
5)Same Align, Distribute, Arrange [drag and drop in the timeline list of elements in the case of Sencha] features.
7)Same easy-to-use Timeline Magnify/Shrink control.
8)Same emphasis on no programming and ease of use for Designers.
9)Both have Preview in IDE or browser.
10)Both have simple, complete HTML file export for ready to run animation.
But of course the two programs differ. Sencha Animator is out now in its first version and on Linux as well as Mac and Windows where as Adobe Edge is available only on Windows and Mac. Edge is still in beta with intro expected in early 2012.
a)Sencha is available now.
d)Sencha provides library function for copy and pasting frequently used objects/elements.
e)Sencha’s Objects/elements can be grouped/nested and the group animated.
e)Sencha’a big downside is that Sencha Animator works only in webkit browsers for now.
Click above to see a simple Sencha Animator example. Use CTL+U to see the underlying code used by Sencha.
2)Runs in all 5 major browsers now.
4)More versatile copy and paste options for objects/element including placing all the transitions/actions in novel ways.
5)All Objects are contained in Elements panel with color-shading used in the Timeline.
6)Timeline has useful control toggles for Auto-keyframe the Properties and Generate Smooth Transitions
7)Edge goes second and has promised more features for early 2012 final release.
Click above to see a simple Adobe Edge example. Use CTL+U to see the underlying code used by Adobe.
Both tools have taken the minimalist approach to drawing and layout. In the case of drawing tools, both have only squares and rounded rectangles/circles for shapes [no lines, stars, n-sided shapes or pen-drawnings]. In addition to this both tools allow images and text blocks to be entered and Sencha adds videos as well. So in either case, Graphic Designers will be creating most of their media assets elsewhere. Sencha Animator costs $199 with a thrty day trial download available here. And no price has yet been set for Adobe Edge but it can be used freely in the beta previews available here.
From a guts of the engine view, the two tools are interesting. Neither tool has used HTML5 Canvas or SVG capabilities. Adobe Edge uses jQuery for almost all of its runtime animation support[hence it runs in all the desktop browsers]. Sencha uses CSS3 animation features plus its own EXTjs JavaScript framework for controling scenes. Sencha implies this gives them an advanatge in the mobile deployment space – but this reviewer was not able to test that.
Finally, Sencha Animator itself is coded in Nokia’s Qt – hence its availability on a number of desktop and tablet platforms. Ye Editor promises to follow up on this as Nokia Qt is making some serious Open Source commitments. But just like Java and Flash, Steve Jobs banished Qt from iOS development [sewing the seeds for iDevices downfall??]. But no question – with Sencha Animator and Adobe Edge, HTML5 animation has taken a decided turn for the better. In sum , you can do serious HTML5 animations right now.
Web Tools Whazzup
| Vendor | Wizards DragDrop | Widgets Templates | SocialMedia Blogging | Database Table/Grids | Mobile Sample | DevCosts RunCosts | Technology [hover to view] |
| Blogger, Google | Many No |
Dozens 30 |
Many Own+import | Some Yes/Widget | Yes Site |
$0 $0 |
Online DHTML+CSS |
| EXT Designer 1.2 Sencha | Yes Extensive | Many No |
Some user done |
Yes Yes/Yes |
Limited Review | Free Trial $299+ $host | Desktop Mac+PC DHTML+EXTjs |
| Jigsy | Many popup Yes Blocks | 42 Dozens |
Many Own+import | Yes for CMS Yes/No | Limited Site | $10-30/month | Online DHTML+jQuery |
| JimDo | Many No |
Some Many |
Some Own |
No Yes/No |
Yes Site |
$0 $60-180/yr |
Online DHTML+Flash |
| Muse , Adobe |
Many Extensive | Some Many |
Basic Next Ver | No Yes/No |
Next Ver Review | free til 2012 $0 +$hosting | Desktop Mac+PC HTML5+CSS3 |
| SnapPages | Many Some |
Many 4 dozen |
Many Own | No No/No |
$0+ premium | Online | |
| SquareSpace | Many Simple | 18 2 Dozen | Many Own+imports | Excel Yes/No |
No Site |
$12-36/month | Online DHTML+YUI |
| SureWebDevloper ICDSoft | Some No | 4 Dozens |
No No | No No/No |
No Review | $0 $50-125/year | Online DHTML |
| Web Designer 7, Xara | Many Extensive | Many ++ Hundreds | Basic Simple | embed Yes/No | Limited Review | $99 $0 +$hosting | Desktop PC DHTML |
| Webnode | |||||||
| Webs | Yes Site |
||||||
| Weebly | Many Extensive | Dozens Many | Many Own+import | Ecommerce No/No |
Limited Site | $0 $36-48/year | Online DHTML+JS |
| Wix | Many Extensive |
32 Many |
A few No |
Ecommerce Yes/No |
Yes Site |
$0 + premium | Online Flash |
| WordPress.com WordPress | Many Panels Simple | 32 100+ |
5 Major Own+import | Some Yes/No |
3rd pty Site |
$0+ premium | Online DHTML+jQuery |
| XsitePro V2 | 24 No | Many Dozens | Many No |
XML Yes/No |
No Review | $197 $0 + $hosting | Desktop PC DHTML |
| Yola | Many Extensive | Hundreds Hundreds | Many Own+import | No Widget/CSS | No Site |
$0 $100-500/year | Online DHTML |
| Vendor | Wizards DragDrop | Widgets Templates | SocialMedia Blogging | Database Table/Grids | Mobile Sample | DevCosts RunCosts | Technology [hover to view] |