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Flash on an Intel Mac - How’s it run? - Part 2

Last weekend, the wife and I went up to The Gateway in SLC for some dinner. And since we were already up there, to go play in the Apple Store. (She could care less, but I get a kick out of it. I just wish I could talk her into letting me get one of those 30″ displays.)

However, this Apple Store trip had a purpose. I wanted to see how Flash ran on an Intel-based Mac. I’d heard mixed reports, and so this one will only serve to add to the mixing of reports. The iMac I played with handled Flash content just fine in Safari. Firefox wasn’t installed, so I couldn’t check that, but all of the Flash content I checked ran great. I couldn’t see any noticible differences. However, a lot of the content I didn’t produce, so I couldn’t tell if things like the text changing colors were happening. Anything that I had made seemed to run normally as far I could tell.

Tinic Uro has just posted an entry where he states that the Intel Macs ship with a Intel-native version of Flash Player 8, so that may be why the ones at the Apple Store ran great. Is it possible that those with bad experiences using the player may have a PowerPC version installed by the IDE that had overwritten the Intel version shipped with the Mac?

Obviously, since I only spent about 15 minutes on the iMac, I’m not an expert on the subject. I know that folks out there have a lot more time with these new versions of the player and have had more chances to find the bugs. However, having seen how well the content I tested ran, I’m not as concerned about the performance of Flash content on these new machines. Still, if you have one of these new Macs, and have had issues, I’d be interested in hearing about them.

As for the IDE, it wasn’t installed, so I can’t say how that works. I’ll just have to wait until I get my own Intel Mac for that. Obviously, it’ll run slower under Rosetta, but by the time I get a new Mac, Adobe will likely be shipping Universal Binaries, so it won’t matter too much to me.

As a side note, if there’s a Thaifoon near you - I recommend it.

Previously on joshbuhler.com: Flash on an Intel Mac - How’s it run?

February 2nd, 2006

Mac | Flash |

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2 Responses to “Flash on an Intel Mac - How’s it run? - Part 2”

Christoph Wiese Says:
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:11 pm

Seems like not that long ago I was running the Flash IDE in Classic emulation under Mac OS X 10.0… I remember there were certain menu commands you absolutely didn’t invoke lest the app suddenly quit… early adopters can make it work if they want to.
Also doesn’t Rosetta work by caching its recompiled code? So in theory the longer you left an app running the faster it would be?

JulesLt Says:
February 6th, 2006 at 1:12 am

Looks like Adobe have said they won’t be going Intel until the next releases of Photoshop, et al, towards the end of the year.

What’s not clear from that is whether that includes all former Macromedia products. My hunch is probably ‘yes’ - that no matter how far along the line Macromedia were with their Intel migration, Adobe will be more interested in integrating the two product lines.

In fact this confirms it :
http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf

Personally, I think it’s pretty poor behaviour given the amount of cash Mac users have probably put through Macromedia’s books, and that it’s not as if it was that surprising - but then that’s how monopolies start behaving - I bet it wouldn’t have happened if they’d still been competing.

On the other hand, if the new versions arrive mid-2006, at about the time they expected the Intel Macs to arrive, then fair enough. (Although I still think it’s poor to expect existing customers to pay again. I work in software development and we can NEVER charge our customers for work caused by OS and hardware upgrades).

2 Responses to “Flash on an Intel Mac - How’s it run? - Part 2”

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