Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.
Well, with Flash they were also beholden to Adobe to fix bugs and optimize it for whatever GPU they wanted to use.
I'm not sure it does take 5x as much processing power, especially when you can ship things off to the GPU. You have to remember that these decisions were made a few years ago, and Adobe Flash video on mobile (where available) has always lacked the performance of native apps/HTML5 video.
As far as Flash mobile performance is concerned, the main issue at the time was constrained to video playback. I am not debating that Canvas is slow, as is the Flash 10 software-blitted graphics Stage.
Both Flash and Canvas are moving towards GPU accelerated rendering pipelines, and Adobe is also making proposals on the HTML5 side, like CSS Shaders, but that's a separate discussion.
My beef was the idea that Apple knew that third party games would be one of the most popular draws to their iOS products. Nobody did (except perhaps game developers themselves).
@doomlaser - it's interesting to hear the argument put that way, because nothing I use flash for involves video delivery (or very little of it). Video delivery is to flash what hot topic was to...whatever my favorite bands were in 1995. It's the generic mass market application of something arguably meaningful, useful, appealing and capable of changing the world. Below that are the banner ads. But in the middle, it's true, there's this wide audience for streamed video that should have been served by browser technologies long ago, and that Flash really should never have been a part of, except that it filled a void as the only plugin widely enough adopted to support cross-platform video.
The loss of video to native browser technologies takes nothing away from the things Flash has to recommend it as a method for blitting graphics to the screen. It's one thing to try and do it with canvas and divs in Safari -- it's a joke getting things to line up, but it's not impossible. But if you want it to look the same in IE? A guy's supposed to run a startup and worry about Firefox reversioning every 4 weeks at the same time? Realistically, if I wasn't running my app in Flex I wouldn't have a company; I'd have a giant pile of IF IE statements and a bigger list of complaints.
So this clock is where the rubber meets the road, in a funny experimental way. It's got "no flash" in the title, so we can assume this is where an HTML5/JS proponent with some coding savvy thinks the line should be drawn; this is what can be achieved with the technology available cross-browser given the state of the DOM art. And I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying that it's nonsensical to throw out good tools to prove you can do something with bad ones.
Oh, I'm pretty much totally with you about the silliness of HTML5/JS/Canvas animations that keep popping up on HN. I agree that they all tend to run slow, use too much CPU, and take too much code to produce.
