Why people hate Adobe (and have now headache with sports-tracker.com)?

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sportstracker.nokia.com was a GPS based sports tracking service for Nokia phones. Around a year ago it spun off as independent company, which was a good move if you really want to develop your service business. Now sports-tracker.com has launched a new website. You can upload your runs and photos there and share your sports results through social media.

It was delightful to see the new site opened and having the features been missing so long time ago. However, I was not totally happy with what I saw.

The whole new site is built on top of Adobe Flash run-time technologies. There are no traditional web pages per se.

The problem is that full page Flash is resource hog. In the picture above you see that opening this web site in my Safari web browser spikes CPU to 100% usage – and it actually stays there indefinitely (note: on front page, see remarks below). This means that my computer is working to barely survive under the stress caused by this one web site – and my computer is powerful iMac. This means that if I have this site open background in my web browser my laptop battery would die very very fast. This means that all programs I try to simultaneously use on my computer become sluggish.

I assume that when sports-tracker.com was spun off from Nokia they contracted some digital advertisiment agency to built the new site for them. Digital advertisement agencies are often, not always, companies focused on the brand and visual appearance. They love to work with Flash because it gives good authoring tools to build nice looking, bling bling filled, animations.  Flash is a great tool for animations. Flash is a great tool for building browser based games. However, it is not good for building the whole web site where the user experience criteria could include 1) the site actually to responds to clicks 2) the site does not bring down to the whole computer. The decision makers probably drink cool-aid “hey let’s built the site with the Adobe’s latest tools – have you seen the demos how coooooool they look like”.

The thing is, I want to just see my sports tracking results. I don’t care whether the diagrams have blurred drop shadows with state of the art Web 3.0 mouse over effects. Now I can enjoy the effects, points for the artistic leader for that, but doing the actual task, accessing my sports results, have become irritating task to do. Things respond sloooow – that’s the main reason. In-flash scrolls bars have noticeable lag.

There exists an uncanny valley how normal web sites behave and how 100% Flash site behave. My right click does not work. I cannot right click a link and open it in new tab. I cannot right click a link to copy it to my friend. I cannot access the site on my N900 web browser (which even has Flash). I coudn’t even send feedback to sports-tracker.com team without first installing a desktop email client, as the email address cannot be copied from Flash to web mail. Text boxes are little different.

I cannot hold my horses to see Adobe conquering mobile phones with Flash and doing the same thing for mobile browsing experience it has now done for sports-tracker.com.

The site is not bad. Usability guidelines have been followed carefully when building the site. The developers seem to have gone into great details to make the operations smooth as possible. For example, URL fragment identifies are used to make sure bookmarking works even though Flash is present on the site. Social media features, not present in old sport tracker, are finally there. The results of design decision to built the whole site on Flash, instead of using Flash for some components only, might not have been seen by the time this decision was taken.

When Nokia Sports Tracker was first introduced 3-4 years ago with the first Series 60 GPS phones it was ahead of the competition. Wow effect had no limits – can you really do that with your mobile phone – in real-time and live?

It is funny how time passes.

It is definitely possible to build a sports tracking site, which looks cool, but does not have issues mentioned here.

Note: With little more research it seems that CPU usage stays 100% is specific to front page only and it has issues of not winding down action when you move away from your browser. However, rendering of other pages still uses vast amount of CPU, causing lag you do not see when opening web pages. The background CPU consumption on sports-tracker.com page is aroud 8% per tab when should be 0%.

Note 2: I am using the latest 10.1  Flash Player.

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7 thoughts on “Why people hate Adobe (and have now headache with sports-tracker.com)?”

  1. I have a relatively slow netbook (atom proc) and the site runs fine under xp sp2.

    Apple macs have never been that good with complex graphics – its possible that you might need a different machine to handle the animation.

    Maybe if you close down other running applications (such as vlc) or increase the ram?

    Sports-tracker is a great website and i use it all the time. its a great use of technology and very useful.

  2. The problem is more with Apple’s OS X than your hardware or flash. As you know intel-based mac’s can also run Windows. For example if you run just about any flash site on Macbook Pro using Windows you’ll get much better performance than by running it with OS X. That is one of the reasons some people also dislike Apple – like the above comment states mac’s have never been good with complex realtime graphics. That isn’t on Adobe, that’s on Apple.

    The irony is that one aspect a lot of people love about OS X is the “bling factor” and for know if you want to create a similar stuff on the web flash is pretty much the only tool. HTML 5 is not any less of resource hog, quite the contrary actually.

    That being said Sports-tracker.com isn’t as optimized as it could by, but as far as I know a lot of these issues will be improved for the next release.

    All in all the web has room for a lot of approaches to building a service and this HTML vs Flash feud has certainly gotten out of hand. Also people often seem to forget how completely static and visually restricted HTML is when they compare it to other techniques. Would the IPhone be such a hit if it was built around a html-interface (no transitions, no gestures etc.)?

  3. Problem with flash and Mac OS X is that until recently Apple did not allow Adobe any access to Mac graphics hardware. Apple used hardware interfaces on their own software but forbid Adobe to do so. This did not change until a recent Mac OS X upgrade (I think it was 10.6.4 update) Only now Adobe can even try to use any of the Mac powerfull grahics chipsets to accelerate flash.

    and I think Apple only did this to make flash look slow and sluggish and their HTML5 alternative fast.

    Sami

  5. Also if the sources are to be believed Flash hardware accelerates only h264 video, not user interface operations which might explain the problems.

    If you are a site author and aware “Steve Jobs” problem then I suggest consider this when chosing site technologies. In the current situation looks like Flash’s uptake is not going well on non-Windows platforms… so you could go straight to Silverlight 🙂

  6. yes only video is accelerated at some level now. I don’t think that Adobe will accelerate anything else anytime soon.

  7. I definitely do agree with Mikko! Flash is for animations, for goodies, for eye-candies. Building a whole website on it is simply bad style. And that’s valid for the (over-extensive) use of all proprietary technologies. Web developers should always keep in mind, that not the whole world is using MS Windows with prop. techn. X.
    I myself am a Linux user for the better part of 15 years now. On my Linux laptop which does NOT have 8GB RAM and the latest quadcore Intel CPU, the new sportstracker site is almost unusable – using the Adobe Flash plug in for Linux. That’s just stupid!

    There are general standards for web content and those standards are there for a reason! The keywords are interoperability and accessibility.
    Just as an example – blind people also do sports, they even run! So how is a screen reader or braille-interface supposed to deal with an all-flash website?
    And you can also do lots of nice Bling Bling with XHTML and such. It’s just more work and requires actual skills and knowledge from the web designer.

    Besides the interoperability and accessibility, there is also the security point of view. Flash has been one of the main security vulnerabilities in recent times and source of uncounted malware attacks.

    Unfortunately, things are not gonna change unless there is massive negative feedback from the users.

    I myself am still using the mobile app but rarely using the website anymore. I simply export my tracks as GPX. In my sparse free time, I’m working on a small system to display my logs on my website – without flash. Just with XHTML and the Google Maps API. Nothing ready yet, though.

    T:Stefan

  8. Two years later and the flash-problem isn’t solved in any way. Nowadays Sport-tracker.com won’t work properly on ChromeOS.

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