Comments on: A Take on Flash on the iPhone by Daring Fireball

By: Agustin

Agustin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:22:25 +0000

Flash and Flashlite are 2 different things, as a Flash developer I can build a site in flash, and it will work perfectly on a desktop, but then I have to make a mobile/Search Engine version of it…
I could build the flashlite version and solve some of the mobile issues, and the app or RIA would work jus fine, but what about the iPhone? or so many other handhelds that don’t support flash…?
Do I have to make yet another version for the site?…

My choice, sadly, has been drop Flash, and work with what is standard (or better suported): CSS, Java, and serverside… Flash was a good promise, but it grew the wrong way. Flashlite is a long lost battle.

Flash is great, AS3 is just wonderful, but it still requires a lot of resources, I can make a cuad core crawl to a halt with a graphic intense site (i’ve done it without big loops and with AS3). Flash gives you the capacity to crash the most stable environments. A banner would display fine on the iPhone, but a heavy encrypting algorithm, or any 3D rendering engine out there use the same plugin, and that would crash any current CPU on a mobile.

So I have left the fun, nice, well supported and warm wing of Adobe to embrace the no so well supported standards… oh well.

By: drawk

drawk — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:13:42 +0000

@ James: Yeh I am not saying Adobe is open, nor is Microsoft, Apple or even Sun but there is a difference. Being open source and being open market are two different things. Apple has always been closed market and it is why they lost the desktop battle long ago. They could also very well screw up the mobile market with this as well.

I support both open and closed systems as long as they provide markets and platforms to build upon. Open is preferred but then again most innovation even open comes at the help of a company.

@Jensa: Possibly you are right, but Flashlite is optmized for mobile and runs fine on my 2 year old phone, HTC. The iPhone should be as capable.

@Nate: I hope you are right, really the flash and iPhone markets are much of the same market, they would be silly not to add this in, but their love of Quicktime is immense. Flash would own video on iPhone as well.

By: Nate Chatellier

Nate Chatellier — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:28:18 +0000

http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q108-flash-on-iphone-is-just-around-the-corner/

By: Nate Chatellier

Nate Chatellier — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:23:57 +0000

My banking website just switched to Flash. I can’t even log into my bank account now on my iPhone since it doesn’t support Flash! With the flash player at such a high distribution rate, it is becoming more and more safe for companies to require it. As more and more companies require it, the mobile web world will have to start universally supporting it, or the natives will get restless. And the natives getting restless is never good for the dictators.

By: Jensa

Jensa — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:13:31 +0000

Hehe… James is right. Same thing. I have a different take on this. Imagine browsing the web with your iPhone using an already quite unstable Safari browser. Visit a site that has 5 Flash ads on it. Not only will you probably pay more for these ads, but just a small bummer by the ones that made the banners and your super-smooth iPhone OS will crawl to less than one frame per second before Safari crashes…

My bet is that the iPhone’s 600Mhz CPU would suck at Flash. Then again – Opera Mobile has a Flash Lite implementation now that will be used on similar or lower spec’ed phones, so I guess it COULD work.

By: James R Taylor

James R Taylor — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:14:38 +0000

“I have to boycott the iPhone for the type of closed environment…”

Yeah, because Flash is the epitome of being an open environment. From Wiki.. “Flash Player cannot ship as part of a pure open source, or completely free operating system, as its distribution is bound to the Macromedia Licensing Program and subject to approval.”

“There is, as of late 2007, no complete free software replacement which offers all the functionality of the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.”

“Adobe has yet (as of February 2008) to release a Flash Player for the x86-64 architecture on any operating system.[18] There is to date no Linux Flash Player for non-x86 compatible processors (e.g. x86-64 native, PowerPC, ARM, etc.).”

Locked into Apple, locked into Adobe. Take your pick.