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Why Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touchscreen Devices
An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Roughly Drafted:
"I'm a full-time Flash developer and I'd love to get paid to make Flash sites for the iPad. I want that to make sense — but it doesn't. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen — and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That's not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It's because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work."
the mouse pointer that one can activate by dragging onto the screen from the lower left edge didnt help?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
"I'm a Mac fanboy who also does some extremely bad flash design (http://adamsi.com/). I can't figure out how to make the silly, and unnecessary, rollovers on my site work on an iPad. I'm believe everything Apple does is brilliant so their decision to exclude Flash must also be brilliant. Therefore I have to conclude that Flash could never, ever, work on a touchscreen device."
Serious bunch of BS in my opinion. For one, a large number of Flash sites, like the author's, seem to use mouse over for nothing more than effects. Fine, but hardly essential. If all that is transmitted is clicks, they still function ok. Second, the big reason people are up about Flash these days is videos and the like. For better or worse, Flash has become THE web video standard. That may eventually change, but no time soon. As we all know, standards change extremely slowly when there's something works and, well, Flash works. It's not perfect but on most computers, it works just fine for seeing a video of a silly cat jump in a box. Finally, if a site didn't work properly, oh well, shit happens. As it stands all Flash sites are GUARANTEED not to work at all.
I don't buy this as a legit argument at all.
Well, I foolishly decided to do some fact checking after submitting my post and it turns out canvas is already supported on the iPhone. Excuse me while I pull my foot out of my mouth.
The real reason why Apple would never allow Flash to work on one of it's mobile devices is simple. The App Store. Most of the available apps could easily be mimicked using Flash, and made easily available. This would not be a good thing for Apple's bottom line.
As noted above, this rationale is easily disproved by Apple's encouragement of offline HTML5 web apps.
I find it interesting that the title is why "Flash is fundamentally flawed on touchscreen devices" and not "Why Certain Touchscreen Devices (aka iPad) are limited and will not work with Flash". This is obviously an attack on the Flash framework as a way to redirect criticism away from the iPad. Apple has clearly mistepped here and now they are trying to do damage control. My understanding is that other touchscreen devices that are coming out in the market place will support Flash (e.g., HP Slate), and it will probably be seamless. I was quite interested in the iPad when the news came out but now that it won't support Flash, and locks users into the monopolistic "App Store" I am no longer interested. Only Apple would try something like this... they seem to be stuck in the monopolistic 90s.
http://maemo.nokia.com/features/maemo-browser/gestures/
You know what else could cover the expense of running an app store? Opening the platform so people can install apps from other places.
The app store gives them more than just income - it gives them control over what runs on the platform. This is a dangerous trend, and that's the real problem with this whole thing.
In that case, Slashdot is an abomination. It (optionally) uses XMLHttpRequest to load pieces of the comments page without requiring a refresh of the entire page. So why do you post on an abomination?
A: Slashdot has interesting content.
B: Slashdot is an abomination. Pagedown goes too far because the bar at the top steals precious real-estate for no reason. Accidentally navigating away and back loses all box text, despite years of tools which save that state for just such eventualities. It runs incredibly slow on iPhones, despite being basically a static page with a reply box. It has a bunch of "Web 1.5" stuff hanging around in the options which hasn't really done much in years. It took about 2 years after the site refresh before it would serve consistently across all browsers.
Hooray for pushing the envelope for sake of pushing the envelope's sake. But if every website were coded like Slashdot, the web would be a far more painful place.
The ______ Agenda
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe.
This seems more likely to me. The Apple/Adobe relationship has seemed a bit strained lately. Adobe often provides better and more support to Windows users, and they've been very slow to move to Cocoa. Meanwhile, Apple has been competing with Adobe in the audio/video realm.
Plus, Steve Jobs has been reported as saying that Flash sucks, is too slow and unstable, and takes up battery life. This is true. It's annoying on Windows, but on OSX, Flash is a disaster. It seems like this should be a case where Slashdotters could support Apple; they're essentially saying, "This stuff should be done according to more open standards like HTML. Let's work on HTML5 to get it to do the things we need and get rid of Flash."