Slashdot Mirror
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."
I really wish I had mod points, you're exactly right there.
The reason that inability to hover "never gets talked about" is that everybody competent knows that if something is important, don't hide it behind hover - it's almost always bad for usability and accessibility. Any website or web application that relies on hover effects is, quite frankly, broken. Sure, it may look nice and be convenient, but there should always be an alternative accessible way to navigate through an application.
If my 3 year old N95 runs Flash and can display content reasonably, there's no technical reason that the iphone/ipad can't too. Apple's decision to miss out Flash has nothing to do with performance or usability, and everything to do with money. Anyone who claims differently is a deluded apologist Apple fanboy.
This entire story is FUD; I took the bite though...
I'm a user interface lead at a game studio which is leveraging a Flash-based solution that could target consoles. I already did this once before on CnC3:Kane's Wrath (a title with PC and 360 SKUs), and have done contract work creating a Flash Lite application for the Sony Mylo 2 (touch screen.) Besides all this I also teach Introduction to Interactive Media at a local college which has a successful curriculum based around Flash, and yet touches on aspects of touch-devices and alternate input (non-browser) environments.
All that said about my qualifications I make this statement:
Flash works in it's existing form on these devices.
Its my professional opinion that it would work fine on an iPad or iPhone and the non-technical agenda Apple has is what's preventing it from manifesting itself on those platforms.
RoughlyDrafted is nothing but an Apple apologist site. This is the same site that told us why we didn't want apps on the original iPhone (never mind that apps have now made the iPhone a huge success), how Android was doomed to fail (despite the fact that it's taken a significant share of the smartphone market in under two years), and how the iPad doesn't need HDMI (apparently a VGA output that does 1024x768 is a good substitute).
To RoughlyDrafted, any problem with an Apple product is a problem with us, not with the product. No apps? We don't really want them. No HDMI? We didn't really need that anyway. No real multitasking? We didn't want that either because it opens the door to "viruses and spyware that run in the background".
What a bunch of crap. Not even Mossberg is that bad.
Exactly. And it's important to bear in mind the source of this editorial: Roughly Drafted.
If Steve Jobs said all Apple users should throw themselves off a cliff, Roughly Drafted would provide a semi-spirited defense of suicide.