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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."
Really? Never? Just off the top of my head, I could envision a button that put the device in "pointer" mode, maybe with scroll buttons where appropriate, and then used the movement of your finger on the touchscreen as either 1:1 or some kind of relative movement of the pointer. There are probably issues with this approach, yes, but it took me seconds to cobble together. Saying that something is impossible as a matter of user interface is silly. You can always change the UI in some way to make it possible, or even good.
N900 has this pointer mode and it works just fine. You activate the mode by a dragging gesture from left to right. (start outside the screen)
You know, I have an N900 and I did not know about that. Yet another little awesome thing the phone does.