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."
Current Flash-heavy sites do not work well on any other device either.
Welcome to the problem of confusing "web site", "application", "advertisement" and "art installation".
I'm not into Flash development, but how would that be different from javascript hover and mouseover features? I think this is a flaw for any advanced interaction feature on any touch enabled device, which means it is not limited to the Flash technology in particular.
If there's anything I've taken from all the Apple talk on its multitouch technology, it's that gestures are everything. What if when Flash is in use, dragging your finger across the display results in "moving the cursor", while a single touch results in a click? Or why not make it function much the same as how laptop touchpads work, where a double-tap+hold equals a click and drag? I can't see that being terribly difficult for Apple or anyone making a touch-based device to implement, really.
I mean, perhaps there's more to it than that, but I can't see the concept of mouseover/hover being a huge showstopper for Flash support on touch-based devices. There are definitely ways around it, and for that matter, there's also CSS/JS mouseover/hover that works the same way. How is this handled on devices like the iPad? Is this also unusable?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
"current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device"
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.
Just because some flash sites are not developing flash taking into account touchscreen devices (it's a new thing!) does not mean it cant be done. The whole thing seems stupid to me. It really scares me to think this person makes money developing flash sites. It seems he is totally unable to adapt, change his methods or do things better than he does. Come on! Sure there are flash files that would create problems and would need to be further developed, but to say it's fundamentally flawed because of that is bullshit.
I have a ClarionMiND. It's one of the few Intel-based MIDs that made it to the US, and with firesale pricing, the $130 for an atom-based handheld looks quite a bit better than the $699 price at launch. It runs Firefox 3 and includes flash, but flash is of only limited utility. The on-screen keyboard can't detect when it's needed inside of flash. Mouseover doesn't exist. On the other hand, many sites use mouseover in their (x)html. Facebook, for example, allows one to delete a post or comment. The delete link is hidden until you mouse over the link. For me at least, it's surprisingly intuitive to use with a mouse, but I'm completely lost with a touch-only device. I find that I spend an excessive amount of time trying to figure my way around the car crash that is the merging of a mouse-centric internet with a device interface that doesn't do enough to cover for the internet's lack of accomodation for the devices interface.
I'm in no way a supporter of Flash, but how is this any different than anything else in the browser with a :hover state? With the advent of HTML5 and the Canvas element, which does work on the iPad et al, you're going to run into the same issues if you program them the same way. Now I get his concern that Flash devs would have to rewrite a lot of their already written stuff to work on the iPad if it allowed Flash, but I fail to see how this is any different from the multitude of websites that use hover drop downs for navigation and the like.
The point that we shouldn't be relying on hover states because of the push towards touch devices is a good one but it's not an exclusive problem to Flash. The reason Flash shouldn't be on the iPad, etc, is because it's a horrible bloated and proprietary plugin, and Canvas, HTML5 video, etc can do the same thing. Flash is now a dead end technology. It's only a matter of time before it's phased out altogether.
The title of the article should have been: "Why Flash is Fundamentally Flawed."
I think what my friend here is trying to say is that perhaps it is the touchscreen input that is "fundamentally flawed." The same argument could be applied to CSS hover and javascript mouseovers. Should Apple simply dispose of Safari on the iPad, because it is "fundamentally flawed?" There are lots of sites that use css hover menus. Poor iPad users will have a bad experience with those sites, so should we then remove the browser?
We all know Apple bans Flash because it would allow third party apps that don't have to forfeit 30% of revenue to Apple. Plain and simple. All other explanations are just someone's absurd mental gymnastics to justify Apple's stupid and shortsighted iPhone OS policies.
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.
"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.
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.
I use the "old style" Slashdot interface, and reading a few comments back in my posting history would inform you on my opinion of changes Slashdot has made to this site (including changes to the interface and fundamental changes to the (meta)moderation system) in the name "Web 2.0."
You must be new here ;)
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
Apple doesn't make much money off that 30% cut. The iTunes store brings in just enough money to cover their expenses on it, as reported every quarter in their results. They make their real profit off the hardware they sell. So I doubt Apple is blocking Flash just to keep that 30% coming in. Flash apps (if they were really all that important) would be helping to sell more hardware for Apple, without the overhead of hosting peoples apps.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia. Only now is it critical for Adobe to try and bring real Flash to the mobile space (and not the crippled/useless Flash Lite), even though smartphones have been around a while. And Adobe is the only company that can make Flash better, since it's not an open internet specification.
Javascript/HTML rendering on the other hand was something Apple could improve without having to wait on some other company. So Apple was able to launch their iPhone product years ago with a great browser, and bring in more hardware revenue. Had they also wanted to include Flash and held back the device till it was ready, the iPhone still wouldn't have shipped. Why? Because Adobe still hasn't made a mobile release (not beta/alpha/whatever) version of Flash for any mobile device/platform. The only way real, true proper, non lite flash works on phones now is with browsers dependent on a server somewhere doing the heavy lifting.
This may just be "absurd mental gymnastics" to you, but I've at least backed part of my comment here with actual information on what Apple does with their 30% (IE, not make money with it, just using it to cover expenses), instead of speculating it's some big important thing for Apple's bottom line.
Not to mention that any developer (including would be flash game developers) can release a free app via the app store. This argument that flash apps would cut into Apple's app store revenue makes absolutely 0 sense.
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
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.
It's ok. Don't work to hard to understand the article because it's complete bullshit. I use flash all the time on my tablet PC using my finger. I've never ran into a problem. It would be a problem in a game where something follows your cursor but I personally find flash much more often used for video/interfaces etc.