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Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives For Android
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe announced that it has released the final version of Flash Player 10.1 for Google's mobile operating system. The app will be available for download via the Android Market for those users who have Android 2.2 (Froyo) installed on their phones. Devices expected to offer the Android update include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, Droid by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, and Samsung Galaxy S. Flash Player 10.1 was also released to support devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months."
If Apple sees that this increases Android usage, they'll reverse policy on the Flash block, and users everywhere will praise Steve for his insight and timing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
No Hero?
Let the suck begin.
Facebook is the new AOL
That's great and all, Adobe, but we're all still waiting for Froyo to be released...as an official OTA, or as an official source release :(
how well does it run on hacked Iphones ruining android?
So, I've tried it on my Nexus One. It seems to play videos ok, but that's about it. You can't really interact with the flash because no flash videos are designed for touch input.
On the BBC news video players you can't control playback because the clickable area on the time-line is far too narrow to hit. You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
It runs as native code through the NDK, not in the Dalvik virtual machine, so I'm going to guess "not at all".
I must admit that I want Flash to go away and be replaced by open web standards, but at the same, time I would like to be able to view all web content on my mobile phone.
So did they manage to get decent performance out of this thing, or is this still more of a tech demo than anything else?
Clever signature text goes here.
If I recall, there's an option in the Android browser to only load flash apps "on-demand", i.e. when you click one. Kinda like Flashblock for Firefox.
Also, since this is the final version, does it finally have hardware acceleration? Hopefully we'll see some tests soon.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Can you zoom in to be able to tap those tiny links/hit areas?
Clever signature text goes here.
developer resources are now?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How does Apple even hope to stay relevant?
Seriously.
Flash is fundamentally user hostile. It's all about controlling the user's experience, not about what the user actually wants.
Until there is an Open Source flash player implementation that can run the vast majority of Flash applications, I don't want it.
Adobe wouldn't be in the platform trouble they were in if that was the case anyway. Right now Adobe has to be the one to create a player for whatever platform. If it were a truly open standard with a good interoperable Open Source implementation, they would no longer have to do that. They could concentrate on making high-quality authoring tools instead.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I know that Flash is not popular around here, but the facts are that it is invaluable for in house web apps. Google Visualization, Flex, Salesforce API, etc are very popular in the business world. Being able to have a 6SIGMA style dashboard written once in Flash and useable on both a web site (intranet in most cases) and a mobile devices is invaluable. Sure, in time HTML5 may be a viable alternative, but we're talking about the business world which is still on IE6 in many cases.
Every time I get a project along these lines support for IE6 is a requirement, and so the only real option is Flash or AJAX (or more often then not a combination of the two).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
> You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
The N900 has a special "cursor mode" that, when enabled, changes the dragging from scrolling to moving a virtual cursor that allows sending drag events to the browser (flash or javascript). I'd guess android could have something similar added if it doesn't have it already.
Those are all issues that can and (assuming demand is high enough) will be fixed. If there's a reason that flash won't work on phones its because of battery usage and performance problems. Steve Jobs was still wrong, let the users and developers decide what they want, if flash really can't be made to work then so be it. But there's no valid reason why developers and users can't be allowed to try it out.
There are more things in heaven and earth then are dreamed of by your philosophy.
Flash is not just for videos.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm actually using Beta 3 (the final version doesn't seem to be in the market despite what the article says). It is much better than the first beta and generally isn't too bad.
You *can* zoom in using pinch-to-zoom but it doesn't really help. Even with the controls filling the screen you can't drag, and many controls are just too damn small.
You can also double-tap on the flash to make it fill the screen, which works pretty nicely, but even then you can't drag! (wtf?)
All in all, I don't think anyone could have done a much better job, but the fact is no current flash movies were designed for use on phones, and it shows badly.
Perhaps now the overworked, underpaid developers who did this can get back to work on flash for 64-bit Linux.
And while I'm in a bitter mood... It still amazes me how flash can be so horribly inefficient even at video playback. Ancient VLC versions play back H264 with far less CPU usage than current Linux flash does. I do wonder how Adobe manages to achieve this disparity in performance.
Now I can have the dubious claim of the cell phone with the biggest security whole.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Flash is not just for videos.
Right... but since most flash apps don't even play videos as expected by the masses, properly, with controls and everything, we're a looooooong way away from what most people think of as "real flash working."
BTW, not having things like "cursor mode" different than "zoom mode", while a little limiting to the true geek, is part of what makes Apple's designs accessible to the masses.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
So how long before Adobe releases a 64bit Linux version of 10,1?
They were doing pretty good supporting 64bit platforms for a bit but they seem to have stumbled a bit recently.
I write dull business apps for a living. When I think "flash support" I think of things like Google Visualization and Flex, not movies.
These are the things that make me want to have Flash on a mobile device.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
on Daring Fireball in 3... 2... 1...
(Gruber abandoned any pretense of rational objectivity a loooooong time ago.)
--CF
At least you have a prerelease of Android 2.2 already. The Nexus One for AT&T doesn't have it yet...
Froyo still has not come out of the beta stage :-)
I guess google was waiting for Flash and Froyo now will be rolled out. Lets hope.
Holy Crap. Would you just shut up? Good criminy. JUST SHUT UP. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. "fundamentally user hostile"? Are you SERIOUS.
If I have to hear one more whiny, pimply-faced OSS evangelist get all upset about a piece of software given to him for free - one that the rest of us are excited to get, even if its crap - I'm going to slam my tongue in a door until I forget how to even spell computer.
AS IF. AS IF people can't learn how to make flash experiences that work on a 200x200 screen. You're assuming that NO-ONE CAN FIGURE OUT how to make a flash program work with that few pixels, that they'll just keep making scroll bars 1 pixel high? ARE YOU SERIOUS.
In terms of rapid prototyping, Flash works great. Would I write my super-fancy game in it? NO. But I HAVE THE CHOICE. Go back to SourceForge and keep hitting F5. Maybe you'll get lucky and see a NEW OSS PROJECT LAUNCH HOLY CRAP WOULDN'T THAT BE EXCITING. ;)
Have you even tried it, or if you have you don't seem to know how to use it properly.
1) I've used it for iPlayer a few times and it works fine, yes the scrollbar is too small but pinch and zoom into it, how often are you seeking anyway?
2) If you click on the flash player it gets focus and the whole page doesn't scroll. If you don't then yes the whole page will scroll.
-1 Apple fanboy propoganda
It's pretty crappy when you have to switch to "virtual cursor" mode in order to interact with a site. That's really going to win users over. Perhaps not such a smart business decision to go with Flash and a write-once-deploy-everywhere strategy?
--- What?
Its AT&T... they're other Android phone is still using version 1.6 and has all links to Google replaced with Yahoo. What did you expect?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Users "decide" by buying iPhones/iPad or a competitor (or not at all).
Developers "decide" by writing for iOS or Android (or not at all).
It seems that users and developer have "decided" that you are full of shit.
Perhaps, but I'd rather have a choice, and don't want to be an Apple sheep with Steve making it for me.
Besides you said it yourself, nothing has been designed for touch input, that doesn't mean it won't be and considering this is the first release ever, I'll forgive them if it's not completely perfect.
Lots of bog standard HTML web pages feature tiny buttons so should we conclude that web browsing is a waste of time on phones? Or could it be that some web sites need to be redesigned.
It's exactly the same with Flash. Some apps will work while others expect higher resolutions or features that phones don't support.
Also, the big content providers in the USA seem to be purposefully blocking access from mobile devices. Try going to Hulu or CBS and displaying videos and you will be blocked even though Flash is perfectly capable of displaying those videos. This just astonishes me that they don't want me to view their advertisements from my mobile device. I can only assume Steve has arranged some exclusive deal with them or they're planning on releasing pay-per-view versions of their web sites, perhaps using a dedicated video application. FAIL.
Actually, it used to be the same with web pages (and still is for many).
They were designed for large screens and are very hard to use on the small screens of phones.
Slowly though, mobile browsers are getting better at handling the problem, and web pages are being redesigned to make things better.
Now, Flash doesn't have the same luxury of time - nor would I want them to because I don't really like Flash - but I think that they should be accorded some opportunity for adjustment. Just because it doesn't work well on a random site the day of its first release (full Flash for mobile, that is) doesn't mean it should be discarded immediately.
Did you try putting the app into full screen mode? I figure that might help with the scrolling problem. (I don't have it on my phone yet so I'm not sure.)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
A new generation of exploits coming to a phone near you!
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I've got a milestone but it's still running 2.1 until Motorola decides to post an update.
A couple things I wonder about flash are whether it will have proper sound support (both output and input from the mic), and whether it wil be able to use the camera devices inherent in most smartphones.
One use I could see for it would then be to possibly stick up a flash-conferencing module on my webserver, which would allow access from my phone...
> It's pretty crappy when you have to switch to "virtual cursor" mode in order to interact with a site. That's really going to win users over.
Yes, it is crappy design - from whoever designed the website (flash or not, it applies to some javascript things too). As a user I do prefer to have the capability to use such websites if I ever need to, even if it means an extra tap to turn a special feature on. Its a small annoyance compared to not being able to use the site at all because the device/software isn't capable of providing a compatible interface.
Oh for fucks sake! How is this Flash's fault? The BBC designed and implemented the player. Flash can handle multitouch fine, and it's up to web designers to make their sites accessible for mobile devices.
The only reason we have Flash Video is because Quicktime sucked so hard. I say the more competition the better.
Well the mobile web thing is still pretty new. The first step is getting a version of Flash that doesn't kill the handset - after that the UI issues are much easier to overcome (albeit you'd probably need to serve up a mobile specific version of your movie). I don't particularly want to see a resurgence of Flash, but the crappy UI isn't really down to Adobe so much as the designers/developers who aren't really targeting these devices.
People always cite this as a reason Flash could never work on phones, and it seems like an incredibly trivial thing to overcome, either by having an overlay on the screen when Flash is detected which causes the finger to act as a cursor, or just using the physical directional pad almost every phone as to do the same thing.
This is a completely ridiculous statement. Videos are probably the EASIEST thing Flash does. If the new player can't handle video controls without frustrating a reasonably knowledgeable user, it's unlikely to do much better on more complex Flash apps. The fact that it will properly display the animated werewolves and vampires in a game advert is not exactly a selling point.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
But you see, the whole point of having flash on phones was so that you could really get the "full" web, and that developers dont have to redo all their work.
Now, most of the flash content is not designed for touch input and phones screens, so you still cant really access that content on a phone in a meaningful way. (I tried to use the FIFA World Cup Matchcast flash app on a droid, not really usable). Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
They might as well spend their time writing an apps, or an HTML5 site.
Some existing flash apps might work well enough on android tablets, but where are these now?
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go? As an individual developer what skills are you more likely to want to develop at this point to differentiate yourself?
Now I'm just waiting for Netcraft to confirm that Flash is dying...
Hmmm... Adobe should be worried if that's the best thing anyone can say about it.
They probably could, but it would suck. Smartphones are not designed to be used with a mouse/pointer interface. This is the same type of fail that Steve Jobs talks about when he says "if they have to use a stylus, you know they failed." Having to use a stylus or similar pointing device means the developer couldn't be bothered to change a computer based interface which required a mouse to point at pixel-level precision to a touch interface which only requires a finger to point at much lower precision.
This is what other smartphone makers and tablet makers never understood. If you force your users to use what is clearly a desktop interface in a mobile device, you will fail. Period, end of story. People do not want to have to whip out a stylus just to dial a phone number or watch a video.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
On the BBC news video players you can't control playback because the clickable area on the time-line is far too narrow to hit. You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
So, basically, you've used a Flash app on some website which is not designed with mobile devices in mind (because Flash simply wasn't there to target it), and from that use you conclude that Flash is fatally flawed on such devices?
I mean, do you think that it was some fundamental Flash constraint that forced that video player you complain about to have a narrow trackbar, and it's impossible to make it wider?
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
And that right there is the problem. Steve Jobs is an annoying control freak, but he's often right. It can be very hard to argue with "right" even when you don't like the messenger.
The N900 has a special "cursor mode" that, when enabled, changes the dragging from scrolling to moving a virtual cursor that allows sending drag events to the browser (flash or javascript). I'd guess android could have something similar added if it doesn't have it already.
It can actually be even better on Android phones, since most of those have trackballs. Opera Mini does that already, in fact - you have a cursor (hidden by default, only shows when you move it) controllable with a trackball. It's quite handy for dealing with websites that are badly designed for small screens (can we please line up all Web designers still using font sizes in px against the nearest wall?).
It's pretty crappy when you have to switch to "virtual cursor" mode in order to interact with a site.
It's crappy, but it's better than not being able to interact with the site at all. Of course no-one is going to sell it as something to go forward with.
erhaps not such a smart business decision to go with Flash and a write-once-deploy-everywhere strategy?
There's nothing precluding Flash apps from providing UI that is suitable for touch-based interfaces. There's also nothing precluding them from detecting whether the platform is touch-enabled or not, as well as the available screen estate, and adjusting its UI accordingly.
The pure "write once, deploy everywhere" is still a myth, same as it always was - even desktop platforms are different enough, and mobile is an entirely different dimension. This doesn't mean that a lot of code can't be shared, however.
The reason is the iPhone isn't a computing platform. It's a controlled media device. Much like the New York Times would decline to publish an article it considered poorly written or in bad taste, Apple so chooses which applications and functionality is available to the users of its iDevices.
You'd be perfectly reasonable not to like it, but you'd also be ignoring the first sentence I wrote.
Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
I read it as "developers will need to start supporting the new touch API and stop presuming a certain fixed size of controls and stuff."
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go?
It highly depends on the requirements. YouTube videos, for example, have ad overlays that are interactive. If you can do that in HTML5, over a playing <video> tag, they will use that. But note that the video stream must be DRM-protected, so nobody could just point wget at the target of the <video> tag and leech your precious home movie of a lolcat.
Exactly. And getting something like Flex working correctly in a touch environment -- or even "works at all" -- for the average business application, would seem to be a significant challenge when getting basic video playing to work effectively has proven to be quite difficult.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Perhaps not such a smart business decision to go with Flash and a write-once-deploy-everywhere strategy?
Yeah, its a much better decision to write once and deploy only on the iDevices, and distribute only through the App store.
Do you even read what you write before posting? I mean seriously..?
"His name was James Damore."
OK, I've compiled the 3+ posts, (reflecting the collective wisdom of slashdot) to send as a list of grievances to Steve Jobs.
I think after seeing the IT elite's overwhelming support for Flash, he will have no other recourse but to stop selling iPads at a million devices/month, until Flash runs on the iDevices.
Yes, they are selling like crazy, and yes people love using them, and not having to worry about technical details, and nerd-talk, but seriously, if all those devices run it, then his Steveness could bring it to his pet platform too, right?
Sign up below this post if you agree!!
----
It's only when you see pages with lots of crap (ads) on them that performance becomes an issue. You can set the plug-in to On Demand, but when you select one flash object to load, I've noticed every flash objects loads and then performance suffers.
You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.
I'm actually using Beta 3 (the final version doesn't seem to be in the market despite what the article says). It is much better than the first beta and generally isn't too bad.
All in all, I don't think anyone could have done a much better job, but the fact is no current flash movies were designed for use on phones, and it shows badly.
The N900 has a special "cursor mode" that, when enabled, changes the dragging from scrolling to moving a virtual cursor that allows sending drag events to the browser (flash or javascript).
So, I've tried it on my Nexus One. It seems to play videos ok, but that's about it. You can't really interact with the flash because no flash videos are designed for touch input.
On the BBC news video players you can't control playback because the clickable area on the time-line is far too narrow to hit. You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
------
(Dear mods, the abovementioned post is heavy in what is called sarcasm.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Movies require constant updating of the screen. Flex apps for the most part dont. Interface can be a challenge, but Flex/Flash even does multi-touch if you put the effort in to incorporate it. Data visualization is the key feature I'm looking forward to.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As they're two completely different things, it's perplexing what point you were trying to make.
You can't really interact with the flash because no flash videos are designed for touch input.
you can't control playback because the clickable area on the time-line is far too narrow to hit
Aren't those problems with the content, and not the player? There are in fact FLV players which are usable on a phone, where all of the buttons are big (like, you know, YouTube, which plays perfectly on my Evo). Of course, that doesn't stop you from generating a conclusion for all Flash content based apparently on the BBC video player as launched through your Nexus One.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You might think Jobs was wrong, but he's going to win for this exact reason. Developers are going to have to redesign a majority of their existing Flash apps that don't work well on mobile devices and the majority will head to HTML-5 to enable support for the "full" mobile device spectrum. He might have been wrong on a few points but he's damn smart and his timing was perfect!
"Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak."
How about just make Flash work on phones - in the very, very near future, I will stop carrying a notebook or a netbook with me. Billions of others round the world will never buy a netbook - but they will buy a powerful phone. The argument for making any platform mobile is too strong.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
people kept saying they where only going to do android and i said many arm based devices.
I've been "using" Flash on my Nexus One for about 3 weeks now. Before I go on, Flash is optional as in use the "On Demand" feature. This prevents it from loading until you want it. Why don't you know about this? Are you being truthful in your post?
To address your no comment about videos and touch input, which is only showing your ignorance, try any of Vimeo's video content. It's already been updated for Android. It works great. But maybe I shouldn't take your comment about Flash video so literal. Were you using that as a blanket statment for all Flash content, weather it's used for video, animations, applications, etc.?
Your comment about touch input in general is also completely farce and doesn't add up with reality. It was disproven early on;
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/05/12/top-flash-misperceptions-flash-cannot-run-on-touch-devices/
There are a few video examples on this site showing touch input with Flash; http://theflashblog.com/
On the topic of input and Flash, I noticed that Flash games that uses the arrow keys, are handled by my Nexus One's trackball. Try games like Flash Pac Man to see this in action -- a game that was never intended for a portable, but yet it works and controls perfectly on my Nexus One;
http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/pacman_flash/
I'm looking at the BBC player right now. I found a sneak peek video of "The Choir" -- never heard of this show. I selected fullscreen mode and I'm not having any problem sliding the progress bar, let alone pausing and adjusting the volume and I have fat fingers. What's your excuse?
Conclusion? What? The only thing conclusive here is your ignorance. Do you even understand what Flash actually is? I'm assuming no, because your comments are as if all Flash content is set in stone and it can't be reworked/tailored for other platforms, which is the farthest thing from the truth.
Anyways, Jobs was hardly right when it comes to other platforms and Flash -- especially the Nexus One, but when it comes to his portable iDevices he's probably telling the truth, considering my 2G Touch can't even display a wallpaper with this iOS 4 update, I guess it wouldn't be able to handle Flash either.
>flash doesn't belong on phones
By your reasoning, neither does HTML 5 canvas and video because they have the exact same (if not worse) issues.
Some people do.
I honestly miss the stylus. I could just handwrite (even with recognition) with a stylus, the screen was way cleaner, you could use the screen real estate much better (smaller controls) and the device was still usable when I was wearing gloves.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I just searched for "Adobe Flash" in the Android Market and got nothing (useful).
Weird. Why doesn't Adobe put it there?
What happens when 30 minutes into my commute my fully charged battery is shot cause I was watching a few youtube vids? Shit the Nexus One can barely hold a charge long enough for me to drop my pants!
Really?
If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?
I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/
I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.
Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.
Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).
But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.
Ummm... I don't really care to know what videos you're watching, but if you're dropping your pants during your commute then your phone's battery life is the least of your problems...
This is not a proper /. post. The author actually tested the thing he is commenting on. Then he actually thought about what he was going to write before he posted it. Finally his post contains no flames or trolls.
And many video types from flash containers can be piped for decoding on DSPs that many modern phones have. Also those without Cortex, et al.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Can we have our AMD64 Linux flash player back?
Yes, but that's less crappy than having to lug around (or go get) a laptop in order to interact with the site. Flash on mobile, IMO, is more about enabling the users to get by on existing sites than enabling the rollout of new Flash sites meant for mobiles.
That said, a lot of flash games do work quite well, and it's entirely possible to design new ones to work well with both touchscreens and mice.
It's crappy because websites are crappy. If a site was designed for the Android - which wouldn't be hard - it could be made as easy to use as a regular program. There's no reason we have to pretend we're viewing websites on a computer with a mouse and keyboard.
I have a Nexus One that I purchased straight from Google on ATT. I have no idea when the Android 2.2 update will land. I'd much rather have the Apple System where it is relatively straight forward to update the iPhone OS and you know when it will be released. As far as I can tell, some people on T-Mobile had theirs upgraded, but it seems kind of random.
So how does it handle those (most) apps that use mouse-over? It does not work with a touch screen. Jobs is right.
And if you want flash for the vector graphics and animation: you should not. SVG has both, and is an open standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svg
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Hear, hear.
I had a couple of Palm devices (both of them antiques, now), and loved the accuracy of the stylus.
Why?
Choice. I could just use my finger, if I needed do some quick math with the calculator or scribble down a short number or something. And when I wanted accuracy, it was no trouble at all to whip the stainless steel stylus out from the Handspring Visor and do something detailed.
And the lengthier notes I'd write in chicken-scratch using the stylus? I didn't care that they weren't machine-readable text. They were my notes, and I could read them just fine.
I like that touch screens have progressed as much as they have (and you can have my Droid when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers), but I really liked being able to do both.
Plus, with a stylus, one gets the opportunity to have other tools as well. The Visor stylus I had included a #00 screwdriver which could take the device itself (or other things) apart, and a reset pin (which worked well on various other things, too). Others included ball-point pens or other amenities.
Kid-proof tablet..
Agreed. I've never liked the design of the BBC player... that drag bar at the bottom is way too small, even for a regular PC. Mind you, given how badly the seek even works on those BBC videos (click somewhere, and it jumps about 20 seconds away to the nearest keyframe if you're lucky), you're probably better off just avoiding touching it.
Check out YouTube vids on the phone and get back to me.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Maybe if they used flash for comments, you wouldn't have this problem :-)
Just kidding of course...
We, Symbian users can watch embedded Youtube videos for a long long time, thanks to Flash Lite installed.
We (S60 V3, not V5) don't even have "touch screen", Youtube somehow sends the right file in right form, you can even "full screen" via phone's menu system.
I don't know we should blame BBC either, it is one of the unknown giants on web, that thing is _huge_. Perhaps they will do a similar content trick soon and I hope they add a truly multi codec html5 video in the process.
What they should never do is, getting totally rid of Flash option. They made the same mistake with Real player/Wmedia. Everyone doesn't really "subscribe" to $600 hardware to keep up with whatever latest trend is. I lost my ability to watch BBC World videos in full FPS after they removed the perfectly working Real Player embedded option and moved to Flash alltogether.
Unless something serious hit them to stop this spoiled no competition attitude, like an investigation (not rumor, real one) or some "killer app" released on Flash (like The Register predicts) that will be "facebook size".
Apple trusts their customers who buys the device and actually queue for it in this Summer heat, people doesn't let your post to higher level etc.
Think like dealing with a cult. Will a cult member believe there is really nothing on dark side of the moon even if you spend 300 billion dollars to actually send him there?
So, join us and give up hopes for those users. Enjoy whatever open device/os you like and ignore them.
Iam a web developer spent a long time learning HTML and stuff... now working in flash.... tbh from development point of view no way HTML5 can compete with flash... but dont worry didnt pay a dime to adobe... downloded the cracked version MasterCollection CS5.
Adobe's the one requiring a Cortex A8 and they've said that getting it to run on older ARM11 architectures is dicey at best. Just passing along what the OP didn't know. Whether or not the older ARM11 processors are capable of running Flash is certainly open to debate, but it doesn't matter if they are capable if Adobe won't port to it.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
iPods and iPhones use the same ARM CPUs as every Android phone. Sure, you can run Android on other devices and other CPUs, but ARM is the overwhelming choice for smart phones.
-Dave Haynie
flash on android doesn't work with chatroulette!
This is useless...