Linked by David Adams on Mon 22nd Feb 2010 08:37 UTC
While it's been a low-level grumbling for years, the issue of Flash on mobile devices (and particularly the iPhone/Touch/iPad ecosystem) has reached fever pitch over the past few weeks, with Steve Jobs as self-appointed Flash basher-in-Chief. The OSNews crowd, that is, dyed-in-the-wool technologists have, by and large, not been big fans of Flash, with its spotty availability and performance on alternative platforms, resource hogging, and instability. And though it's quite useful for web video and other specialized interfaces, it drives the tech savvy crazy when it's used for utterly superfluous multimedia bling. So we've had a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Flash, and whether device users should be free to make their own decision about whether it's worthy to install on their iPads. But we're leaving out an important detail. As Daniel Eran Dilger, a Flash developer, points out, almost all the important existing Flash infrastructure won't work anyway. Update: A worthwhile rebuttal to this point of view.
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Member since:2006-12-15
Being a programmer myself for years, I highly doubt it's that difficult to make existing apps compatible with both traditional mouse input and new touch devices. It's centainly WAY easier and faster to just modify the existing Flash apps than reimplementing everything with totally different technology that isn't even ready yet and lacks good tools to create.
What I have seen so far from the early versions of Flash Player for Android and webOS looks pretty solid. Sure, there will be things that don't work. But an awful lot of stuff will work and work with Flash only. I've got an iPod touch and missed Flash several times, already.
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Member since:
2006-08-02
He never said you couldn't; he said that most existing flash sites don't. The entire point is if things need to be reimplemented anyway to take into account the lack of a mouse pointer, then why not reimplement in HTML+CSS+JavaScript?