RSSFlash on smartphones sounds like a bad idea
May 04
I’m a bit amused and confused by the public war over Flash on the iPhone. I’m an avid iPhone user. I also don’t tend to like Flash on the web unless it’s really called for, like something very interactive or video.
I won’t bother guessing whether Apple’s motives are truly meant to control their ecosystem or have my best interests in mind.
We can categorize Flash use into two broad categories: video and non-video. Considering how much video is available in the Flash format I’d argue that Apple should make an effort to show those videos natively on the device (if that’s even allowed). Why not an app, similar to the YouTube one, that appears whenever you click on a Flash video in the browser? But, I hope Jobs is right and non-Flash video will soon replace Flash.
However, I have absolutely no interest in non-video Flash on my iPhone. Why would I want it? To visit sites that are fully in Flash? I don’t bother visiting any sites like that on a PC, so have no need on my phone. What about for games? Just imagine how useless a typical Flash game would be on such a small screen. Either you’ll have to zoom in and scroll around constantly (plus, what would distinguish between a zoom touch and something for the app?), or look at it zoomed all the way out.
I think it’ll be pretty funny when Android and Blackberry phones soon get Flash and people suddenly wonder what they’re supposed to do with it.
May 18, 2010 @ 13:26:03
I disagree. I think if a technology is as popular and widespread as Flash is, you support it. Out of courtesy to your customers. Besides, if you’re going to claim to have a phone the surfs the net, you need to be able to deliver on that, not just view a handful of canned sites that barely work or have been crippled for mobile users.
I don’t like the arrogance of Apple thinking they can change the entire face of the internet by refusing to support its most common eye candy. It’s surprising that a company that produces products like the iPad, that are nothing but eye candy, would object to supporting eye candy on their eye candy.
But at the end of the day, it’s Adobe’s fault. They need to get off their complacent butts and implement Flash on every smartphone platform, and do it right with respect to memory consumption (the biggest problem), stability (second biggest problem) and performance (just good enough to run video without framedrops would be sufficient).
May 19, 2010 @ 06:39:35
I definitely agree in principle, but think Flash on smartphones will be bad enough that I’m having a hard time caring. I wouldn’t be upset if Flash were on my phone, only if there wasn’t a way for me to disable it.
Jun 08, 2010 @ 09:02:08
Interesting note: The new Tivo Premiere (Series 4) has a new UI, entirely written in Flash. They chose Flash because it was fast and easy to develop impressive visual effects and third party developers could easily develop add-ons to add value.
However, early reviews of the new Tivo all report that the new UI is laggy. Painfully so. The company says that this will be resolved in the near future via a service patch that enables multi-core support on the device’s CPU. A single core CPU just can’t handle it, even though it’s doing little more than displaying text menus and a few thumbnail sized graphics.
Is this the result of shoddy or hurried programming by Tivo’s UI team? Probably.
Is it a sign that Flash is a resource hog that bogs down every system it’s installed on? Quite possibly.
But it underscores how popular Flash is, when the main selling point, and apparently the only new feature, of the Tivo 4 is the Flash UI.