Flash crawling to the iPhone
We have heard that Flash is coming to the iPhone even since before the iPhone launched. Gear Live say that it is definitely coming.
Why isn’t it on the iPhone now? They make out that it is due to business decisions, but my guess is that this isn’t the case. The iPhone came out swinging that “the browsing experience is full.” The browser is a desktop-esque browser. No WAP here please.
This means that you would expect to see true Flash instead of Flash Lite, which you often see on a mobile phone. However, Flash does eat up a lot of memory, CPU, and thus battery, so I think that the Apple folks have been playing with Flash and making it fast and economical enough to run on the device.
At certain times it has been frustrating not to have Flash. You feel crippled. On the other hand, it has also often been nice. No silly Flash ads etc.
If it finally does make it on the phone, it will open up the world of iPhone development to Flash developers which will be a big thing.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Its very limitations have made the iPhone a boon to good web development practices.
At my most optimistic, I hope an iPhone Flash runtime drives developers to slim down their movies, just as Safari on the iPhone has encouraged web developers to put their HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a diet.
For this to work, Flash/Flex developers will need to accept certain limitations, like narrow layouts and missing support for mouseDown or drag.
In many ways, mobile in 2007 is like the desktop in 1995. Narrow and noisy bandwidth, slow CPUs, small screens, limited cache.
But unlike that 1995 user, sitting on some ugly computer furniture waiting for “Loading…” to finish — the iPhone user is on the road, or stealing a minute during a meeting.
In this environment, good luck with trying to make sense of a garden-variety Flash movie.
Otherwise, I hope Safari on my iPhone can help me out by adding a nice big “SKIP INTRO” button. Especially when it detects some site trying to push a megabyte Flash menu out over EDGE.
For doing rich user experiences on the iPhone for specialized tasks, given that the developer is careful about resource usage, Flash might have a place. But doing simple menus in Flash, or worse, entire page layouts, is lazy and short-sighted. Wrapping such content and functionality in a proprietary opaque container often provides a little eye candy and a nice conference room demo, at the expense of compatibility, discoverability by search engines, and usability/accessibility. Add to that the difficulty of maintainence, internationalization, and a boutique labor pool.
For Flash developers not willing to optimize for the mobile web, perhaps something like Adobe AIR for iPhone will come along, providing the user with an “installation” experience, where the user doesn’t expect the app to load quickly, and persistence for installed apps reduces the frequency of this heavyweight loading.