Does the iphone need flash? 17/11/08

Although flash is slowly making its way onto some mobile devices, Flash on the iPhone is still looking as far off as a manned mission to Mars. But with HTML 5 starting to be implemented in webkit and most other browsers, and the advancements in SVGs of late, I’ve been thinking about what roll flash will play on the iPhone, and if it is really needed at all …

At the moment, I find the fact that I can’t jump on youtube and watch my friends latest video a little annoying, but with the <video> and <audio> tag already working in safari 3, how long will it be before these are carried through to the iPhone? And with the wider adoption of such tags, will sites such as youtube continue to use flash as their default media player?

I’m a big fan of Flash, and seeing what Joshua Davis and Hi-Res were doing with the platform back in the late 90’s is what really go me into web design and playing with code in the first place, but now that I’ve had to live without flash on the iPhone for the last few month and counted the amount of times I’ve actually missed it, I’m not so sure it’s the iPhone enhancer I’ve been hoping it would be.

code, technology, web design |

2 Comments

  1. Yes it does need it *1.

    Todays web requires flash for full access(unfortunately). To claim a
    full web browser without flash is false advertising.

    *1 No it doesn’t need it. There’s *lots* of stuff on the web made
    with flash… but luckily there’s more stuff made with standards based
    html… which makes it easier to live without flash stuff :)

    So I guess my final answer to your question is yes and no.

    ps. flash has been available on *lots* of mobile devices for *ages*.
    “Versions of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already, and that
    is expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months” — from
    the tech crunch article.

    pps. flash for 64bit linux is available now… the first 64bit
    implementation of flash on any platform.

    Comment by Rene Dudfield | 17/11/08

  2. Hey Rene,
    I’m not saying I wouldn’t love to see flash on there. For me, making a web application in flash seem very appealing, but if it’s going to take a million years, I think id rather see more effort put into getting the browser supporting html 5 and svgs …

    Comment by Aaron | 18/11/08

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