The media this weekend has been tooting more about Adobe Flash Player running on the iPhone. Apparently now Apple and Adobe are working together. Who cares? I don’t. I really, really don’t care about flash on the iPhone.
It’s legacy and unnecessary. We have plenty of other ways, all involving open standards – CSS, DHTML, Javascript and WebServices – to implement rich user interfaces into any webpage, be it displayed on the iPhone or not. Apple’s on MobileMe is a fantastic example of the potential. Why all the hububalub about Flash on iPhone?
Rewind back to pre-iPhone days and there was a ton of Flash on the internet. It was very easy to make rollovers that faded in and out using it, and hell hath no fury like a website designer that insists you watch their rinkydink opening animation for 20 seconds before you’re allowed the honour of perusing their website’s actual content. But that doesn’t contribute to the value of the web. It’s gimmicky, and frankly I think most flash websites are just that – high on gimmick, low on content. The value in a website comes from the content that’s offered: ‘Content is King’, as they say. So the fewer flash websites, the better.
We revamped our old website in May 2007 to remove all the flash and replace it with DHTML. It took a couple days but it allowed our website to be viewed properly on an iPhone or iPod touch. (Why 2007? Because we wanted to be ready for the iPhone launch in Canada.)
Apple also has a compelling reason not to offer Flash on iPhone: Flash can be a development platform for rich applications. There are plenty of flash-based games, and if those are loadable via a website then developers could circumvent distribution through the iTunes Store. No doubt, if Flash is allowed on the iPhone platform, there will be some kind of restrictions or regulations with regards to third-party Flash ‘apps’ as opposed to Flash ‘website enhancements.’
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