One of the first things that people noticed during Steve Jobs’ keynote was the fact the the iPad doesn’t support Flash. That’s one of the things that people hate about the iPhone as well. Steve says Flash cuts battery life, but why not create an option to enable or disable Flash on your device. It should be the consumer’s choice to activate Flash and not Apple’s choice.
Another thing that caught people’s eyes was the fact that the iPad in their promo video did seem to support Flash. It’s pretty obvious that Apple want us to think the iPad is capable of supporting Flash, but they failed to convince us. Even better, they adapted the promo video and it now shows the iPad NOT supporting Flash. You can easily see that because of the displayed blue lego blocks.
This is what Steve Jobs said at the keynote: “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had!” So if I want the best browsing experience, I want to be able to load website all the way and not half way. I want websites to show all their content and not just the text and a few pictures. If I want the best browsing experience, I need Flash. So Apple, before making such a statement you should check if the product is really capable of giving you that feeling. Is it really capable of supporting Flash?
The answer to that question is YES. It is capable of supporting Flash. But Apple just didn’t integrate it into the software. If the device is capable of playing videos 10 hours straight, than it shouldn’t be a big problem to integrate Flash. The battery will last. So is there hope? A lot of people are hoping that Apple will integrate Flash support before the iPad is officially launched. But Adobe, the company behind several elements of the iPad’s software, says they will release Flash for the iPad.
Adobe announced they will bring Flash to the iPad. Adobe’s Flash Professional CS5 software will be sold with the ‘Packager for iPhone’. The Packager allows developers to use Flash technology to develop applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. An Adobe employee spoke about the fact the iPad doesn’t support Flash and said the following:
“It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”
Although Adobe wants Flash support on the iPad and also almost every user of the device, Steve Jobs is not even thinking of implementing Flash. He says Adobe is lazy.
“Adobe is lazy. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not its because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.”
It looks like the Flash story is not really over. Apple doesn’t want Flash and Adobe is going to bring it to the users wether Steve wants it or not. I personally thing that HTML5 will take at least a year or two before it is wide spread. We’ll see…
Source: Adobe blogposting and Wired
Want to see Apple’s iPad promo video?: original / adapted
