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Flash vs HTML5

Ed — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:40:00 +0000

Recently there has been a lot of coverage regarding this debate. Apple have said never, they are currently being investigated by the FTC for this.

There are a lot of pro’s and con’s for both sides, Apple and its supporters are hedging their bets on an emerging technology to replace flash in the long run and provide a better user experience for new mobile devices.

In the past few days some heavyweights have had their say-

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/opera-joins-in-jobs-v-flash-argument-687597

http://hothardware.com/News/Microsofts-Take-On-Flash-HTML5-Is-The-Future-But-Well-Support-Adobe/

Looks like the tide is slowly turning…

Adobe and Apple, Jobs weighs in

Ed — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:07:10 +0000

ElJobso has finally stated, in an open letter to the world why Apple are restricting flash on its mobile devices, he makes a lot of valid points that I’m sure will fall on a lot of deaf ears-

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Conclusion from Steve-

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

UPDATE, Adobe CEO comments on above-

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/

The migration begins…

Ed — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:54:13 +0000

Steve Jobs told Apple employees – “They (Adobe) are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

This is a man possibly way ahead of his time, he has stubbornly refused to allow Flash on the iPhone and upcoming iPad.

Youtube and Google both have alternative beta’s in development instead of Flash based ones, these are HTML5 based.

Problem is most web sites these days employ some form of flash and it would take a major shift by online delivery to re-develop existing websites away from flash to HTML5.

That has begun with Virgin America, they have now released their new website sans flash, new and improved with HTML5!-

http://www.virginamerica.com/va/home.do

Story here-

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/03/virgin-america-dumps-flash-over-lack-of-iphone-support/

Adobe Flash, one step closer on iPhone…

Ed — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:11:55 +0000

An open source developer has written a Javascript runtime hack to enable Flash based animation on Safari web browser on the Apple iPhone-

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/hack-enables-flash-on-iphone/

See a few demo’s here on your iPhone-

http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/