Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash. He says it has poor security, kills your battery and performs poorly on mobile devices. For those reasons and more, Apple doesn't allow Flash applications or video to run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Today, Skyfire will try to break through Apple's Flash blockade with the submission of its mobile browser, which transcodes Flash into HTML5 in real time, to the App Store. And according to its creators, Apple is going to accept it.
An enterprising iPhone hacker has figured out how to get Adobe Flash working on the iPhone, despite Steve Jobs' banishment of the third-party plugin from all iDevices for reasons detailed in his long-winded "Thoughts on Flash" memo posted to Apple.com back in April.
Why do you need Flash on the iPhone? To see banner ads?
No, not really.
Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called "Open@Adobe."
"Open@Adobe is a site aggregating Adobe's openness programs, which includes source code hosting, such as the Adobe® Flex framework, and contributions from Adobe to standards organizations, as well as specifications."
The battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash for dominance over video on the Web is likely to end poorly for one of the two, and lately it's been looking worse and worse for Flash. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the Web stating why Flash would remain banned from iPhones and iPads, and just yesterday, Apple got an "unexpected ally" in its anti-Flash crusade - the adult entertainment industry.
But today, just to keep from making things too cut and dry, Google-owned video site YouTube has come out with a list of its own reasons why Flash is here to stay - for now - and HTML5 simply isn't qualified to handle the job at hand.
Earlier this morning, Google released a new stable version of Chrome, the company's increasingly popular browser. This new release for Windows, Mac and Linux is the first stable version of Chrome to be distributed with a built-in version of Adobe's widely used Flash Player. Just two days ago, Google enabled the built-in version of Flash in the beta channel versions of Chrome, where it had already been available earlier this year, though Google then disabled this feature after a while.
Adobe Systems announced today that its Flash Player 10.1 software for mobile devices is now being released to its platform partners. The plugin-based technology, which allows for a range of interactive elements including video, games and even advertising, is already available for Google Android phones running the latest operating system revision, code-named "Froyo," but technically known as Android version 2.2. This OS now runs on Google's Nexus One and is expected to arrive on other Android phones like the Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, HTC Evo, HTC Incredible, HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S.
Adobe has also now shipped Flash Player 10.1 for mobile to its device partners who will then prep the software for launch on Blackberry (RIM), webOS (Palm), Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian smartphones.
The one notable exception to this list is, of course, Apple's iPhone.
Even though Apple has very little interest in seeing Adobe's Flash run on the iPhone, the enterprising hackers behind the Spirit jailbreak tool have apparently managed to port Flash to the iOS platform. While the details are still murky, this video shows a well known Flash clip on a jailbroken iPhone.
The fact that this video was shot by Comex - the developer behind the Spirit jailbreak - leads us to believe that this video is most likely genuine. Assuming this is true, it will also be interesting to see if these hackers will manage to run Flash content inside the iOS's version of Safari.
Within two years, the number of hours people spend viewing online video will easily surpass the time they spend watching television. There's no doubt that online video has enjoyed stratospheric growth of late, but despite that success, the technical underpinning by which video is delivered into your browser hasn't really developed much since the 1990s. Back then, watching a video on the Web meant squinting at a postage stamp-sized low-res player with very jerky video.
No Flash on the iPhone? It's not a problem for advertisers, apparently. Developers tasked with creating rich media ad units for Apple's popular mobile devices have been busy porting their Flash-created ad collateral into an iPhone-friendly HTML5 format using mobile ad firm Greystripe's "iFlash" ad technology, which provides a Flash-like ad experience.
The iFlash ad format has become so popular, in fact, that Greystripe is just now announcing a 200% growth spike for these "iFlash" ads following the iAds announcement.
Chrome continues to make gains on both Internet Explorer and Firefox and we have to figure that it is partly a result of the types of features we're seeing frequently added to Google's entry into the browser market.
Today's beta release boasts more than just speed increases, included a number of nifty features.
