While Flash on the iPhone and iPad certainly isn't in the cards, it looks like it will be coming to Android even sooner than Google VP Andy Rubin said it would.
Mobile browser company Skyfire released version 2.0 today, which brings Flash video to Android along with a few other features.
We were surprised to find a long missive penned by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs posted to the Web this morning. The subject? Why Apple hates Adobe Flash. Ever since the Cupertino-based company opted to reject the plugin-based technology on the iPhone and its Wi-Fi-only companion, the iPod Touch, people have questioned and debated not just the decision itself, but the reasoning behind it. Was Flash buggy? Was is a matter of it being a proprietary product? Did it use too much CPU? The answer, as explained by Jobs in rich detail, is all of the above.
Despite the now-infamous absence of Adobe's Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.
The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the "lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer."
Adobe is officially giving up on Apple. Or rather, Apple gave up on Adobe and Adobe is just now admitting it. In any event, the news is that Adobe's "Packager for iPhone," the bundled tool in Flash Professional that lets Flash developers leverage their existing skills to produce iPhone apps, shall be no more. The toolkit will still ship with Creative Suite 5 as planned, but no future development or investment is planned in this area - or so says Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Adobe's Flash platform, in a blog post on Tuesday.
For websites that find themselves stuck in the middle of the ongoing feud between Apple and Adobe, there might be another way out of the mess - Ripcode. According to the company, its latest product is a server-side solution for websites that want to get their Flash-based content onto Apple's iPad and iPhone.
Adobe will soon introduce its Creative Suite 5 to the public. A tool in the new suite will allow for easy import of Flash animations into HTML5 Canvas code. Once IE9 launches, all major browsers will support Canvas. At that point, any Flash creation can be viewable by just about anyone without downloading the Flash plugin. It also means, clearly, that devices that cannot accept the plugin can nonetheless run the animations built on it.
Those who are excited about this probably think of Flash is a space hog. As ReadWriteWeb has discovered, it sometimes is, though not always.
Video platform provider Brightcove just announced the launch of a new tool for website publishers called the "Brightcove Experience Framework for HTML5." The framework allows the company's 1,300 customers create HTML5-compatible websites for delivering video content to Apple mobile devices, including the upcoming slate computer known as the iPad, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch.
There has been a lot of debate about the move to HTML5 for Web video support, an area previously dominated by Adobe Flash and its accompanying Web browser plugin. Some publishers claim making the switch is a burden while others, most notably Apple CEO Steve Jobs, say the move is "trivial." The truth, says Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, is that "it depends." For some publishers using homegrown video solutions, building a new HTML5 website is indeed hard work, but for customers using platform solutions (like his, of course), the transition is much easier.
The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio (NPR) will be launching custom-built iPad-only websites next month when the new Apple slate computer known as the iPad is made available for sale. Both sites will automatically detect when web surfers arrive via an iPad device and will then show those visitors a special version of the site, customized exclusively for the iPad. How exactly will these sites compare to the web pages regular site visitors see? There's just one difference: they won't feature any Adobe Flash technology.
With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."
On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.
Today at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced several initiatives designed to cement their company's relevance in a world where Apple, one of the top smartphone players, has banned Adobe software from inclusion on all mobile devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-launch iPad. Without Adobe's Flash runtime, thousands of websites don't work, streaming videos won't play and a number of online casual games are broken. Apple, of course, is fine with this, having worked around the issue thanks to the 150,000+ iPhone applications that deliver the same functionality...although sometimes for a fee.
Adobe, meanwhile, is focusing on the other up-and-coming smartphone platform, Google's Android OS, with the launch of their "AIR for Android" offering. With this and the newly announced Flash Player 10.1, wannabe mobile developers don't need to learn specialized code, but can instead leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and AIR-based applications. They can then have those apps run anywhere: PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile...including, surprisingly, the iPhone.
