Adobe Flash Blog on iPad/iPhone — Bad for Games, TV, News… and Porn!

posted on Jan 29 by admin in the Firmware Version 3.0 category

TheFlashBlog’s Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe “focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities” has put up a series of iPad mockups highlighting a wide range of web sites all showing the blue lego brick of Flash plugin fail — and they feature the range of games like Farmville, news sites like CNN, TV sites like Hulu, and online porn like… well, you get the idea.

In all fairness porn is underplayed compared to the rest, but that it’s played at all by someone from Adobe is — forgive us — a ballsy move. Of course easy to access, free, online porn is a major reason a certain segment is upset there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPad. Regardless of your personal feelings one way or another about it, porn is historically a huge early adapter of technology, including VHS, DVD, online video — now increasingly Flash-based — and even the iPhone via Jailbreak and web apps.

Brimelow is using the visuals, mainstream and adult alike, to point out how ubiquitous Flash is on the ‘net, and how Apple shouldn’t be calling the iPad (and previously the iPhone), the ultimate browsing experience” when it doesn’t include Flash.

That’s a valid point, and one Adobe’s Photoshop Product Manager John Nack addresses candidly and, in our opinion more convincingly, on his own blog. He made me rethink some preconceptions, so it’s well worth a read.

But Apple isn’t aiming the iPhone or iPad at the web, or computing, as it is today. They’re attempting to reframe their mobile devices as appliances for tomorrow. Yesterday’s web was all about Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft’s proprietary ActiveX platform. Today is about Flash. We’ve moved passed IE6 and ActiveX, and Apple is betting we’re moving past Flash as well.

The porn industry, interestingly, will likely be one of the early indicators on whether that ends up being true or not. Along with sites like Hulu, Brimelow’s post might just end up being less an inditement of Apple today, but a checkbox for HTML5 conversion tomorrow.

As to gaming, Gruber’s right. How would Flash games written for a mouse and keyboard on an iPad — or iPhone — anyway? They’d need to convert them for multitouch and fingers anyway, and then why not make an app that fully leverages the hardware?

[Via Daring Fireball]

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Adobe Flash Blog on iPad/iPhone — Bad for Games, TV, News… and Porn!