Computerworld is running a story by JR Raphael entitled Why the Apple crowd's completely wrong about Flash about his experience with Android and Flash Player 10.1. I love this quote: After installing Adobe's Flash Player onto my Android phone, the first thing I noticed was that I could suddenly access the entire Web. Enough said!
Computerworld: Why The Apple Crowd's Completely Wrong About Flash
7 Comments
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dave
Flash is dead Ben, get on to building some HTML5 tools.
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anon
As long as there exists the phrase "best viewed in" on the web (and that phrase seems to be on a dramatic rise lately), and as long as it can find its way to the majority of screens (and with Android taking off on mobile that will once again be the case), and as long as Actionscript remains a saner implementation of ECMA than Javascript (which it continues to be), then Flash will not die.
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Matt W
Ha! Commenter dave above must not have read the article. The sentence after the one Ben quoted is this:
"Say what you want about how Flash is dead, how better technologies exist, whatever -- the fact remains that a lot of Web sites utilize it, and not having access to it restricts what you can do."
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Andrew Pritchard
Why do people who do not use Adobe's products read Ben's blog?
P
Really a good article, the part I like in that blog was:
That brings us to the most important point about Flash support on a smartphone: It's an option. If I don't want to use it, I don't have to. I could opt to never activate the Flash content on the pages I'm browsing, or I could opt to uninstall Adobe's Flash Player altogether if I so desired. But I have that choice. It's my phone, and it's my decision.
T
That article makes some great points. The strongest point in favor of Flash on a SmartPhone is when he talks about configuring Flash to not load Flash movies unless the user wants them loaded (On-Demand Loading). That is a great feature, but correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it true that only the very latest version of Flash has that option? If that is true, then Steve Jobs and Apple only had the "Bad Old Way" to test Flash and make their comments, which loaded EVERY Flash element on every page.
Also, the author clearly states that you have to go "Configure" your Flash to do that "On-Demand" Flash loading -- it is not the default option. If that is also true, I think Adobe should consider making it the default (mainly because most people never look at their settings, nor would they assume that was even an option).
J
Andrew -- Maybe because [Despite so much of his content lately being about Apple/Flash] Ben's a Coldfusion guru and his blog is read by Coldfusion people, not necessarily people who are adoring fans of Flash, or even Adobe in general.
I still think this whole thing is just Jobs getting back at Adobe for all the crap that went down when OSX came out and Adobe dithered about porting photoshop to it.