bigsinky

Was out with mum yesterday and she bought on spec an iPad 16GB. £439 in the carphone huerhouse. Have to say it's very slick. I am online as I type here. I have read online that flash will not be available and even adobe state on their website that limitations placed by apple make her iPad incompatible with the software.

So my question is, you being a apple supporter, when if at all can you see flash being available on an un jail broken iPad or iPhone? Are apple not under pressure from android to make their hardware compatible. Steve jobs says flash is too buggy to be used on iOS, but how bad can it be

JackClark

I very much doubt that flash will ever reach a iOS device, Adobe can't even make it work on the Macintosh and they've had years to get that right.

Games are covered by the extensive library of apps and video is covered by HTML5, that just leaves adverts and Adobe can keep them. Flash is a closed proprietary system, Fanboys bleat on about Apple products being closed and proprietary, but then bleat on about wanting Flash! The mind boggles.

Is there something in particular your mother would like to be able to use?

Ant

Skyfire browser will do flash

bigsinky

streaming media via bbc website i.e radio 4

Ant

You want wunderadio or tunein radio that'll do it

JackClark

Perfect timing, the BBC iPad app has just been released and I believe it plays live radio as well as TV.

bigsinky

eggcellent will get her to download it tonight

IWatkins

Flash does actually work on Macs, I do it every day as part of my job. And even though Jack thinks it is just adverts and games that need Flash, you will find that actually there are plenty of "proper" applications out there that use Flash as their runtime. Regardless of what Jack thinks, HTML5 does not currently do 25% of what Flash can.

It is a shame that Flash in the browser on IOS devices probably won't ever happen. That is just down to view of Apple and wanting to keep control of the "user experience" (read: make money). Fair enough, up to them.

But on the plus side and contrary to what Jack thinks, there are already plenty of Flash applications available via the AppStore for IOS devices. They are written in Flash then packaged up for IOS devices using the Adobe AIR runtime. Performance is comparable to normal IOS apps and have full access to all the devices features.

This means a developer can write an application to run in a web browser (using Flash Player as the runtime) on a PC, a Mac and an Android device. And also for a PC, a Mac, an Android device and an IOS device as a packaged application (using AIR), all from a common source code base.

Cheers

Ian

JackClark

Flash is awful on Mac's, if ever Safari crashes you can be sure it's Flash related. I block it and only turn it on out of curiosity, every time it's a bloody advert that's lured me in.

Ian, what can flash do that can't be done without it? Nothing I suspect, in which case why bother. And your statement that Apple only refuses Flash in order to make money is way off the mark, to remain in control maybe.

Markus

< Fanboi Alert! >
Prior to a while ago, when Adobe released a beta of some updated flash plugin for OS X, you could easily get your mac to max out it processor on a flash site, a good example being the Diablo3 site. You'd go there and as soon as the page loaded, Safari's processor usage would spike and it was directly attributable to flash. This was with me watching and one of my developer friends having a poke about to verify what was slowing down Safari.

Post installing the beta, the performance was somewhat better, so progress is being made.

The iPhone / iPad lacking flash support is because of the above post beta player / plugin thing. It would kill performance and more importantly battery life of the phone.