my guess is that adobe thinks that if they can convince everybody that flash on the iphone is a fait accompli, then apple will be forced to allow it.
reading between the lines, i think apple's objection to flash is more philosophical than technical. it's going to take more than this sort of PR stunt to make it happen.
Not technical? Flash is a piece of junk that leaks memory, crashes and causes your cpu to spike (less battery life). How is this a good thing on a iPhone?
My impression is that Flash is pretty good (technically) on Windows, it's a CPU hog on Macs, and somewhat crashy on Linux. Still, it could be worse. Think RealVideo.
But that's kind of beside the point. I'm guessing that Apple's real objection to Flash on the iPhone is that they don't want Adobe to be in charge of something that important. Apple likes to be in control of their own destiny, and they're one of the few companies with the clout to get away with something like that.
iPhone is a whole new platform, in a sense. If Apple keeps Flash off of it for long enough, the developer community might make do with alternatives -- javascript, quicktime, etc -- so that Adobe's stranglehold on web media doesn't carry over to the newly burgeoning iPhone world.
I'm guessing Adobe is all too aware of this possibility, which is why they're lobbying so hard to get in there and assert their dominance.
If Adobe had bothered making a reasonable Flash player for the Mac, Apple would have a much weaker public case for not including it on the iPhone. But Adobe's long neglect of the Mac is now returning to bite them.
But that's kind of beside the point. I'm guessing that Apple's real objection to Flash on the iPhone is that they don't want Adobe to be in charge of something that important. Apple likes to be in control of their own destiny, and they're one of the few companies with the clout to get away with something like that.
I think it's something similar, but slightly different: that Apple doesn't want any code running on your iPhone that didn't go through the App Store.
But Apple does have philosophical objections to flash on iPhone. i.e. you can use it to run apps without going via the apple app store.
You might think "how much of an app will that be? it will be a flood of crapware". But then take a look at what people are willing to pay Apple $5 for.
Ok, a couple more: If everybody that does their very best to do the stuff they do today in flash would seriously try their hand at JavaScript the need for flash would be relegated to very few sites. And it wouldn't hurt to have browsers support H.263/H.264 natively either.
If Javascript/HTML/CSS had the cross-browser support for scripting, display, formatting, etc that Flash/Flex does, I'm sure more people would consider it a serious option.
There are many things that can be done in Flex that are impossible or extremely hard and fiddly in Javascript (and I'm not talking about animations, but about user workflow tasks like uploading a bunch of files). There are many other things that can easily be done in HTML/CSS/JS but don't quite work across all major browsers. That last 1% really kills you by taking a huge chunk of time to fix.
Flex interfaces, on the other hand, work exactly the same no matter what browser you're using. Many of our clients are still stuck on IE6 because of corporate policies. Trying to reproduce our interface in Javascript would be very hard and wouldn't work properly for most of them.
To paraphrase you, if Javascript had more of the capabilities of Flash maybe Flash wouldn't be needed.
On the one hand it provides Flash with a big advantage over silverlight, and Flash has _much_ better support for:
- End users not on Windows.
- Programmatic generation without a Windows back end.
But it also makes pure JavaScript less attractive, and that is one of the things that offers /real/ vendor politics free interoperability for rich web apps in the future.
Every time I read 'iPhone' I get a reflexive reaction to a closed, evil gatekeeper keeping me from doing what I want to on the plaform, and projected that onto Adobe. My bad.
adobe has opened up a little bit. enough to convince a casual observer that swf is an open format. but it's not.
for example, the open source flex sdk can't be used to create flash apps with gui controls. for that, you need adobe flash cs4. they haven't opened up the fla format, which means that nobody can create a product that competes with adobe flash cs4. so it's not very open at all.
