.swf Files on iPhone

Now...NO. No FLASH for You! Sorry, horrible soup experience flash back...no pun intended. A few rumors and good sources have sited Flash support is coming. When...go to the apple feedback link...

If you're developing for the iPhone, then you should check this page.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/designingcontent.html

It's mentioned in several places to avoid Flash when developing for the iPhone and stick to web standards. The way things are currently being handled is putting all the computation on the server side and displaying the interface on the phone.

There has been a lot of questions regarding playing flash within the safari browser. Although it's not supported yet, it should be mentioned that the youtube app can play flash media on the iPhone so theoretically you could upload whatever presentation/animation onto youtube in order for fellow iPhone users to watch. Unfortunately though, the youtube app does not launch automatically when a youtube link is selected within the safari browser. This would be a simple upgrade that would be quite useful for the browsing experience.

The youtube app does NOT play .swf files. They are basically Quicktime files.


"YouTube is in the process of encoding videos using H.264, the advanced video codec built into QuickTime 7 that enables higher-quality video to be streamed over the Internet at lower bit rates. The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use those H.264-encoded videos, according to Apple. More than 10,000 videos are expected to be available in H.264 format on June 29th; YouTube will be adding more each week, and the company will have its full catalog available in H.264 by this fall."

Quoted from http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133185-page,1/article.html




Mac OS X (10.4.10)

quote: "it's mentioned in several places to avoid Flash when developing for the iPhone and stick to web standards. "
Just FYI - Flash is web standard! It's easy to develop and it functions the same on many browsers across three platforms - Mac ,Windows and Linux. Oh, and it's rarely make Safari crash unlike Ajax style web sites.
And the widgets for iPhone do lot's of computations on the client side. Those that don't are unusable.

While Flash may be have received wide acceptance by users as a "de-facto" standard, it is NOT a part of the accepted standards for web use.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/
http://www.whatwg.org/

If you search, you'll find that there are ways Flash can be used within the standard (ie, simple non-interactive animations, like .gif's). To develop web apps using it, although Adobe would LOVE it to be, is not adhering to the standard.