Adobe flash player

Chris CA wrote:
Why hasn't Adobe approached Apple with a viable working version of Flash for iOS to try and convince them it can work?

Again, I'm not trying to defend Adobe here. I'm neutral on all this really. I just know that certain things are unavoidable in certain industries. For example, as a Web designer, I'd be happy to never have to design around IE's weaknesses, but I don't have that luxury.

Thanks,
Matthew

Hmm, I think you need to spend less time trolling for Adobe and more time learning math. If Flash was such a big deal, Apple would not be selling millions and millions of iPads so I would say that the majority of people are fine without Flash.

I'm not either, but I guess we'll get to spend the next 2 years seeing how this plays out. But your analogy only works for the iPad, the iPhone has been out since 2007 and has never had Flash but other competing phones have, yet they sell out of iPhones the minute they hit the market.

So Apple has been "avoiding" Flash for going on 5 years and has made a lot of money during that period and sold 165 million or so iOS devices.

deggie,
Good points. The success of the iPhone is beyond doubt.

However, I do think the game for the iPad may be changing -- maybe. Who knows, two years from now Flash itself may be phased out. I don't believe that will be the case, as I know that Adobe is developing it further and Web designers are using it in more creative ways.

Anyway, I just wanted to add my voice to the discussion and say that I think it would be the best for us all if Flash was an option on the iPad.

Thanks,
Matt

mattschenker wrote:
Hello,
As a Web designer, I was supportive when Apple first announced that the iPad and other iOS devices would not allow Flash. Like Mr. Jobs, I believed that HTML5 would perhaps be a worthy replacement.

But in the past few months, I've started to feel differently, for the following reasons....

@ *HTML5 cannot fully replace Flash*. Yes, there will be some overlap. But even at its best, HTML5 cannot be a full replacement for everything Flash does.

@ *Having greater options enriches the Web*. Some designers want to use HTML5 and some want to use Flash. Some want to use both. To limit all iOS devices to non-flash development means that iOS devices are by nature going to be limited. This seems to run counter to the whole idea behind iOS devices.

@ *Dictating limits*. It should not be up to Apple to decide what is and is not allowed to display on my iPad browser. I totally understand Apple disallowing Flash in the App Store. But when I open Safari and Flash-based pages don't work, it's starting to feel like my device is crippled. If Apple is going to push the iPad as a mini-computer, it's a bad idea to dictate such built-in limitations.

@ *Competing devices will have Flash*. This year, we're likely to see the Android market ramp up and show signs of being a real competitor to the iPad. They will allow Flash. That's likely to be advantage for them over the iPad.

Apple should reconsider its position regarding Flash.

Thanks,
Matt

Matt,

It's rather silly to be debating whether Apple iOS should have flash or not. The answer is, probably not because most of what it can be done with flash could be accomplished with apps. For video streaming, we have Air Video and others that are obvious!

While the iPhone is a screaming success mainly due to its excellent user interface and apps store; though the Android phones are catching up, it is really not an ideal device for flash. The screen is too small for making any impact. The iPad, however, is a different story all together. It has a bigger screen. The competition knows this. This device is ideal for multimedia consumption and high bandwidth usage. Not being able to play flash is a downside, but this can be mitigated by BUYING an Android tablet if one so wishes to do so.

I am not sure why Tamara always brings up the $1200 Motorola Xoom? Why not the eLocity A7 priced between $299 and $349? Why not? This device, when installed with the latest Dexter Mod, is an extremely capable device, much more capable than what the current iPad can do. I bought this to do 3 things which I had to buy anyhow to do what I want.

I paid $299 for the A7, but really I paid almost nothing for it. Here's why..

It is an excellent Apple TV device replacement. With the HDMI port, it MIRRORS the main screen of the device so what you touch shows on the screen verbatim! Apple tries to do this with Air Play and Apple TV with limited success. I can do this hardwired and 1080p if movies are in that format. What is Apple TV 2 max resolution? I can stream anything from Netflix, Hulu, TVersity, Picasa, Flicker, MobileME photo gallery plus my clients' professional FLASH based web galleries with ease with a HDTV or a digital projector. Currently, there is NOTHING like this from Apple. That's $99 bucks. So now, my eLocity A7 is worth only $200.

But wait!

The eLocity A7 can ALSO serve as a portable WebDAV server in the absence of a WIFI or 3G service!
An equivalent product for the Apple iPad is the AirStash which is $99 again. But this baby can access a USB flash drive, card drive and microSDHC card, which makes it available to my iPad for saving, loading and sharing. Do you know what that means to Numbers, Pages and Keynote? It means, I can just simply load up my files through my eLocity and serve it to the iPad without going through iTunes or my Synology server! And it works bloody fast. Plus I can give it to my clients the modified file or files on the SD card right on the spot.
Can you do that with a plain iPad. Not!

The camera connection kit sold by Apple is a total joke! Slow as molasses! The PNY Zoomit SD card reader which I bought and regretted as it too is slow to load files! If I knew the A7 can do this earlier, I would have skipped these products and go directly to wireless WebDAV. So now, my $200 valued A7 is less $99 again.

So, for about $100 US, I also get a capable flash player tablet which plays suprisingly well all the sites I put it through. Oh btw, with Pogoplug, I can print files easily on both iPad and eLocity A7 to my network printer, PLUS the eLocity A7 streams video files from the PogoPlug, which then acts like a Western Digital Media Player. Plays iMovie 11 created files just fine.

So in the end, the eLocity A7 is worth the price for all the devices I had to buy for the iPad anyhow.

With the eLocity A7, my iPad can truly be a laptop replacement with no flash worries plus the ability to load files from any SD, CF cards through an eLocity WebDAV server, plus be able to hook right up to a projector with its HDMI port and play my presentation.
I see both as complementing each other. It is sad for some people who are truly blind for what the Android platform can offer.

Message was edited by: Coolmax

It is an excellent Apple TV device replacement. With the HDMI port, it MIRRORS the main screen of the device so what you touch shows on the screen verbatim! Apple tries to do this with Air Video and Apple TV with limited success.

Perhaps you mean AirPlay? Air Video is a 3rd party app.
Apple did not "try" to make the iPad screen mirror on the AppleTV.
They have been doing it since the iPhone was first released.
There are apps which will mirror the iPad screen on a monitor.

Chris CA wrote:

It is an excellent Apple TV device replacement. With the HDMI port, it MIRRORS the main screen of the device so what you touch shows on the screen verbatim! Apple tries to do this with Air Video and Apple TV with limited success.

Perhaps you mean AirPlay? Air Video is a 3rd party app.
Apple did not "try" to make the iPad screen mirror on the AppleTV.
They have been doing it since the iPhone was first released.
There are apps which will mirror the iPad screen on a monitor.

Thank you Chris for the correction on AIrPlay. As far as I understand it, AirPlay streams selective content from iPad memory storage or from the web to the TV screen with limitations, being that it is wireless which has some lag time and it needs WIFI. Rather cumbersome if you are on the field and with foreign secured WIFI equipped with IDS, IPS systems which some corporations have. And you can only stream certain content; though I think it will change with iOS 4.3. There is no limitation and no content restriction for the Android platform eLocity A7. If it shows on the Android screen, it shows on the TV screen. All you need is a HDMI cable and that is cheap. Shall we say that I had been Apple experiment dud; buying the CCKit, VGA adapter and the PNY only to have to sell them except the PNY which is useful for my iPhone.

Message was edited by: Coolmax

Message was edited by: Coolmax

Coolmax wrote:
There is no limitation and no content restriction for the Android platform eLocity A7. If it shows on the Android screen, it shows on the TV screen. All you need is a HDMI cable and that is cheap. Shall we say that I had been Apple experiment dud; buying the CCKit, VGA adapter and the PNY only to have to sell them except the PNY which is useful for my iPhone.

We are lucky enough to live in a free market economy where consumers are able to benefit from healthy competition from other corporations. Apple has never been misleading regarding flash. They are very upfront with the fact it will not support it. Most of the population is also aware of this. If you think this eLocity is a better fit for you, you should absolutely go for it as opposed to the iPad.

-SM

People defending the iPad against Flash.... 4, I can even name them.... deggie, tamara, julian, chris.

Informing new iPad users that Flash does not exist for iOS devices and that it seems unlikely that it ever will, is not defending the iPad against Flash. It is called *stating the facts* - a concept you seem unfamiliar with.

99% of your 50 or so posts on this forum are repeating the same old rubbish and actually do *nothing at all* to change the situation, or help new users.

If an efficient, bug-free version of Flash did come to the iPad I wouldn't be against it. I may not use it much myself, but many people would and it would stop all these threads from people who buy iPads even though they don't have a specific feature they need (i.e. people like you).

What I mainly want Flash Player for at this point is for Scrabble on Facebook. Scabble and other similar word games need the Flash Player plug-in to fully display their game board and allow you to play. So ...I can get to the game but it won't load.

Sure ...I can fire up my laptop and play the game there - - but what's the point of having the Facebook App and then not allowing a user to take advantage of it's features.

Anybody out there in Apple land have a solution for this ??

Thanks in advance,

MJ

Totally agreed. Flash is a standard, why are Apple being such snobs about it?! Speaking as a developer myself, thousands and thousands of developers the world over went to university/college to get a degree and took years to learn to develop rich-media using Flash which is an absolutely, phenomonally brilliant tool, only to find that Apple couldn't care less.

In fact it seems that Jobs has a vendetta with Adobe for some reason - crazy considering that for all these years Adobe have produced the primary software used to create 90% of the worlds marketing from Apple Macs. Jobs should be bending over backwards to get Adobe Flash on their devices, least he could do is be grateful and go with Android, Windows and the other phone manufacturers who make their devices work with Flash as standard.

I think Apple should be slapped with an anti-competitive law suit just like Microsoft did for trying to exclude and control.

HTML5 will come and go just like many other coding languages. Flash has superseded and continues to remain a common strand across all developer platforms working independently (thank God!) to provide the most pervasive and well used rich-media platform. Hey, YouTube was built on it and was made famous by it!

C'mon Apple, get it together

Message was edited by: be.free

People will live with it for so long. Once they realise Apple do not offer it, it becomes a problem. Millions may be buying iPhones and iPads (including me), but HUNDREDS of millions of people work with and use Flash daily. Apple MUST break at some point. Go Android and Windows for supporting Flash!

be.free wrote:
In fact it seems that Jobs has a vendetta with Adobe for some reason - crazy considering that for all these years Adobe have produced the primary software used to create 90% of the worlds marketing from Apple Macs.

Please cite a source for this statistic.

Jobs should be bending over backwards to get Adobe Flash on their devices, least he could do is be grateful and go with Android, Windows and the other phone manufacturers who make their devices work with Flash as standard.

I think Apple should be slapped with an anti-competitive law suit just like Microsoft did for trying to exclude and control.

So, let me see if I understand your argument: Adobe has, by your reckoning a 90% market share and that's good. But Apple, which is in competition with phones with Android, RIM and Windows 7 OSs should be served with an anti-competitive law suit? Do I have that right?

And, the U.S. government lost most of those suits against Microsoft.

I represent 10s of thousands of graphic designers and web developers. There is simply no other software that does what Adobe does. Well there are, but they are far inferior products. Quite simply, there is a reason why Adobe products pervade our industry to produce brands, brochures, websites, TV ads... because they are KILLER products that nothing else has been able to touch. People vote with their wallets, my design agency would never buy anything else otherwise we would get left behind. It costs big bucks to create good products such as Adobe products, I'm afraid no-one else has produced the goods.

As for citation, the Design Business Association (DBA) is the only and primary business association for the creative industry of which the majority (and all the biggest creative agencies) belong. I have been a member of the DBA for many years - 100% of the member agencies use Adobe products as their primary mechanism for creating the marketing you see everywhere you look.

The fact that Apple have sidelined Adobe and Flash in this way means they are sidelining the entire creative industry! Absolute madness!