

Adobe flash's official blog on ipad - prat
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/building_ipad_apps.html

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lurch_mojoff
So in short, Adobe have capitulated trying to push the Flash plugin on the
iPhone platform, and instead have decided to at least take a sliver of the
application authoring tools market. Surprisingly smart move for them.

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maukdaddy
Am I the only one that's happy with no flash on the iPhone or iPad? After
seeing what flash does to the CPU of both Macs and PCs, I definitely don't
want flash running on any mobile device. Also, my AT&T "3G" connection is slow
enough that loading extra flash would make page loading times even worse.

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9oliYQjP
I am not a Flash developer. But with the exception of this past year, I've
gone to Flash in the Can conferences and loved viewing what the Flash
community has developed. There are some really beautiful works of art, proofs
of concept, games, and even user interfaces developed in Flash.

That said, the only true mass market commercial successes involving Flash are
solutions for which equivalent alternatives exist or are very very close to
existing. HTML5 solves the video dilemma that Flash was a nice, elegant
solution for. In 2004 we were stuck in the quagmire of "Click here for
QuickTime, here for Windows Media, or here for RealPlayer". It had a nice 5
year run but now an alternative exists.

IMHO, Flex is Adobe's last stand. Until recently AJAX user interfaces have
been a complete pain to deal with. For the record, I prefer the HTML/CSS/JS
approach, but implementing an interface using any of the existing frameworks
save for SproutCore or Cappucino is a completely different experience to what
Flash/Flex developers are used to. Once frameworks like SproutCore and
Cappucino truly get mass market acceptance in the developer community (e.g.,
probably in 5 years time when MS comes full circle with ASP.NET implementing a
sane implementation of web forms only using the MVC approach) I think Flash
will die.

Apple is correct in the same way they were correct about the death of the
floppy disk. They're about 5-7 years ahead of the competition and until then
you'll have people complaining about the lack of Flash just the same way you
had folks complaining that an iMac didn't ship with a floppy drive in the year
2001 (long after Apple ditched it and long after they were appropriate for
sharing files).

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Arubis
It's beautifully ironic that the biggest push against a proprietary de facto
Web standard is coming from a system so proprietary that it can't be forced to
support said web standard.

That said, I'm firmly in the camp of those who'd like to watch Flash wither at
the vine.

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ptomato
Personally I'm fairly certain not having flash on the iPad will hurt flash
usage far more then it hurts iPad sales, and I'm very happy about that.

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danudey
I posted a comment to the blog this morning, suggesting that many users don't
want Flash because of its poor performance on non-Windows platforms, and
mediocre performance on Windows. Unsurprisingly, the comment wasn't approved.

Still, I stand by what I said: show us a Mac Flash plugin that doesn't use
ridiculous amounts of CPU, that doesn't drain my laptop's battery or peg a
core at 100% just to show a few ads on the page. Show me something that
doesn't require browser vendors to work around just to prevent browser
crashes, and then maybe, MAYBE, I'll consider Flash on the iPad a good idea.

How Adobe can continue to do such a half-assed job with the Flash player on
Mac and Linux, and then act all surprised and indignant when Apple shuts them
down, I'll never understand.

Oh, and as for their native app generation – they can compile Flash apps to
native code that doesn't run well except on the iPhone 3GS. If they can't make
native iPhone apps that are fast enough to use, what makes anyone think they
can make a flash plugin that is?

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poppysan
I would love to put out a "ipad" like device that is completely flash based.
The flash haters would hate it, but the many dev's can easily bring their apps
to the device, as well as offer the ability to play thousands of already
created games for free, watch millions of videos, and work with the hundreds
of flash based web apps.

I'd buy it!

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wtallis
The only way such a device could profit in the market would be if it's version
of Flash fixed all the performance and battery life problems that are keeping
Flash off Apple's mobile devices. If the performance still sucked, then the
device could only remain on the market if it was being sold at a loss, which
could lead to anti-trust problems for Adobe (forcing their way into the mobile
space the same way Microsoft forced their way into the video game console
market). If the performance was fixed, then it seems to me that it would be in
Adobe's best interest to try to get it on to Apple's mobile devices ASAP lest
more open alternatives like HTML5 actually start to catch on.

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arethuza
I guess as these applications won't be run embedded in a browser that the Flex
code won't be able to interactive with JavaScript - which is a shame. It looks
like I will have to use HTML 5 Canvas to get OpenShapes
(<http://shap.es/docs>) to work on this platform.

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danudey
If the iPad makes developers stop using Flash, I'll pay any price Steve Jobs
asks.

