iPad 2 - Flash

With the release of the original iPhone, then the iPod Touch, each subsequent hardware and software revision of each, and now with the iPad, there has come a growing chorus of complainants who bemoan the lack of Flash support on Apple's multi-touch platform. And as this groups cries grow louder, the erstwhile defendants of Apple's platform decisions dig in deeper and deeper, entrenching themselves for the battle to end all battles. If the blogosphere is any indication, this is a huge and polarizing issue, and if modern-day politics are any issue, we all have to take sides, and for whatever side one takes, one can not give an inch.

As such, I am now going public with my stance: the iP{hone,od,ad} never has, does not and never will need Flash support. Further, anyone who feels that Apple will fail without it is clearly a Communist Nazi terrorist who doesn't return library books on time.

Joking aside, I am casting my hat in with Gruber et al, and suggesting that the absence of Flash is really not a huge deal for any of these platforms.

Flash has a great legacy: at the very least, we can thank it for getting the great majority of Java applets that were all the craze in the mid-to-late '90s off of our web pages. While those applets still have a place, they mostly felt tacked on, stuck into the web pages in which they were embedded, they took too much processing power, and they were often buggy. So long, dancing Star Trek Federation Insignia, we hardly new ye.

And for all the great points regarding Flash support made on both sides of the argument, I think that the key for me is that the bar has been raised with regards to seamless web experiences, and many Flash apps are what embedded Java applets were just a few years ago. They feel tacked on. They interrupt the flow of the page. Unless the app itself is the reason you're going to a page, finding Flash running--i.e. in an advertisement or a movie that auto-starts without the viewer requesting that it do so--is an annoyance and it has an adverse effect on the overall experience.

And just like Java applets went the way of the dinosaurs when Flash became the prevalent plug-in technology, the bell is tolling for Flash because HTML5 is on the way, and there's very little you can't do using HTML5 and Javascript with modern CSS transforms and animations, and built-in support for video. Sites all over the web are demonstrating the possibilities, with YouTube leading the way with their HTML5 version of the site that doesn't make my laptop's fan kick in.

There are lots of solutions to the problem. Maybe Adobe should open-source the technology and hope that the Mozilla, WebKit (Safari and Chrome) and Gecko (IE8+) frameworks adopt it, thus allowing them to leverage their position as a premier provider of content creation tools. I'm not sure if this is the best idea in the world, but it's a darn sight better than digging in and trying to hold onto a market position that is clearly slipping away.