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Flash Plug-in For iPhone Coming Soon?

Adobe Confirmation of Flash

A friend of mine works in the FLASH unit of Adobe and has since it was Macromedia. He told me the other night (while playing with my new iPhone) that Apple is putting a lot pressure on Adobe to build a flash plug-in for the iPhone and that Adobe should have something out soon.

Evidently Apple would not give Adobe an early release of the iPhone to get a jump start on it, but he said their lab was getting one this week after the 4th holiday.
 
Macrumors said:


Walt Mossberg answers a number of common iPhone questions but also suggests that a Flash plug-in will be coming soon from Apple.



Adobe's Flash plug-in is required to play Flash content which is commonly used in certain aspects of web design and web-hosted videos. Apple managed to get around this requirement with Youtube by converting Youtube content into h.264, which the iPhone supports natively.

Article Link
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I think the edge network is much more of a concern with flash than the iphone's hardware. The transfer speeed is so slow that it would take forever to download a decent flash stream.
 
neven said:
I understand that Flash is big on the web, but I'd like to hear some examples of major websites whose core functionality depends on Flash. I'm a user of above-average technical knowledge and I haven't run into a website yet on my iPhone where the lack of Flash was a problem. I'm not saying they're not out there, I'm just asking for some examples.
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Weather.com. You can't view the map in motion screen without Flash. I use this feature all the time at home and would come in very handy on my iPhone.
 
I hope they release a software upgrade soon because my iPhone has crashed a number of times. I'm happy to hear about these important software additions, and can list about 100 I'd like to see -- starting w/VoIP -- but the software's a bit buggy. All is part of being an early adopter I suppose -- but we have to be treated right, as we're paying $100 more to be the guinea pigs for Apple
 
Perhaps by releasing a flash plugin so soon after Apple release the iPhone is a marketing ploy. By missing out flash, some people started to see the value of it, and then by releasing a flash plugin NOW, people will maybe be impressed about this "new feature". Also, it would perhaps make Apple look like a company that listens to complaints and then does something about it.

Just speculation :p, who knows
 
fishkorp said:
i call it a real browser. i block all flash in firefox and don't notice a difference on a single site i go to.
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Perhaps *YOUR* school of sites, and *YOUR* personal choice. But for most 98% of us, without flash it ain't the *REAL INTERNET*.

w00master
 
Flash is a 42nd Street of yore revisited.

Along with Flash video support, Flash brings to the iPhone everything that is wrong with the internet. I'm so tired of going to a mainstream website only to have commercials and "flashing" ads distracting me. Not to mention things that fly across the screen for no apparent reason.

I say, keep flash off the iPHone. It's the the creepy hawkers who used to stand outside strip clubs trying to entice customers inside. Tacky and tasteless. Let's hope that it never happens.
 
Rojo said:
While cool, it seems odd they would suddenly do this. Apple seemed adamant that Flash was a drain on battery life, and they went out of their way to get YouTube to recode all their videos to not be Flash.

So why suddenly add Flash now? Why not have it there all along?
Something doesn't seem right with this rumor -- unless they're just caving in to all the complaints of the iPhone not supporting Flash. But Apple doesn't seem like the kind of company to cave in...
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They maybe caving in to Universal if they don't sign the contract soon.
 
Dofus comes to mind

dicklacara said:
I hope that Apple and Adobe work together to implement an efficient Safari/Flash plugin tailored to the iPhone... it would be to the advantage of both...

I did some measurements, a while back, and the Flash plugin for Safari sucked from a performance standpoint-- often using over 10% CPU while doing nothing, and in the 60% CPU range doing simple tasks (on an iMac G5 2.1 GHz).

It was so bad that I suggested that they (then MacroMedia) change their Flash promotional from "Rich and Reach" to "Rich, Reach and Retch":)
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Im fine either way, flash is not that important to me. However flash does offer the oportunity to play Dofus on the phone and that would be a plus for me, Hehe.
 
Yankees 4 Life said:
unless they are able to make the iphone data transfer over to the computer, which currently on my macbook, i cant, then it aint happenin. Plus, the wireless system could kill your battery life.
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Mmmm... If you take photos with the iPhone camera, the next time you plug the iPhone into your computer, the iPhone is treated like a camera by iPhoto-- you can crossload the iPhone photos to iPhoto (where, they, in turn, can be synched to the iPhone).

If Apple were to allow ITMS downloads to the iPhone, i don't think it would be too difficult to synch them with iTunes on your computer.

Personally, i would seldom download directly to the iPhone...
rather I would like to browse the ITMS from the iphone and order (songs/TV/eBooks/Movies) that get downloaded to iTunes on a computer at home. Later these could be synched to the iPhone.

In fact, it would not be too difficult to run a server from your home computer-- running an app that would let you to browse your home iTunes library and play them directly to your iPhone over WiFi.

Aside: Since I got my iPhone, I can no longer type on a regular (computer) keyboard... Anyone else notice this??
 
Certainly many tech savvy people could do without Flash ads, but advertisers, Goolge, etc. Would sure appreciate it if their adds showed up. And Apple does have a strong tie to google. And ads are a source of revenue for sites.

As far as pop-ups, doesn't the iPhone version of safari block pop-ups? It's always been a set it and forget it option for me, haven't seen a pop-up in years. Can't say I've ever noticed a performance difference with Flash/Non Flash sites. It's primarily a vector format with small file sizes.
 
psp

dr_lha said:
Unless Apple themselves are working on a super optimised version of Flash for the iPhone I doubt it. Full Flash is pretty bad at eating CPU cycles, especially if your CPU is <1Ghz.
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How does the psp do? it handles flash doesnt it?
 
Fwink! said:
Wait, so it was a better plan to get YouTube to re-encode it's whole library, than for Apple to get a flash plug-in working in the first place?

I will venture a guess that this is mostly to enable small beans developers to get into the game. Flash is a lot easier to work with than WEB 2.0. Especially for simple games and such.
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They didnt encode their whole library. My friend asked me to pull up a youtube video that was posted months ago and the iphone could not find it using the youtube button. However, when I went to youtube.com, the video was easily found, but of course not playable.

If youtube offered a streaming download for every video like google videos does then you could watch them using the iPhone's native movie player. If you go to google video, find a video you want to watch (not many of them) and then choose download in ipod format, the video will start to play.
 
I hope Apple come out with their own 'flash killer' , like microsoft has with flashlight. Not to actually kill flash, but to provide some sort of dumbed down way of writing powerfull app's that run in a sandbox and on osx.
I know, I know, they keep harping on about Web 2, but it doesn't cut it IMO. It's a loose collection of technologies with no decent WYSIWYG timeline based way of programing them (that I'm aware of?). It just seems like a quick bridge to something they have up their sleeve which we wont see until leopard is out.
Flash has never been optimized very well for the mac, and i doubt they (Adobe) are gonna start now the iPhone is out. It's an area I feel Apple need to take control of themselves.
Xcode lite!
I dont know much about it but I'm hoping Core Animation has a role to play in this somewhere?? From what i have read it certainly sounds like it is setting the foundations for this to become reality.
 
As far as I know, AJAX is here to provide for a rich client, lots of developers are looking into it. I could be wrong, but AJAX may take over some of the flash usage.

I hardly ever go to sites that use flash with my computer or phone. I would not miss it either way.

I would instead prefer they work on the big issues like:
1) Get a GPS chip in there and integrate it with the apps. Off most of the time to conserve battery.
2) Add video to the camera
3) Turn the camera around so people can do video ichat (porn industry would love this one)
4) Make more applications take advantage of the horizontal and let me use horizontal keyboard.
5) Support multiple calendars / todo lists
6) Drag and drop for images and other info from one app to another or background or implement a "send to application".
7) Bonjour support for printing and connecting to file shares.
8) Remote control to access my computers at home
9) SSH/SCP for those not supporting remote control or for something quick and dirty.
 
veneficuss said:
They didnt encode their whole library. My friend asked me to pull up a youtube video that was posted months ago and the iphone could not find it using the youtube button. However, when I went to youtube.com, the video was easily found, but of course not playable.

If youtube offered a streaming download for every video like google videos does then you could watch them using the iPhone's native movie player. If you go to google video, find a video you want to watch (not many of them) and then choose download in ipod format, the video will start to play.
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Apple and YouTube long-ago announced the full library conversion would be complete by this fall. This was announced in regards to the AppleTV, but has the same impact on the iPhone.

Ah, here's the PR:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/20youtube.html

I think a lot of this is due to the Google buyout of YouTube. Google is rather open to multiple formats.
 
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