Flash Comes To the iPhone Via App 182
An anonymous reader writes "While the HTML5 and Flash standard debate rages, Apple, a major promoter of HTML5, has allowed its iOS devices to run Flash videos. Apple has given approval to an app developed by Skyfire that translates Flash code into HTML5. According to CNN, when a user clicks on a Flash video the Skyfire app downloads the Flash video on Skyfire's server where the video is decoded and then encoded in HTML5 and is delivered to an iOS device. The app is embedded in the Safari browser."
This came in to be from one of 2 ways: (Score:4, Insightful)
OR
Steve Jobs now likes flash, or finally realized that most of the internet does indeed use flash, and has succumbed to the reality of reality.
Re:Flash *video* comes to iPhone (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you not seen the really annoying spate of web sites that use Flash for site navigation?
Fuck, I hate flash -- mostly it's a cue that the site is a piece of shit that I don't want to use. I've yet to encounter a single Flash-based website I cared enough to use.
And don't whine to me about your damned badgers ... we don' need no steenkin' badgers.
Name one (Score:3, Insightful)
Odd that you should say that, because the only flash site I ever use is youtube. So, what flash do I absolutly need yet that I am not aware off?
Here is a hint, promo-sites for games/movies etc I do NOT need.
What amazes me is that so many people claim that Apple has made a mistake and that people NEED flash, they MUST have flash, yet the iPhone and iPad sell like... well like an iPhone/iPad... they sold MILLIONS. Apple with 1 phone is among the biggest phone makers. Yet apparently all these people are buying the wrong phone because their flash needs are not being met... poor suckers... that is why I see so many iPhone users fuming everytime they use their iPhone! "DAMN", they say, "STILL no flash! This sucks! I am going to return it and NEVER BUY another one!"
This explains why the next generation iPhones completely failed to sell... oh wait NO THEY DIDN'T.
Your needs do not seem to be the same as million of iPhone/iPod/iPad users. To bad. Don't buy an iPhone, buy a Windows 7 phone. Be happy.
Re:Flash *video* comes to iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to access those sites or not is a pretty big deal if your out and about and need to look up information on a nearby business.
If your business site requires Flash to view (specifically, the "no Flash==blank page" type), you're not getting my business whether I'm "out and about" with my iPhone or sitting in front of my quad-core desktop. It's not 2002, go back to web design school.
Games and video; any other uses of Flash I've seen have been pathetic attempts at custom UI that suffer from usability problems and general annoyance.
Re:Name one (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't agree more. I haven't found a single instance in 3 years for requiring flash. It is only now gaining support on Android, which is funny in itself. Folks slamming Apple when it wasn't even out of beta for Android.
There is simply no need, as any site worthy of a mobile device, offers a mobile version, which never uses flash.
Re:Flash *video* comes to iPhone (Score:4, Insightful)
Sound Manager also works with HTML5.
sounds that represent interactions with the UI can do wonders for the user experience and intuitiveness.
Really? I tend to just find them hella annoying these days. Back when I was 8 I loved playing through the silly sound effects in the Mac OS control panel, but in OSes since then I enjoy listening to my media collection rather than all the beeps, clicks and whooshes.
Re:Steve Jobs Warned Us About This Horror! (Score:2, Insightful)
...And yet I still knew what they meant. (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard of any kind of journalism is explaining things in a manner in which your audience will understand it. Laypeople--and in the technical community that is Slashdot, I am referring to geeks who don't necessarily know or care about all of the technical intricacies of video codecs--see the headline and think, "Oh, a way for me to watch video I couldn't before on my iPhone!" Bingo.
Most people like myself probably thought, "technically, that's not what it's doing; it's probably transcoding something written in Adobe's proprietary Flash format into something that only uses standards in the provisional specification of HTML 5, likely by extracting the H.264 video and re-wrapping it into HTML 5 standard-compliant tags." Most of those people probably also thought, "...but I know what they mean. It's a way for people to watch video they couldn't before on their iPhones." Again, bingo.
Now, I'm really sorry if you were so confused, thinking that the line was being literal and expecting there to be some kind of, I don't know, web alchemy at work, but I assure you that you were in an extreme sliver of a minority. Most people "got it," and as such, I think it passes muster as far as technical journalism goes. If it really bothers you that much, how about considering reading the f****** article, looking for technical details and/or references that you can research yourself?
Incidentally, the submitter pulled that description directly from the article, which appears in International Business Times, not exactly a bastion of "technical journalism." If you want to whine about technicalia, how about writing to the editor there instead of here? Let me guess, is it because you're too busy explaining somewhere else that since there's no modulation/demodulation over digital channels, everyone should stop calling those boxes you plug the coax into "cable modems?" Or are you too bothered by people calling 2010 the start of a new decade instead of the end of an old one? Or how about those idiots who talk about the "dark side of the moon," the side that receives just as much light as the other side? Do you make such a fuss when someone comments on how hot the "middle of summer" is, when in reality, average temperatures are highest around the solstice, which is the beginning of summer?
Oh, right, I know why. Because here, you get modded +5 Informative, whereas in normal society, you'd just get called out as the tool you are. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to the bank to get some money out of the ATM machine using my PIN number.