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."
Re:Flash *video* comes to iPhone (Score:4, Interesting)
There are millions of sites authored in Flash (ActionScript) that have nothing to do with video. In many cases, sites that really would work just dandy in normal HTML/CSS. But that doesn't make it a non-problem for end-users who simply want the full web on their smartphone. Before I had Flash on my Droid, I had to go to a PC browser to see Mini-Circuit's web site (they make RF components) or check-out on J.C. Penney's e-commerce site. Nothing whatsoever to do with video. And no more a battery drain or other issue than JavaScript.
The reason is simple: Adobe's authoring tools are very nice. They allow a content person to author the kind of site you'd need real programmers for in JavaScript.
This is how you know Apple wasn't serious about killing off Flash. If you wanted to get rid of Flash effectively, you don't target end users, you find out why people use it, and make them want to change. An authoring tool that does what Flash does, as well as Flash, in HTML4/5 + CSS + JavaScript, given away free, would solve this problem. And in fact, Adobe's tools are moving toward this anyway... they are going to support authoring in HTML5, some day (given HTML5 isn't quite really real until 2012 or so, there's time).
I'll believe it when (Score:3, Interesting)
the idea gets implemented as a PC browser plugin perfectly enabling the latest Youtube and flash games.
Who needs smartphones to just hate Adobe Flash's slowness?
Re:Steve Jobs Warned Us About This Horror! (Score:3, Interesting)
PrinciPAL (he's your pal, well she/he should be :P) is how you remember it. Yeah, I learn its differences back in elementary school this way. :)