On 28/01/2010, at 4:08 PM, Chris Griffiths wrote: > Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be > too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over > its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a > mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running > applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for > application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them > in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business > from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos > and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.
I would disagree quite vehemently with this argument. In fact the last sentence in particular is quite ludicrous considering all the native apps on the iPhone like Pandora, Rhapsody, YouTube, etc etc which already provide plenty of competition to the iTunes store and yet are blessed by Apple. I would argue it is a case of Apple doing all in it's power to stop the closed, proprietary Flash format owned and developed by Adobe from superseding open standards on the internet for something as important as interactive web programming. Apple has already demonstrated that they are more than happy for web apps on the iPhone, hence their pushing of Web 2.0 - AJAX, Javascript, HTML 5, H.264 and other open standards which together are rapidly becoming very strong alternatives to Flash. In fact, for the first year after the iPhone's release that was Apple's only recommendation for apps on the platform. Apple also happens to be one of the biggest players behind many of these technologies and the open source webkit standard popularised by Apple in Safari and adopted by Google, Nokia, Palm etc. The horrible implementation of Flash on the desktop Mac OS X is a prime example of why Apple wants to kill Flash and have an open technology that it can help optimise and improve itself, rather than be beholden to another single company on the iPhone. See John Gruber's take here: http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash Daniel Eran's take: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/06/html5-assault-on-adobe-flash-heats-up-with-clicktoflash/ -Mart -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
