Not flash-site-browsing, which could get complicated and resource consuming (as mentioned with the touch screens and flash ads). Just a way to watch videos that won’t stream without flash support. I am not a developer and am sincerely curious whether a “simple” app cannot be created to do this?

-C-

At the bottom of this discussion, some of us have placed reminders that this isn’t what this article is about.

The solution I propose here does not put Flash on the iPhone. It makes ANY technology available by only refactoring the UI (a well built application would not need to be rewritten, just the UI would need to be shuffled around).

The new generation of phones is coming soon; Symbian, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android are the front runners. I don’t want to have to rebuild all my apps five times to run across all mobile devices. Developing a native iPhone app, or an Ajax-JS based app, either means I’m locked into one mobile platform, or have to dumb it down to something that Ajax-JS can handle from a display perspective.

This solution offers developers a way to get it all with the technology of their choice. You don’t like Flash, use something else, but if you want it across all five major mobile platforms, saying “do it with the iPhone API” doesn’t pan out.

Agreed. The point here was that making Flash available in Safari would still leave the majority of Flash sites unusable. The remedies you offer up would require rewrites, and so that would leave a lot of people expecting to use Flash on the Internet pissed off at Apple coz stuff isn’t working.

I don’t believe there is a really a universal solution to simulate (or replace) hover on touch, since many Flash apps using hover also have explicit functionality from touches (clicks), and swipes (drags). Not to say that there might not be a solution at all, but I sincerely don’t think that such a solution would approach anywhere near universality.

> Lots of “Web 2.0″ apps, that have nothing to do with Flash, break on the iPhone.

True. But no-one’s moaning that the iPhone should support these sites :)

> Apple stands to gain the loyalty of MILLIONS OF FLASH DEVELOPERS by putting Flash on the iPhone.

I disagree with “loyalty.” I don’t really think you quite mean it either…? I would say “Appeasement,” perhaps.

And Apple would stand to lose far more than it would gain by an influx of Flash developers. See Albert’s points above.

> Saying, “because a phone doesn’t have Flash, but people still use the phone to browse the web, means that Flash is pointless” is like saying “I have a car without power steering, but I use it anyway, so power steering is pointless”.

OK, I could agree. Except I never said that :)

What I *am* implying, however, is that:

1. Flash in Mobile Safari is pointless, and
2. Flash outside Safari is not at all in Apple’s interests (nor, frankly, in anyone else’s, except Flash developers, perhaps).

> I have actually never heard a knowledgeable internet-based developer say that “the internet is composed of hyptertext” since 1995.

Well, then: time to reset that clock :)

Lemme split an important hair before I reaffirm my statement: I said “the Web,” not “the Internet.”

There’s loads of other services that comprise “the Internet,” including email, instant messaging, MMOGs, and remember Gopher? to name merely a few. But these are importantly NOT part of “the Web.”

When considering what “the Web” is, remember that:

1. the World Wide Web consists of the entirety of material available via HTTP, which is of course the HyperText Transfer Protocol; and that

2. nearly ALL Flash content is served with a HTML document (same comment about the HT in this acronym, too)

And so, common as it is to encounter both Flash and malware (not equating, mind you), I still view both them as being something AVAILABLE ON the Web, which is to say that the Web would still be every bit “the Web” the Web without them :)

So I reiterate: without Hypertext, we wouldn’t have “the Web.”

The point is a little overstated, but the spirit is to shake the conception that “the Web” is incomplete without Flash. It’s simply not.

LMAO @Jay

But as Tim is pointing out, there’s a much bigger story here, and it’s not just about delivering Flash apps to the iPhone. It’s really about the flexibility of building applications using whatever tools you want/need, and then having the ability to deliver that application to multiple device platforms using a single management paradigm.

Citrix’s core technology behind “Faking Flash” to the iPhone is Citrix XenApp. It used by over 100M users daily to deliver all kinds of applications to all kinds of platforms, the iPhone being just one of them. As long as the application (Win32, Flash, Flex, HTML, ASP, .NET, AIR, Silverlight, JAVA, etc….) can run on the MS Server that XenApp is installed on top of, you can deliver that same application unmodified to multiple platforms (PC, MAC, iPhone, Windows Mobile Professional, Symbian S60, Linux, more coming soon). You can also develop custom apps specifically for a certain platforms if your requirements demand. Whether the application is running locally or delivered remotely, the end game is to get the data to the end user in a useful way for them to use securely. In the case of Citrix, usually related to some type of business task, again regardless of the device they are using.

Again, it’s all about flexibility and the ability to centrally manage the delivery of all of your corporate apps and data to your corporate users in a unified way. You may never have a reason to deliver a single application using Citrix XenApp (all though some customers do this today), this again is about a much bigger picture of which the iPhone and Flash are a small part of. Citrix XenApp is commonly used today to deliver web based applications to overcome browser compatibility issues on PCs and other platforms. A company having the ability to deliver it’s Flash based apps to iPhones is a natural fit to overcome compatibility issues, just another example of one of the many reasons why companies use Citrix. Obviously this type of use will initially be more prevalent with existing Citrix customer, but I applaud Tim’s foresight as to how the use cases can be extended in to less classical markets for Citrix.

So if you’re an app developer and you have interest in this type of flexibility in targeting the ~250K customer base that Citrix has, you might want to step back a second and consider the bigger picture and understand how this can be value add into a Citrix customer’s environment, as Tim has. We already have a list of core ISV partners that see the value of developing custom mobile apps to be delivered via XenApp calling out the the same core value that Tim points out. They get it! And they get how they can make more money with it! I think Tim gets it to :)

Flash use goes far beyond what has been described here. Although I can’t argue with developing with standards, html+javascript+css does not = flash by a country mile. That being said, am I missing Flash on the iphone? Not really … only sometimes when surfing. I like the idea of native apps and as a Flash developer I am trying out Obj-C and Cocoa. But you realize this is just trading one closed technology for another.

And aside from the casual games (cough: App Store :cough) done in Flash what time do you spend on sites that use Flash? I can count maybe a few presentations on a few sites that are in Flash that I’ve missed on the iPhone but they were almost always supportive of the main content. Mostly Flash is used for adverts and I block flash when I can.

The Gods of Flash are angry! Watch out.