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Adobe’s evangelist is pretty annoyed with the iPad

By Joshua Schnell Fri, Jan 29, 2010 @ 6:10 PM

Firefox 500x166 Adobes evangelist is pretty annoyed with the iPad

The Flash on iPhone argument is raging on today, but this time it’s taken a whole new twist. Adobe’s Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow, has decided that the iPad experience can’t be the best browsing experience without flash support. I have to say that the image gave me a hearty chuckle, but this is a case of a picture not being worth a thousand words.

Flash has long been a staple of internet video content, and crappy animated websites since I was in high school, but to be frank, I’ve never really stumbled on a website where alternatives couldn’t be adopted. The only real challenge to my statement might be video players, but HTML5 seems to be challenging that viewpoint altogether.

Some websites might look better in flash, and I’m sure that there’s plenty of excellent uses for the language, but given the flexibility of alternative stylesheets and modern web standards I don’t think users should be faced with the blue lego icon. It doesn’t make much sense, and these brands that Lee Brimelow illustrates in his hilarious picture are losing out on a pretty huge demographic.

Users shouldn’t be forced into one particular technology, and if Flash isn’t available on the iPhone or iPad then these developers should be doing everything in their power to make sure that viewers on these devices are getting what they came for. It’s not that difficult to create a stylesheet for an iPhone currently, so I don’t see why we’re still arguing about flash on these devices.

Business is about making sure your customers don’t have to jump through hoops to get what they want, and frankly this blue lego is just one giant hoop for companies like CNN, Hulu, and the others. It doesn’t make much sense from a business standpoint, and it certainly doesn’t make much sense from a user standpoint.

What’s this blue lego telling potential customers who use the iPhone as a browsing device? It says we don’t care enough about you to make sure our site works bug free.

Sure, this fight makes sense from Flash’s standpoint, but all of these companies on the list need to get a lesson or two in website management. It’s not a Flash or HTML5 decision. Both can be used, and alternative can be served up to individuals who don’t have flash access. Seems pretty simple if you ask me.

[via @WTL]

  • cache

    until html5 is widely adopted and supported, and the differences between browser support of different video/audio codecs is hashed out, html5 is not a reasonable alternative. have you ever seen a Flash site done with Papervision3D? like it or not, Flash provides experiences that html5 is a very long way off from achieving. and it’s far more widely supported than coming-soon html5.

  • TeamNutmeg

    A decision to use Flash (and not provide iPhone-friendly alternatives) isn’t a bug, it’s simply a choice of method of content distribution. Ease back on the rhetoric, please. It’s far too easy to turn that mirror around, after all, and ask what it says about Apple that their own terms of service disallow the implementation of a widely-accepted web standard (regardless of its merits).

    What’s more, Brimelow doesn’t even mention the iPad, nor does he sound particularly annoyed about the iPhone’s lack of Flash support (in the one whole paragraph he even mentions it). If anything, he sounds annoyed with the lack of support in general for HTML 5, and is just trying to make a case for Flash once HTML 5 *is* more widely supported. So the title of this article is unnecessarily inflammatory.

    I think your time would be better spent with common-sense replies to other peoples’ rhetoric than picking entirely new fights.

    • http://www.macgasm.net Joshua Schnell

      Umm, the title of the post is ‘The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?’ Are we talking about the same post?

      http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703

      • TeamNutmeg

        *boggle* Apparently not. When I clicked the link to the blog yesterday, the top article was “HTML 5 and Flash video.” I notice he’s edited the original iPad screens graphic. Maybe I hit his site while he had that post pulled for editing?

        I think I’d still call it more catty than annoyed, though.

        So… yeah. Disregard my comments aside from the “bug” bit, please.

  • TeamNutmeg

    (BTW, the only thing lack of Flash support says about Apple is that they’ve made a business decision about it that they feel is right – the same thing a lack of iPhone alternatives says about web content providers.)

  • darkfusion

    So want to tether my phone and watch hulu in class. When it looks like i’m taking notes.

  • guy

    ROFL, the capabilities of flash/flex/air are vastly superior to html5 and silverlight, interactivity, database connectivity, seamless desktop to web-based communication of applications, and ease of development. There’s obviously a lot of people making flash websites whom aren’t web designers, but then again, if you look at 90% of the web, its mostly really ugly websites. It was Apples poor decision to not support flash, it’s completely irrational to not take the 10 minutes it takes to code flash compatibility into a browser. You could even take such a capability from opensource browsers and simply paste it in. Flash is easy to develop with, easy to support in any browser on any platform, there’s just no excuse.