Apple, Flash & CS5 Options

[crowdogs]

Has anyone any comments about Apples recent admonishment (and censorship, if you will) of Flash on its iPhone & iPad? See NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/technolo...lash&st=cse

Apple carries a pretty big stick and I was wondering if they could actually change the course of Flash. I wonder because I am considering the purchase of CS5 Web Premium when it is released later this month. I'am not ashamed to say that it will be a major investment for this hobbyist/freelancer at $1800.00 and well above my pay-grade's ability to fully utilize (if fully utilizing is even possible).

So, any thoughts about Flash's future, or lack thereof?

[Christian J]

Here's one from the Flash camp: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-futur...sh-mobile-apps/ --I wonder if the following is correct:

"What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions?"

do I really want to shut out a large market segment from my website?

Which large market segment, iPhone/iPad users? I doubt the number of mobile phone browser users will ever become very large (compared with desktop/laptop/netbook browsers) due to the inconveniently small screens. I also doubt the Safari desktop browser will ever be able to outcompete the other browser vendors (and that way be able to outcompete Flash).

In any case plugins like Flash have always had various accessibility problems (including bandwidth requirements) even for users that do run it on their browsers, so I'm sure the general plugin market share will drop everytime something better (for users, advertizers or site owners) can replace the plugin. When it comes to multimedia I'm reminded of W3C's SMIL spec, though it's never had much of an impact AFAIK.

[jimlongo]

do I really want to shut out a large market segment from my website?

Which large market segment, iPhone/iPad users? I doubt the number of mobile phone browser users will ever become very large (compared with desktop/laptop/netbook browsers) due to the inconveniently small screens. I also doubt the Safari desktop browser will ever be able to outcompete the other browser vendors (and that way be able to outcompete Flash).

Only time will tell, but my guess is that mobile browsers (iWhatevers, Nexus, Android, Nokia, Motorola, HPalm, etc., ) will eventually capture a big enough market share to make you sit up and take notice.

Safari has nothing to do with this conversation. Flash works (albeit it's performance is very often pretty crappy) just fine in Safari and will continue to do so.

This post has been edited by jimlongo: May 4 2010, 07:32 AM