Články

Most of us already have Flash Player 10 installed and this seemingly minor update doesn’t seem like much, but Adobe has a good reason for taking so much time for development. Flash Player 10.1 is the first player in the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative, which aims to enable customers to experience rich internet applications seamlessly across multiple devices.

Almost all mobile device manufacturers stand behind this project (19 of 20 – Apple not taking part), and work together with Adobe to enable Flash Player on mobile with some interesting features, such as hardware-accelerated video decoding and vector renderer and accelerometer input. Tablets are also supported (iPad isn’t); in fact the player’s API has been expanded to support multi-touch and gestures  and some time ago I’ve seen Flash Player running on a TV.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first player in the Open Screen Project  , an industry-wide initiative, which aims to enable customers to experience rich internet applications seamlessly across multiple devices. Almost all mobile device manufacturers stand behind this project (19 of 20 – Apple not taking part), and work together with Adobe to enable Flash Player on mobile with some interesting features, such as hardware-accelerated video decoding and vector renderer and accelerometer input. Tablets are also supported (iPad isn’t); in fact the player’s API has been expanded to support multi-touch and gestures and some time ago I’ve seen Flash Player running on a TV. So will we be able to play flash games, open flash sites and enjoy the web in its full integrity on any device? I don’t think so: mobile devices have limitations which you don’t encounter on PCs; so do tablets, television sets and set-top boxes. You probably won’t be able to open heavy video sites on all devices but we’ve tested some of our latest Flash sites on Google’s Nexus One and we’ve been impressed with the results. I think the initiative is good, it surely has a future and, as a Flash developer, I’m very happy to see where this small browser plugin got.

Here are some screencaps of jojoklub.cz  , one of our latest flash websites, running on HTC Desire:





Many Apple customers are already unpleasantly surprised to see that their devices, which claim to support the web in its “full integrity”, can’t display Flash content. Apple acts as if HTML5 was a real alternative  for Flash, mostly showing off with the new video tag. I very much appreciate the standards and the W3C’s work, but let’s not be naïve and grab the bull by its horns: the browsers which hold a considerable market share still didn’t implement the HTML5 specifications  , and where’s the point in standards if you need a workaround for almost each. It’s going to take years till this happens, and even then the HTML5 will have much less features than Flash Player has now.

If you happen to not be using Safari, Apple’s pride  will look like a pathetic try, asking you to install their browser (reminding me of Microsoft’s way of solving things). This makes me wonder: why would 96.5%  of internet users install a browser to get a relatively feature-poor HTML5 experience when about 98%  of users already have Flash Player in any mainstream browser?

While still trying to be objective I can’t omit the fact that Steve Jobs criticized the openness of the Flash Platform, and I think it’s important to understand why Flash Player is not open-source: if it was, what would happen to Flash Player is exactly what is happening to today’s browsers  . I don’t mind the player having closed code as long as the development tools  are for free. How does that work on the iPhone?
Apple does an amazing job at presenting their products and it’s hard not to let the eye-candy fool you, but if you’re a developer, you should know better than to fall for marketing tricks.

In hope of a close-to-ideal web, I leave you with another demo and a “Wonderful world”  :)