Not Watered Down?

In one of the iPhone ads that talks about the internet, they famously go to the New York Times homepage and scroll down the page to the video player area.

At this point I noticed something. The ad actually shows the video player section while my real iPhone does not. My iPhone says I need to get the latest version of the Flash Player, which by the way, you can’t download to your iPhone BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST.

Hopefully this means they’re planning on releasing a Flash Player plugin soon.

2 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

mark
July 16, 2007 at 9:55 am

Another possibility is that Apple has a Flash player plugin that works on the iPhone Safari/OS X but has chosen not to include it with the released iPhone software.

Why not include it? Because Apple is trying to wean users and sites from Adobe’s proprietary Flash solution and move toward open Web standards like MPEG-4’s H.264. This is what Apple got Google’s YouTube to do for it. So Apple is testing the waters to see what the outcry is, and if it’s not that great, we’ll never see Flash.

Note that whatever happens here will likely also affect the AppleTV, as it begins moving more and more toward the web. This connection between iPhone and AppleTV is already seen in YouTube.

mattybinks
July 16, 2007 at 10:50 am

I thought I said that Apple might be planning a plugin soon but maybe you missed that last sentence.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s a great idea for Apple to shut out Flash considering the huge number of Flash based websites that exist today. Being someone who builds sites for a living, Flash is the easiest way to get cross platform site designs live. That’s why site designers and developers choose Flash when they build sites. They also know what a total nightmare it is to build totally cross platform sites because IE just doesn’t support open standards, and until it does, Flash is a necessity for many designers.

That being said, many in the creative digital space curse Flash daily because it’s so buggy and isn’t so great to work with on the back end.