Apple Shareholders Meeting: Lots of Apps, No Flash
by Eric March on March 5, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I’m going to don my bulletproof vest for this one, because I’m going to open myself up for messenger season. I say this because I’ve got some bad news. Apple’s shareholder meeting concluded yesterday, and Steve managed to let slip a few key points. First, foremost, and least encouraging is that we shouldn’t expect Flash support anytime soon — possibly never; Steve cited significant performance issues with the Flash runtime that the iPhone is not properly capable of dealing with. Steve outright decried Flash Lite, citing its scant resemblance to the desktop version of the language and declaring that it would not be in the spirit of the iPhone’s full internet experience.
What it all boils down to is a big fat “maybe,” with the caveat that you not hold your breath; as has been said by many people in the past (myself included), the issue is with the fact that Flash is a processor hog and needs muscle that neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch have. That isn’t to say that it is impossible, just that it would run very slowly, and that would tarnish the otherwise slick user experience in Steve’s eyes. It would seem then that the ball is now in Adobe’s court to do what they can to optimize the full-blown Flash runtime so that it runs at a decent clip on Apple’s latest fruits — assuming they have designs on doing so.
But not all news from the shareholder’s meeting is glum. Steve also said, “You’ll see a lot of apps out there this summer,” which is a strong suggestion that he has ample third-party development lined up to show the world what the SDK is all about — presumably in addition to whatever Apple themselves have planned. (There’s still the matter of those “enterprise features” Steve intimated about a couple of weeks ago.) Those of you in the general vicinity of the rising sun also have something to look forward to as Steve aims his sights at penetrating the Asian market, as well as attempting to make inroads in India, stating, “We will one day enter China, we’re not saying when, and we will one day enter India.” And of course, there’s still the much-anticipated release of the SDK to look forward to tomorrow. While I am sure boatloads of you will be lamenting this latest yes/no answer to the Flash problem, I am equally sure that there will be something to keep you occupied tomorrow. It’s certainly going to keep us occupied.
We will update you with news as we get word of it.
The iPhone SKD Roadmap presentation starts tomorrow at 1:00PM EST.
(Sources: AppleInsider, iPhone Atlas, TUAW)
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Posted in Application Related, News Related, SDK
March 5th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
In all honesty, I don’t really care all that much about native flash support to begin with… we’re already seeing flash on computers that notes ‘this flash requires a lot of cpu power; you will need at least a dual core cpu to view this properly’ or things like that — and half the time it still lags! — just to imagine people complain that their iPhone can’t play those flash video will be annoying enough already as is.
Though, it’d be very nice if they can give us additional video codec. Flash Video (H263, H264, and On2VP6 variants) — along with a “translation” system that will take the tags for flash, and figure out the video path to play it, would be greatly appreciated, for example. DivX/XviD support would also be greatly appreciated. Native player with matroska contained H264 video playback will probably even earn them a new share holder.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
With regards to Flash, I think what most people are most interested in is not so much the powerhouse Flash apps, but rather the casual games of the sort you’re likely to find on places like Jay is Games, or any of the thousand other Flash games sites. Casual gaming is big stuff, and most of the casual Flash games are fairly lightweight in terms of their demand for horsepower (Flash’s own system requirements notwithstanding). This is what people seem to want most. That, and the ability to view videos on websites other than YouTube.
It’s possible, depending on the capabilities, limitations, and terms of the SDK, that we may see new codecs ported to the iPhone and Touch, but they won’t be from Apple. If Apple ever intended on supporting other codecs, they would have done so long before now. That leaves it to third parties, so we’re going to have to see what the SDK brings to the table before we can figure out whether we’ll see new codecs.