The Flash Ultimatum

by Eric March on March 20, 2008 at 1:03 am

We’ll get back to you on that. This whole thing is starting to make me dizzy. Yesterday, the Financial Times quoted Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen as saying that they’ve given the SDK the once-over and they’re determined to put Flash on the iPhone, with or without The Steve’s blessing. Unfortunately, Narayen should have paid a little closer attention to the terms of the SDK before going on about it in a quarterly earnings conference call, as Adobe have just released a statement to clarify matters.

Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.

In other words: We can’t do that with the SDK, so we’re going to have to get The Steve on the phone and pitch this idea like Roger Clemens and hope he doesn’t tell us to get stuffed again.

That’s not to say that Flash isn’t coming, it’s just that Adobe have realized that the SDK is a dead end, and the only way they’re going to be able to make this work is the same way they were hoping to make it work the first time they approached Apple, except this time they intend to rewrite it especially for the iPhone and hope that’s enough to convince The Steve to relent. Will he? Won’t he? Who knows. The Steve is a hardass, but I have to believe that he really does want Flash on the iPhone, so long as it doesn’t muss up his slick and purdy UI with a slow and cumbersome runtime.

(Source: CNet news.com)