A tour of my thoughts on Apple’s iPad, an analogy that includes computer games, and the non-problem of Flash on iPhone OS.
Blue Legos by LarimdaME.
Over the last few days, there’s been a reasonable amount of hoo-haa over Apple’s new iPad, and while I enjoy the excitement of an Apple product announcement, I have to say I was underwhelmed by the iPad unveiling, primarily, I think, because I was expecting something revolutionary; a steep learning curve; the future of home-computing as Apple saw it.
Perhaps that’s what was announced. Perhaps I put too much faith in the rumours. Perhaps I’ve seen too many sci-fi interfaces.
But what I really want to say, the whole point of the previous χ words of introduction, is this: the iPad does not appear to have Flash, and I couldn’t be happier.
Bear with me, while I indulge in an analogy.
The Xbox is a great gaming platform, despite being woefully underpowered when compared to “modern gaming PCs”. Why? Because developers of Xbox games are running on known hardware: there is no “if this graphics card; if that graphics card” in the code. The Xbox platform surely has it’s flaws, but by now they’re well known—compare the recently released Modern Warfare 2 to the launch title Call of Duty 2. There has clearly been a lot of effort put into squeezing the very best from the Xbox.
Apple does the same; they build their software for their hardware, and vice versa: the two are intimately intertwined. What Apple is doing now is clear, Apple is building everything from the silicon to the store.
Hopefully it is by now clear that there’s no way Apple is going to allow Adobe to put their proprietary Flash code on the iPad (or iPhone for that matter), regardless of what the Adobe fan-boys may think.
Apple isn’t about to let anyone put their code on the iPhone, they didn’t let Sun put Java on the iPhone, they’re not going to let Adobe put Flash on iPhone OS. They’re not going to let any third-party put their code on the iPhone.
Add to all of this the fact that Flash on Mac OS X is an absolute disgrace. It seems to me that Adobe have been floundering on the Mac, for at least as long as Apple has been using Intel processors. Flash on the Mac will regularly crash Safari for what appears to be absolutely no reason whatsoever. Flash on the Mac is the reason ClickToFlash is so prevalent.
With a track record like that, it’s not a surprise that Apple have excluded Flash.