Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Web Hosting Lounge : Apple doesn't support flash??? Are you kidding me!

[Frosty]

I am strictly a windows fan, I do not and will never like apple. Lately it seems apple is taking over the planet especially with their blasted ipad!

I just borrowed a friend's ipad and found out that it does NOT support flash??? WTF!!!???? It has to be one of the most preposterous things I have seen. My site looks absolutely terrible on ipads because it doesn't support flash, I am NOT happy about this.

Forgive my ignorance regarding apple products but do apple laptops also NOT support flash? This is yet another reason why I hate apple and they;'re friggin taking over the planet!

[Orien]

It's honestly a good thing that Apple's mobile devices (other than their computers) don't support Flash. It's clunky and a huge battery-waster on mobile platforms. Microsoft is not supporting Flash either on their upcoming Windows 8 tablets.

Flash is going to be phased out in the next few years, so you might want to update your website to use HTML5 instead.

[Frosty]

In regards to html5... is there anyway to replicate flash with html5?

Meaning if I had a website with flash, would I be able to duplicate that site and have it in html5 so that I it would look 100% EXACTLY like my site did with flash?

[8088]

Originally Posted by Frosty

In regards to html5... is there anyway to replicate flash with html5?

More often then not. It depends on what it does and browser support.

Originally Posted by Orien

It's clunky and a huge battery-waster on mobile platforms.

That's true in some cases. But an animated canvas can be just as CPU intensive.

[Orien]

Originally Posted by Frosty

In regards to html5... is there anyway to replicate flash with html5?

Meaning if I had a website with flash, would I be able to duplicate that site and have it in html5 so that I it would look 100% EXACTLY like my site did with flash?

For most intents and purposes, yes -- you can probably convert your site to HTML5 and have it look the same.

Originally Posted by 8088

That's true in some cases. But an animated canvas can be just as CPU intensive.

I believe iOS is adding GPU accelerated canvas in the next release.

[Frosty]

Thanks for the responses. I'm more relaxed now knowing that I don't have to give up the look of flash seeing that I can basically replicate the look via html5

[(Stephen)]

Flash runs great on My Android with Honeycomb, and on HP Touchpads, not causing any issues and performance is excellent, even full screen video.
I've been more than pleased with both. My sister uses her touchpad with flash video more than her laptop now.

[Frosty]

Stephen,

The ONLY thing I like about ipads is that they are touchscreens. I would have loved to own an ipad if only they were running windows... therefore it seems I would be happy with an HP touchpad?

Are the HP touchpads basically the same as a netbook but with a touch screen??? That is what I'm hoping.

Thanks.

[JaJae]

Not allowing Flash for so long was a strategic business decision on the part of Apple. There really wasn't a valid reason for Steve Jobs to deny it other than if he allowed Flash on his mobile devices he couldn't rape developers in his app store. People would have just made mobile flash friendly websites and bypassed paying Steve Jobs to list their products in the app store.

HTML is starting to get better, but for the longest time it was pretty useless. Apple should have given people the option to use Flash if they wanted to as Android does, but Steve Jobs knows how you should use and hold your devices better than you do.

[Orien]

Originally Posted by JaJae

Not allowing Flash for so long was a strategic business decision on the part of Apple. There really wasn't a valid reason for Steve Jobs to deny it other than if he allowed Flash on his mobile devices he couldn't rape developers in his app store. People would have just made mobile flash friendly websites and bypassed paying Steve Jobs to list their products in the app store.

I'm not going to argue that it wasn't a strategic business decision in part because it probably was.

But a native app experience will almost always beat out the experience of going to a flash friendly website on a mobile device. Even on Android phones/tablets with Flash support, people prefer to use native apps if they are available.

And out of curiosity, what websites are you (to everyone) trying to access that demands Flash support on your devices? I know YouTube is a common one, but that works on all iOS devices by redirecting to the app. Things like Pandora, ESPN, etc. also have apps. I'm just curious. I have friends with Android devices and they almost never talk about the immense benefits of Flash support because they never use it.

[(Stephen)]

Originally Posted by Orien

I'm not going to argue that it wasn't a strategic business decision in part because it probably was.

But a native app experience will almost always beat out the experience of going to a flash friendly website on a mobile device. Even on Android phones/tablets with Flash support, people prefer to use native apps if they are available.

And out of curiosity, what websites are you (to everyone) trying to access that demands Flash support on your devices? I know YouTube is a common one, but that works on all iOS devices by redirecting to the app. Things like Pandora, ESPN, etc. also have apps. I'm just curious. I have friends with Android devices and they almost never talk about the immense benefits of Flash support because they never use it.

How about news sites with embedded videos, what about websites that use flash navigation? You miss a lot without flash.

[Orien]

Originally Posted by (Stephen)

How about news sites with embedded videos, what about websites that use flash navigation? You miss a lot without flash.

I wouldn't know about news sites, because I subscribe to RSS feeds for my news and go through articles in an app. And news apps have full video support. As for websites with flash navigation, I can't imagine there really are that many popular sites left like that with no graceful fallback to HTML5?

I certainly am missing some aspects of certain websites, but in the end, I really do think the benefits outweigh any compromises. It's great not having Flash ads load either.

[(Stephen)]

Originally Posted by Frosty

Stephen,

The ONLY thing I like about ipads is that they are touchscreens. I would have loved to own an ipad if only they were running windows... therefore it seems I would be happy with an HP touchpad?

Are the HP touchpads basically the same as a netbook but with a touch screen??? That is what I'm hoping.

Thanks.

HP touchpad was on sale for $99 for 16GB and $149 for 32GB recently, as HP discontinued it

It isn't like a netbook, it is better but it was using a custom linux os called 'WebOS' and its quite good, but HP took far to long in execution of hardware to be viable.

Android, is also a linux based os, and its got its faults, but a huge marketplace with apps, flash support, and basically all the benefits of an ipad without the Apple 'our way or no way' mentality. I love some things about apple, and some of their business sense, but the lockdowns annoy me greatly.

Anyway, apple/ipad/iphone aren't going away, you need to plan a transition to HTML5 before too long, you will be missing sales/clients/visits by ignoring them. Adobe is working on making a development platform like flash, that exports to native html5 properly with all features; I don't think HTML5 will go mainstream until this is released.

[cselzer]

Originally Posted by Frosty

In regards to html5... is there anyway to replicate flash with html5?

Meaning if I had a website with flash, would I be able to duplicate that site and have it in html5 so that I it would look 100% EXACTLY like my site did with flash?

You might be interested in taking a look at Adobe Edge. There is a preview beta available free to download. Its quite cool, i was recently playing with it.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

[unity100]

Originally Posted by Orien

Flash is going to be phased out in the next few years, so you might want to update your website to use HTML5 instead.

most unfortunately, that 'next few years' amount to billions of dollars of business in internet terms. noone can just ignore flash at this point or into the future.

For most intents and purposes, yes -- you can probably convert your site to HTML5 and have it look the same.

html5 support is still half assed. it would be another risk to convert sites to html5. noone would jump on that ship just to perpetuate a new technology.