The Back Button

This week I’ve been reading a lot of posts from people complaining about the lack of Flash support for the iPhone. A lot of this commentary has risen from Steve Jobs himself having said that “it performs too slowly on the iPhone“. Now, I don’t doubt his reasoning for a second, but I’m not saying that AVC2 isn’t blazing fast. I’m saying that a lot of SWF on the Internet are poorly constructed, resulting in CPU bombardment.

The cost of a cycle on a handheld CE device is great because sooner or later you’re going to run out of power. If you’re running poorly constructed SWFs all day long from random-bogus-flash-site.com then your either going to run our of power fast or leak memory everywhere.

Today I could be viewing a small flash banner ad from website X that will motor up my laptops fans with what appears to be next to no functionally or animation - what the hell!? I propose that someone please start a Flash name & shame website that decompiles these SWFs so that common mistakes can filter down to the people who created them.

I believe that poorly constructed SWFs are the main reason why you won’t be seeing Flash on the iPhone anytime soon. Steve wants a consistent Safari experience for it’s users. It would be too painful if Safari crashed every couple of minutes because ‘Banner ad company XYZ’ hired the lowest bidder.

And of course it would only be naive to say that Flash on the iPhone isn’t a clash of interests. Why would Apple want another media player on the iPhone? Remember that at the end of the day, the iPhone is still the flagship iPod. Apple won’t sell any iTunes media if you can stream it for free all day long.

Of course Apple could choose to disable Flash in Safari, but allow you to create springboard apps. But this is really what the iPhone SDK is all about, so I don’t really think Flash fits here. Maybe platform portability is the best argument to have Flash apps, but why would Apple go for that. For starters, Apple doesn’t want famous iPhone app “Q” to one day start running on a Sony Ericsson phone. How would that sell iPhones?

The iPhone is extremely powerful in terms of multimedia rendering, You’re able to utilize its engaging Core Animation framework featuring embedded OpenGL to create the kinds of real time effect you would see in ‘Photo Booth’ for example. The ability to draw power from hardware acceleration means that the iPhone can pushing bits around the screen at a very decent frame-rate without bothering the CPU too much.

Could Flash 10 with hardware acceleration be the answer to the iPhone SDK? It seems today that AVM2 can push code around with ease but its display list rendering is greatly lacking. Could Flash 10 solved this? Could 10 be the platform of choice for competing mobile brands? It seems to me that portable mobile apps are the best way to compete with the iPhone right now. So, wouldn’t it be great if those portable apps were F10 SWFs?!

.. NOT!

It’s just my old MacBook in a Manila Envelope

Apple has just publicly released an OS X update (10.5.1) that claims to fix a number of issues. One being:

Improves compatibility with Adobe Flash-based uploaders used by .Mac Web Gallery and certain other websites and applications.

So “OS X 10.5 Leopard” is out tomorrow and yes, I shall likely be stopping by the SF Apple store on the way home to pick it up. Between my wife and I, we have around 5 Mac’s in our day to day life. Myself, I usually use my laptop at home and at work I’m using a 24″ iMac running Tiger.

But here’s the thing, I’ve been running the WWDC version of Leopard on my MacBook laptop for the past few months now. And you know what, most of the time I don’t even notice I’m switching between it and Tiger.

I think that right now, the only thing Leopard has over Tiger is it’s polished look. Leopard has had a lot of upgrades backstage, so they are not so apparent in everyday use. But, I guess that once applications start taking advantage of these new features, then maybe the worth of Leopard shall start to shine through. Hmm.

But like I said, I am still going out tomorrow to buy it so I must be a sucker for QuickView and the super fast spotlight.