While Apple continues to give Adobe the cold shoulder over Flash support on the iPhone, it seems that the T-Mobile G1 (and by extension, Google Android) is more than happy to leap merrily into bed with the web standard.
At Adobe’s MAX event this morning, Google’s current director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, demoed Flash running on a G1, and apparently making it look easy in the process. There was no mention of when or how the functionality will be added to the G1 in the consumer realm, but you can bet that if Google was willing to show the tech up and running so openly, it can’t be very far away.
Rubin did indeed confirm that Adobe and Google are working hard to make it happen. This means of course that annoying animated banners filled with yapping emoticons and testosterone pumped action movie trailers will no longer be confined to computer based web browsers. Perhaps we should all be careful what we wish for…
(Via Endgadget Mobile)
So it’s official - Adobe have confirmed that they are hard at work on an iPhone port of their Flash player - holding out the tantalising prospect of running Flash games, apps and movies on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The question is - will Apple let it happen? The iPhone SDK explicitly states that No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).
In other words - NO FLASH FOR YOU.
Still, you can’t blame Adobe for trying.
Adobe has announced plans to take its Photoshop brand to mobile phones, albeit not with image-editing software along the lines of the popular PC/Mac application. Instead, it’s planning to launch Photoshop.com Mobile in beta, allowing people to upload their cameraphone snaps to Adobe’s Photoshop.com site. Besides uploading, the app will let them see thumbnails of the photos in their online gallery, as well as browsing albums created using Adobe’s Photoshop Elements software. However, the mobile app will initially lack more advanced features like tagging, titling and captioning. However, Adobe is missing a trick by only making the beta available for Windows Mobile handsets, starting in late September with Samsung Blackjack, Motorola Q and Palm Treo phones. Why focus on a single mobile operating system, when they could be targeting, say, Symbian and iPhone too? Perhaps that’ll come in time.
iPhone users have been waiting for full Flash support for a while, after all, according to Apple’s winsome adverts the iPhone doesn’t offer a watered down version of the internet, “it’s just the internet”. Quite.
Even so Steve Jobs’ advice seems to be, don’t hold your breath for Flash and in Apple’s shareholder meeting on Tuesday, made comments indicating that architectural limitations in Flash itself are what is holding the tech back.
Continue reading ‘Steve Jobs still not sold on Flash for iPhone’
