Flash on the iPhone

Since Bobby Scoble posted a link to a funny video earlier about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, it has sparked more discussion about it on the comments thread. Here’s my take:

If the iPhone had Flash support, then it would be very easy to build fullscreen web-powered applications for the device which *could* look and operate just as good as the native UI – without using Apple’s tools or Safari/js/wigdets UI and platform.

Mobile versions of Flash are an issue due to the differing Flash versions they can support. Eg: FlashLite for many Symbian, etc mobile phone platforms and often PocketPC can only support previous versions of Flash, say v5 or v6, which have limited support for xml and flv stuff people might want these days. Though that’s not to say that a hugely compelling Flash application can’t be built in Flash 5 or 6, because it can! (QuickTime has rubbish support for recent Flash too, btw)

But Flash is VERY GOOD at creating and submitting FORMS – which is more or less what every Web2.0 application does, be it up front or around the back of the scenes via JavaScript functions ie: AJAX.  Flash developers who have been building online interactive apps for years have hae the AJAX mindset for a very long time, programming switches and routines to work behing the nice shiny vector graphics, which might then go and hit a web based script and database on the server.

Does anyone know of Apple and Abode are indeed talking or not? Let’s face it, it would make for a great announcement and demo by P.T.Jobsnum! ‘One more thing’

People like ‘Some Guy‘ don’t seem to be able to see the Wood for the Trees (‘Branches for the Apples’?) with suggestions that it’s all about YouTube and the comparison between FLV and MPEG H.264.

Ho hum.