Flash Development for the iPhone is Hard: Adobe

Flash Development for the iPhone is Hard: Adobe

Monday, February 02, 2009 - by Michael Santo
Well, duh. In a Bloomberg Television interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen admitted that developing Flash for the iPhone was "hard." Specifically, he said:
"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating. The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."
Part of the issue is getting Flash, which is used to view online video and animation, to work effectively on the iPhone, or at least to the satisfaction of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While 800 million other handsets have Flash, the iPhone does not, and it's because Jobs feels it does not run well enough on the iPhone.

Nothing can make it to the iPhone through the App Store without being approved by Apple, though it's possible to install unapproved apps on a jailbroken iPhone.

Flash Lite, Adobe's phone-focused version, isn't good enough for the iPhone, Jobs added; what Jobs wants is a version between Flash Lite and the full-featured PC version.

We will admit, it would be truly annoying if the first version of Flash that appears is a full-featured version for the upcoming iPhone 2,1 that we've seen references to lately. That phone will probably have a more powerful processor and better graphics support, meaning it's possible full, PC-level Flash might be possible on the device.
Via: Bloomberg | News Archive | Tags: Apple, iPhone, Adobe, Flash
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Comments

By Super Dave on Feb 2, 2009

News:
Part of the issue is getting Flash, which is used to view online video and animation, to work effectively on the iPhone, or at least to the satisfaction of Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Flash hasn't always played well on Windows, either. Not too long ago it was giving ATI graphics users atikmdag error messages in Vista, and that was very frustrating!

By 3vi1 on Feb 2, 2009

They need to quit making excuses and make nice with Jobs before Microsoft decides to release Silverlight for the iPhone. If they don't get smart, Adobe is going to get steamrolled just like every other 3rd party tech that MS decided to "embrace and extend".

It took Adobe forever to release a 64-bit Linux flash. I get the impression that Flash's underlying architecture wasn't sufficiently abstracted from the initial platform of implementation (32-bit Windows). At least, I don't know why else development would seem to be so slow every time they look at a new target.

By bob_on_the_cob on Feb 2, 2009

3vi1:

They need to quit making excuses and make nice with Jobs before Microsoft decides to release Silverlight for the iPhone. If they don't get smart, Adobe is going to get steamrolled just like every other 3rd party tech that MS decided to "embrace and extend".

It took Adobe forever to release a 64-bit Linux flash. I get the impression that Flash's underlying architecture wasn't sufficiently abstracted from the initial platform of implementation (32-bit Windows). At least, I don't know why else development would seem to be so slow every time they look at a new target.

Linux has it windows and mac still dont have flash for 64 browsers. With things like Obama's swearing in using silverlight they had better get going.

By digitaldd on Feb 4, 2009

i wouldn't be surprised if the actual quote was " Writing software that isn't buggy as hell is hard". I've never had a piece of Adobe software that wasn't bloated as hell and didn't crash constantly.

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