Why Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touchscreen Devices 521
An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Roughly Drafted:
"I'm a full-time Flash developer and I'd love to get paid to make Flash sites for the iPad. I want that to make sense — but it doesn't. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen — and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That's not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It's because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work."
Re:Never? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not entirely true (Score:5, Informative)
the mouse pointer that one can activate by dragging onto the screen from the lower left edge didnt help?
Translation (Score:5, Informative)
"I'm a Mac fanboy who also does some extremely bad flash design (http://adamsi.com/). I can't figure out how to make the silly, and unnecessary, rollovers on my site work on an iPad. I'm believe everything Apple does is brilliant so their decision to exclude Flash must also be brilliant. Therefore I have to conclude that Flash could never, ever, work on a touchscreen device."
Serious bunch of BS in my opinion. For one, a large number of Flash sites, like the author's, seem to use mouse over for nothing more than effects. Fine, but hardly essential. If all that is transmitted is clicks, they still function ok. Second, the big reason people are up about Flash these days is videos and the like. For better or worse, Flash has become THE web video standard. That may eventually change, but no time soon. As we all know, standards change extremely slowly when there's something works and, well, Flash works. It's not perfect but on most computers, it works just fine for seeing a video of a silly cat jump in a box. Finally, if a site didn't work properly, oh well, shit happens. As it stands all Flash sites are GUARANTEED not to work at all.
I don't buy this as a legit argument at all.
Re:Not entirely true (Score:2, Informative)
Well, you can actually use a trackpad without buttons, too. A quick tap is a single click, a double-tap+hold is a click and drag.
Re:That's not why iDevices don't support flash (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What??? (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it strange at first that it used a virtual cursor instead of just tapping on an object on the screen but it actually ended up working better and they were able to use the same engine underneath the hood. But the thing was, you moved the cursor with your finger and your finger didn't obscuring what the virtual cursor was pointing out.
Now, that being said I'm not sure I would want to have two different idioms but saying that it can't be done is just stupid.
Re:The App Store (Score:5, Informative)
The real reason why Apple would never allow Flash to work on one of it's mobile devices is simple. The App Store. Most of the available apps could easily be mimicked using Flash, and made easily available. This would not be a good thing for Apple's bottom line.
As noted above [slashdot.org], this rationale is easily disproved by Apple's encouragement of offline HTML5 [apple.com] web apps.
The title of this article is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I find it interesting that the title is why "Flash is fundamentally flawed on touchscreen devices" and not "Why Certain Touchscreen Devices (aka iPad) are limited and will not work with Flash". This is obviously an attack on the Flash framework as a way to redirect criticism away from the iPad. Apple has clearly mistepped here and now they are trying to do damage control. My understanding is that other touchscreen devices that are coming out in the market place will support Flash (e.g., HP Slate), and it will probably be seamless. I was quite interested in the iPad when the news came out but now that it won't support Flash, and locks users into the monopolistic "App Store" I am no longer interested. Only Apple would try something like this... they seem to be stuck in the monopolistic 90s.
Re:Flash only? (Score:1, Informative)
This is roughlydrafted after all. Of course it's an attempt to rationalize after the fact.
The iPhone handles mouseovers already (Score:3, Informative)
... well, to some degree anyway.
It does this by essentially transforming the mouseover event to a intermediate click event. For example, if you have a link that has a popup menu displayed on :hover, clicking the menu item will first show the popup menu. Clicking again follows the actual navigation. Although this doesn't address the issue of mystery-meat navigation and over events that are less obvious, it does seem to work well. I don't see why Flash couldn't do the same.
To me, the issue with Flash is all about playback experience. Adobe can't even get the player to be efficient and smooth under OS X on decent hardware, so having it on my iPhone sounds tortuous.
Fix the Root of the Problem - the Touchscreen (Score:2, Informative)
The cursor exists for two reasons: to give the computer an idea of what your eye is focused on, and give you an idea of what the computer thinks you're focused on. On a touchscreen, the machine has no information until you actually mash your finger in the general vicinity of several potential inputs - forcing it to do heuristic gymnastics to figure out which one you really meant. And if it gets it wrong, you are angry, because it didn't warn you that you were clicking the wrong thing.
The iphone keyboard tries to fix this in a sad and lonely way: it makes the button you're "clicking" bigger, as you're clicking on it. This slows typing to a crawl, but combined with auto-complete and auto-suggest it's a reasonable facsimile of an effective input method. But since there's no auto-complete when you're navigating a website (except googling the specific page, maybe), that's not going to solve the "flash problem".
On the bright side this will all be resolved just as soon as eye-tracking is solved. Whatever you're looking at will be "your focus" - dropping a focus indicator whenever you're looking at a clickable object (existing mouseover highlights would work fine). Then you tap it with your finger (because blinking is too hard to control and saying "click" makes you sound ridiculous) and presto: the computer knows where you're looking and you know where the computer thinks you're looking, and you've finally replicated the functionality of a 40-year-old technology, but on a touchscreen.
Re:Not entirely true (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eat my balls! (Score:3, Informative)
You know what else could cover the expense of running an app store? Opening the platform so people can install apps from other places.
The app store gives them more than just income - it gives them control over what runs on the platform. This is a dangerous trend, and that's the real problem with this whole thing.
Re:Why do you post on an abomination? (Score:4, Informative)
In that case, Slashdot is an abomination. It (optionally) uses XMLHttpRequest to load pieces of the comments page without requiring a refresh of the entire page. So why do you post on an abomination?
A: Slashdot has interesting content.
B: Slashdot is an abomination. Pagedown goes too far because the bar at the top steals precious real-estate for no reason. Accidentally navigating away and back loses all box text, despite years of tools which save that state for just such eventualities. It runs incredibly slow on iPhones, despite being basically a static page with a reply box. It has a bunch of "Web 1.5" stuff hanging around in the options which hasn't really done much in years. It took about 2 years after the site refresh before it would serve consistently across all browsers.
Hooray for pushing the envelope for sake of pushing the envelope's sake. But if every website were coded like Slashdot, the web would be a far more painful place.
Re:Eat my balls! (Score:3, Informative)
How about for "years", we substitute "right now"?
http://www.yourappshop.com/ [yourappshop.com]
for instance.
Re:That's okay... (Score:3, Informative)
The problem in TFA actually isn't about Flash(TM) itself, the real problem is the direct coupling of the mouse to the user interface experience via the web. "Hover" is a mouse-specific capability. Flash supports this capability, as well as javascript and other languages, (although Flash sites seem to rely on it more often than others.)
Too many web designers assume a mouse is present, leading to all kinds of human factors problems, not the least of which is handicapped accessibility.
Of course the idea that Apple wants Adobe to FOAD is still perfectly valid. But if people want to believe that "hover" plus "iPhone" equals "no Flash", well, that's what they'll believe.
RTFA, yo. (Score:1, Informative)
From the article:
"D) Have a visible mouse pointer near your finger, and not interact with things directly. Use Apple track-pad style tap-and-drag gestures, as seen in some VNC clients. This kind of indirect control violates the very principle of direct touch manipulation. This is making the touchscreen be something “like a laptop but worse” and has little reason to exist. And again, you’d have to keep remembering whether you were in direct touch mode or “drag the arrow” mode, and which parts of the page behaved in which way."
Re:That's okay... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Eat my balls! (Score:4, Informative)
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe.
This seems more likely to me. The Apple/Adobe relationship has seemed a bit strained lately. Adobe often provides better and more support to Windows users, and they've been very slow to move to Cocoa. Meanwhile, Apple has been competing with Adobe in the audio/video realm.
Plus, Steve Jobs has been reported as saying that Flash sucks, is too slow and unstable, and takes up battery life. This is true. It's annoying on Windows, but on OSX, Flash is a disaster. It seems like this should be a case where Slashdotters could support Apple; they're essentially saying, "This stuff should be done according to more open standards like HTML. Let's work on HTML5 to get it to do the things we need and get rid of Flash."
Re:Roughly Drafted (Score:3, Informative)
Spot on.
Searching for the rationale in an apple fanboi's statement is an exercise in futileness.
Re:Not entirely true (Score:3, Informative)
No. I would tell Steve Jobs not to dictate technology by banning its use. If HTML5 is better, the market will migrate toward it on its own. Don't be fooled: Apple is trying to maintain app store lock-in, and insulting us by trying to claim this is a technological stance. It's pure greed, not technological purity.
If HTML5 can do everything Flash can do (it can do a lot, but not everything), then all the complaints people have about Flash will simply shift on over to HTML5. Whatever abuses of Flash exist, those abuses will still exist in a new form. You will still be invited to punch the monkey, only now you won't be able to use software like FlashBlock to avoid it.
Somehow people assume that abuses of technology are a problem with the technology itself. As though there's something wrong with the Internet because it can be used to transfer kiddy porn, or there's something wrong with baseball bats because they can be used to beat someone up. Abuses will exist no matter what the technology is.