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Originally Posted by Sonist
Some interesting points, but as I was reading the excerpts, I kept thinking, wow! some of this is straight from the 1990s. Then i clicked on the link, and wow! again, it was from 2000.
While some of of observations are still valid, conventions have evolved significantly, as has Flash. Things will continue to change, and I expect that HTML5 will gain momentum and be widely accepted for many things in the coming year or three, but Flash will still be an important part of the web (including for touch devices).
Anyway, my whole point about Flash is not to defend Adobe, but to point out that Flash is very widely used, and any device which does not support it cannot be deemed a good web-browsing device, since a good portion of the web will not be accessible with it.
To me, defending Apple for not including Flash on the iPad is similar to defending the lack of Search, or Copy/Paste on the iPhone.
Given the recent stories about the chip in the iPad being based on the older Cortex A8 design, Apple may have been worried about maintaining the feeling of "speed" on the iPad. Also, it is likely that there was no time to optimize Flash 10 for the iPad, given Apple's secrecy and reluctance to provide needed information.
But whatever the reason, bashing Flash is not going to change the fact that the iPad, in its currently rumored state, has some serious shortcomings.
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Granted, these conclusions were drawn 10 years ago. Are you familiar with Jakob Nielsen's work? He is one of the most highly regarded usability experts for good reason-- his recommendations are backed up by solid empirical usability lab research. He regularly revisits earlier findings to see if they still hold. If you search his site, you'll find more recent articles coming to the same conclusions, again based on empirical research.
I'm not bashing Flash. It's fine for many things, and I know support for vision-impaired readers (for example) has improved. I just don't think it's appropriate as a primary navigation method for most websites. (And even Rowling's website, about which I cited Nielsen's remarks above, has a text-only method in parallel with the intriguing Flash interface.)
I don't know what Apple's reason is for avoiding supporting Flash on iP* devices is. I don't think any of us know (unless someone here is a closet Apple employee). I've heard a lot of claims attributing Apple's motivations to technical security, performance, app store protectionism, personal dislike on the part of Steve Jobs, etc., but I haven't seen a link pointing to a verifiable quote from an Apple representative on the matter. Similarly, I don't know that Apple won't support Flash in the future, and I have seen no links to official word from Apple on that.
In the absence of this evidence, I think further arguments are pointless. We can speculate, and that can be fun, but let's keep the "heat level" low.