iPad Why Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touchscreen Devices

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by weateallthepies

I happen to think he's talking out of his rear.

It seems he is trying to disprove the existence of my old N800 which as a touch screen device works fine with plenty of flash sites. Sure there are probably things which won't work but most of the large sites people are interested in and sites using flash as menus and media players will work fine.

There are plenty of other devices too which seem to cope with flash and a touch screen.

It seems to me more an effort to force developers to create applications which are iPad/phone specific.

I really dislike sites that use flash for the menus.

[JSWolf]

So how is Youtube going to work on an iPad?

[deltop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So how is Youtube going to work on an iPad?

http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I really dislike sites that use flash for the menus.

Why do you dislike Flash for menus?

I am not being facetious, but I did ask you this before and never got an answer.

There are various reasons why a company may want Flash for the menus on its site, but if it functions well, why do you care?

Originally Posted by deltop

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Except, of course, if you want to be able to view ALL of youtube's videos..., then you need Flash.

And your Flash player can deal nicely with ALL videos, including those encoded in H.264. So, why on earth would you want to use the Lite (HTML5) version on a desktop?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Why do you dislike Flash for menus?

I am not being facetious, but I did ask you this before and never got an answer.

There are various reasons why a company may want Flash for the menus on its site, but if it functions well, why do you care?

Because it doesn't function well. You should never have to install a plugin to be able to navigate the menus of a website. All websites should be tested with box standard web browsers and as such, they don't come with flash and thus, web sites that use flash for important things like menus won't work.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because it doesn't function well. You should never have to install a plugin to be able to navigate the menus of a website. All websites should be tested with box standard web browsers and as such, they don't come with flash and thus, web sites that use flash for important things like menus won't work.

Uh, O.K., but EVERYONE (or virtually everyone) on Earth, with a desktop, has Flash installed. Don't you?

You can say the same about Java, really.

How else can you get fonts other than the few standard Windows ones, circa 1980, to show on all browsers, then?

[nikkie]

Originally Posted by Jim Lester

The original article was missing some details. Hover states (more correctly mouse over and mouse out events) are fully supported by flash even on touch devices. For more details set this blog post by Mike Chambers (with demonstration of Flash app on the iPhone)

The difference is in the interaction model of mouse vs. touch requires you to be careful in the design (am I really going to get a mouse over before I get a mouse down, maybe not), so yes it is quite possible to make a flash based app that won't work well on a touch device.

BTW this isn't a strictly flash based issue as there are any number of websites (eBay for instance - hover on the categories menu) that use Javascript to handle hover states on menus. It takes careful coding and consideration (regardless of platform and programming language) to handle the differences in touch vs mouse control.

This is interesting, but I feel like he missed a fundamental point. From the article:

Basically, hover events do work in Flash content on touch screen devices. The main difference is that on a touch device, you will get also get a MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN event prior to the MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER event, where as on a desktop machine, you MAY only get the MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER event.

The problem with this statement is that in the browser, your mousedown event is only used for two things:

• Clicking
• Dragging

If you wanted to use the Mouse_over event, it would imply that a user would want to do something other than those two things. In Safari on the iPhone, if you attempt to move your finger (to get another mouseover) after you already have the mouse_down, you are, by default, invoking the "drag" gesture. It would not be currently possible to get a mouseover without a implying a mouse_down (which means drag) without breaking the ability change what portion of the screen you are looking at. So, while he is quite correct that you *can* get the mouseover event, you can't use it without breaking the browser.

Now you absolutely could use it in a separate application that was guaranteed to fit within the screen size (e.g., not require dragging), or that mapped drag to a different control.

Mike Chambers is quite right when he says that this issue isn't unique to flash. You definitely find this same thing in plain html. But I think he again misses the point on this issue. Most uses of the mouseover feature in plain html are not required for the functionality of the site. In Flash, they often are. One of the main reasons flash is used is that it makes it easy to do timeline-based animations. When timeline-based animations use mouse *position changes* and not the mouse *state changes* as an input, as they often do, this *will* be broken.

So no, you wouldn't be able to play Bloons as is, even if the iPad did support flash. It would require some modification to its input methods. As it is, it would fire the missile when you touched the screen.

[nikkie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because it doesn't function well. You should never have to install a plugin to be able to navigate the menus of a website. All websites should be tested with box standard web browsers and as such, they don't come with flash and thus, web sites that use flash for important things like menus won't work.

This is correct. I work in this field. We would not use flash for menus, even if we did use flash elsewhere in the site, unless we absolutely had to, or the client required it. They can be very very shiny, but for menus themselves...it would be unwise.

Of course, it depends greatly on your intended audience. If your website contains flash games exclusively, it won't make any difference. The user would not have come to the website otherwise.

If your website is, on the other hand, for contact centers, then no, you wouldn't consider it. And yes, you would support IE6 until hell freezes over.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Uh, O.K., but EVERYONE (or virtually everyone) on Earth, with a desktop, has Flash installed. Don't you?

You can say the same about Java, really.

How else can you get fonts other than the few standard Windows ones, circa 1980, to show on all browsers, then?

That's not the point of what I have installed now. The point it that to use flash for a critical part of a website is asinine. And it breaks all kinds of rules of web browsing. If I was to web browse to Astak's site (uses flash for the menus) from my wife's iPod Touch because that was all I had available at the time, I'd not be able to do much there. So really, anyone who thinks flash is good for menus should NEVER be allowed to design a website.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by nikkie

This is correct. I work in this field. We would not use flash for menus, even if we did use flash elsewhere in the site, unless we absolutely had to, or the client required it. They can be very very shiny, but for menus themselves...it would be unwise.

Of course, it depends greatly on your intended audience. If your website contains flash games exclusively, it won't make any difference. The user would not have come to the website otherwise.

If your website is, on the other hand, for contact centers, then no, you wouldn't consider it. And yes, you would support IE6 until hell freezes over.

I agree 100%. And I also think HTML5 is not yet the answer until all of the main browsers have it available. The true answer is not to use fancy animations and other such stuff that doesn't need to be there. Too many people put up flash where flash doesn't need to be. Heck, in a lot of cases, an animated GIF would do better.

[nikkie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I agree 100%. And I also think HTML5 is not yet the answer until all of the main browsers have it available. The true answer is not to use fancy animations and other such stuff that doesn't need to be there. Too many people put up flash where flash doesn't need to be. Heck, in a lot of cases, an animated GIF would do better.

I'll try to keep my fancy animations off your lawn - as long as you keep your animated gifs off mine!

In all seriousness, I think it is fine to use HTML5 or flash in non-critical websites for entertainment (though not for menus, please!). Just as gaming requires the user to have the latest hardware, it's perfectly reasonable to expect a user who wants to be entertained by your website to go and get a recent browser, or at least keep theirs up-to-date.

For mission critical sites, e.g., governments, banks, etc, they are only now starting to embrace javascript. And tediously at that. Ugh! And you will almost never catch them using flash.

To get back on track...textbooks are going to be mission critical in the future, and that's the only real concern relevant to mobileread and video for now. As the iPad and the Entourage Edge are pretty much the only dedicated (ish) readers at this point to support embedded videos, they can fight out formats between themselves.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

... The true answer is not to use fancy animations and other such stuff that doesn't need to be there.....

Well, the problem is that what is "fancy animations" to you, may simply be a branding requirement, or good design, or added functionality.

It all depends on the target audience. For some sites, the lowest common denominator is fine, for others it's not.

Many may not want to sacrifice a desired user-experience, to ensure that they are viewable by the 0.00002% out there, who can only access them on an iPod Touch.

Presently, for certain content, Flash is often the best way to easily reach the widest possible audience. For many purposes, HTML5 is neither as capable, nor as widely adopted.

As to Nikkie's point, of course some older Flash sites may require "tweaking" to bring them up to "touch" date. But, for many, it will most likely be easier and a lot more cost-efficient to do such updating in Flash, than to scrap them completely and start anew in another platform, with possibly less desirable results and more limited compatibility.

Originally Posted by nikkie

...As the iPad and the Entourage Edge are pretty much the only dedicated (ish) readers at this point to support embedded videos, they can fight out formats between themselves.

I'd be surprised, if we don't see a few Android 2.x tablets on the market before Christmas.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Sonist

....


I'd be surprised, if we don't see a few Android 2.x tablets on the market before Christmas.

I expect several new entries in the e-book category as well as the tablet category in 2010.

[dmaul1114]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I expect several new entries in the e-book category as well as the tablet category in 2010.

I do as well, and I'm very excited to see what comes out.

Should be a rush of devices this year, I'll probably wait for 2nd generation devices in 2011 to really consider buying a tablet.

I don't have much desire to be an early adopter with tablets. Rather let the kinks get worked out and find something that fits my specific needs rather than settling for something that just does ok.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

Since iPod has 74% of the market http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19294.cfm and the closest competitor (Sandisk 7%, Microsoft 1.1%)..... At least to me it would seem that other devices are not continuing to "dominate a good chunk of the market".....

I know if I had a company that had 74% market share, I would be quite happy and would not worry so much about my supposed "propitiatory policies"...

I do think the internet appliance is the wave of the future. Apple is a company that could in fact be the game changer.... but the fun thing is we don't know, and ANYTHING can happen. It will be interesting in 5 years to reflect on all this

In today's fast moving world, we will know everything (is the iPad a success, what happened to flash) after the results of Q4 are out, i.e. early January next year.