Flash 10: What it means to you
The iPhone has made many strides to bringing the true desktop web experience on mobile devices, but there has been one glaring omission to its arsenal, Flash. For those who don’t know what Adobe Flash is, it’s essential the backbone of that media experience that you find so dear on the interwebs nowadays. From streaming video sites like Youtube to all those addicting games, whether you like it or not, the whole web community has embraced Flash to the point where it has become an integral part of any browsing experience. However, there isn’t a mobile device or platform out yet that has taken course and attempted to port these experiences to the ever growing mobile web world. Enter Adobe, who has finally taken strides to bring Flash to a plethora of smartphones, with two glaring exceptions, Apple and RIM.
Adobe’s Open Screen Project is seeking to fill the void. With an alliance of companies, Palm, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are working to port Flash 10 to their various mobile platforms. So what does it mean to you the user? Well it means that before, where there was no hope of bringing those web applications without significant reduced functionality to your phone, now with the concerted effort of almost all the big guns working together, we’ll most certainly be able to view native youtube, hulu and many of the other applications that run entirely in Flash, mirroring that desktop browsing experience almost 100%. As a word of caution though, bringing Flash to mobile devices almost means bringing those Flash ads you see to mobile devices as well, but I for one would gladly take that punch in the gut to be able to watch my favorite show on hulu on the go.
Read more here and here. Watch Adobe’s press conference here.
--written by Peter To--
