Before the naysayers (read: “Apple Fanboys”) break out their disagreement drums, we should explain. By flashy we mean, of coure, Adobe Flash, a technology used in various forms by hundreds of thousands of websites around the world. Have you ever browsed to a website on your iPhone and found some weird symbol where you would normally see feature-rich content? That would be a Flash object, not displayable in the browser that Apple ship with its iPhone and iPad.
Apple’s reasoning for disallowing Flash is that it is “closed and proprietary” (two adjectives equally applicable to Apple, some may say!) and so do not allow it. Adobe’s counter, with its Creative Suite 5 package (read: Dreamweaver etc.) was to build a code translator that took the Flash element and converted it into a format that would work on the iPhone. This would allow developers to continue using Flash (a win for Adobe) and also to sell their Creative Software as being a suitable development platform for iPhone-compatible sites.
The fruit-themed manufacturer has not taken this lying down, though, and has now changed the terms and conditions of its developer license, effectively disallowing code translation tools. This means that Adobe’s “feature” became utterly irrelevant overnight. We suspect that Adobe and Apple are not the best of corporate friends!
From a technical standpoint we can see where a “closed system” is more secure and supportable, and as suppliers of IT Support Solutions we are certainly all for this! However, we do believe in giving users the right to choose, and the denial of supportable technologies on capable platforms does seem to be a little bit backward to us!
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