Jobs Continues to be in Flash Denial

We know Steve Jobs hates Flash and will not allow it on his ‘iP’ platform. He cites bugs, consumption and general denial. If iPad used Flash he claims battery life would reduce fro 10 hours to 1 ½ hours. We sit an listen to the man because he is Steve Jobs but we also recognise his Midas touch might be often goldplated. The launch of the iPad had blue cubes displayed where sites had Flash but it didn’t sdistrurb Jobs as he obviously think we are all wrong and he is right.

Adobe is pushing the Flash media player onto a wide range of devices, with Flash Player 10.1 on Linux, Android and Windows tablets and mobiles. Jobs favours HTML 5 standardisation and pushing its adoption and development use and says that Flash causes crashes on Mac OS and that it has been optimised for Windows. Apple first said it would be adopting Flash then took the decision to ship the iPhone's Safari browser without the Flash plug-in.

Adobe is now working on optimising Flash and Flash Lite for OpenVG 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 and is using Imagination's PowerVR SGX and VGX graphics cores. It is also collaborating on optimising Flash 10.1 for Android, Windows CE and Linux. 19 of the top 20 mobile device manufacturers are now part of the Open Screen Project with only Apple being the major absent. Adobe's Open Screen Project is creating chipset support for the Flash runtime on such as Nvidia's Tegra 2, Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Freescale's i.MX515. This certainly is a game changing move.

Now Jobs is widely reported trying to get the Wall Street Journal to ditch Flash for the iPad. The Journal is not alone in adopting Flash to deploy Videos, slide shows, news, graphics. Jobs says of Flash, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology." He compares it to obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch; the floppy drive, old data ports and the CD.

Jobs’s biggest claim is that would be "trivial" he suggested the Journal used the H.264 video compression system could be very effective and cheap on video but is reliant on a privately licensed and patented technology. H. 264 clearly does not fully replace Flash today but imagine the effort to write most of the sites out there today happily running Flash? Imagine the training, the skills acquisition and the integration into the editorial workflow.

To read more on HTML5, we recommend the Gizmodo article, ‘ Why HTML isn’t going to save the Internet’ . We it offering a form of DRM to websites restricting users ability easily capture video and audio content to their hard drives, coupling ads to content and simply doing things it is almost impossible to do without Flash.