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[18/12/2009] Would flash website work on Iphone mobiles and others?
The reason you're reading this is because you're probably worried about your website's behavior in Mobile Safari, the iPhone browser. Apple has gone out of its way to promote the Web Experience of the iPhone and has claimed that it is similar to the experience derived while working on a regular personal computer. This, though, is correct only to an extent.It is an undeniable fact that iPhone boasts of a very rich user experience, but at the same time it lacks supports for another rich user interaction platform, Adobe Flash. Yes, the answer to your question is a definite - NO. Websites which contain flash as their presentational medium will not work properly on the iPhone at all. Even if your website utilizes flash for navigational options, the usability of the site in Mobile Safari would be greatly hampered, considering the fact that your navigational menus won't show up.
At the "Flash" end of this, things are going a continuous overhaul. Right from the good old Macromedia days, to the current Adobe Flash 10.x - Adobe has gone a long way it Flash. It is enriching user experience and has now extended support to almost all smartphones utilizing the Symbian, Windows Mobile, webOS, Blackberry or even the new Google Android G1 engine.
Speculations have been such that Adobe is going to add support to the company's Adobe Flash Professional CS5 kit for converting Flash softwares into standalone iPhone applications. That means that you could watch videos from online websites like Hulu.com on your iPhone by utilizing certain custom softwares that Hulu will create for your iPhone using the development tools, offered by Adobe, for iPhone. Whereas, in regular Android G1 phones or the Blackberry, Hulu videos can be watched right from within your browser.
The lack of flash is as frustrating for the iPhone users as it has become to the webmasters and flash developers. These users feel that they are deprived of an essential chunk of the internet owing to the lack of Flash Support on the iPhone. Such is the discontent amongst the users, that when Apple launched a TV commercial claiming that the iPhone constituted of all parts of the internet - the ad had to be brought down in the UK by UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after two users claimed that the ad was misleading since the iPhone did not constitute flash.
The question, however, is that - why are the iPhone users segmented from this enriched user experience? The answers are many - some suggest that Apple chose performance over experience. The company is more concerned about its users facing problems with excessive battery drainage or maybe even torpid browsing. Others say that's because of the lack of interest for each other that both Adobe and Apple have.
Whatever maybe the reason, apparently webmasters with websites in flash will have to look for other options or totally ignore the iPhone crowd - since flash and iPhone don't seem to be mingling together anytime soon.
