Hey y’all, got a quick question. Does the current generation of iPod Touch units have support for imbedded Flash or Java objects? For example, if I go to a site like ArmorGames over wifi on it, will it load the flash or java games?
iPhone and iPod Touch support Javascript, but not Java or Flash. There have been rumors circulating that Flash might be supported soon. It’s not a technical issue, is purely political / marketing.
Not true. Both Flash and Java are noted resource hogs, especially the OS X versions which have not been well-optimized by Sun and Adobe. Flash in particular has a big impact on CPU use, and therefore battery life. Battery life is one of the reasons expressly stated by Jobs, confirmed through independent testing, that the first iPhone didn’t include 3G; the chips suck power. It’s a trade off between performance and battery life, along with internal engineering for the chosen form-factor.
Including Java support opens up possibilities for non-OS X native applications. This is obviously not something Apple wants to do right now. They’ve opened up a specific development environment with their official SDK, and they’re pushing native Cocoa, along with integrated interface APIs. The interface is something that is integral to the iPhone’s design, and again Java doesn’t fit on the iPhone; Java has its own, separate interface APIs.
The business considerations regarding Flash and Java on the iPhone aren’t trivial ones either. The way it stands right now, Apple has minimal licensed technology included in the software. If they put in Flash and Java, they become more dependent on outside companies to deliver software for their hardware. Being dependent on another company is not a position Apple, or any other business, wants to be put in.
Don’t forget that Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software one. They write nice integrated software that complements their hardware in order to sell more physical units. Money made from their software is incidental. They like making the whole widget because then they have control of the overall design. Good design and usability is paramount to maintaining and increasing their market. That’s how they got and maintain their loyal user base in the first place.
Unless Java and Flash magically become more efficient or the CPUs used in the iPhone do, and battery performance gets much better, there is a technical reason to exclude that software. The business considerations are obvious. What they’re using for video right now is H.264/MPEG-4 video, which is an ISO standard format and therefore non-proprietary, unlike Adobe’s implementation. By using that, Apple has the chance to reduce Flash’s importance for video delivery on the 'net, get better internally-tunable performance and integration with their software, and they don’t have to pay Adobe for the privilege of using a file format that Apple helped develop the standard for. Seems to be pretty much a no-brainer to me.
Right. like I said, it’s NOT a technical issue.
Everything is a tradeoff in a cell phone. Apple has decided to forego Flash at the moment, perhaps because of battery life, but more likely because they only want to support standards-compliant websites.
There’s no magic number for battery life. If the 3G iPhone gets less battery life, than the current version, they will still sell them, because people want higher internet browsing speeds.
You and I have very different interpretations of the phrase “technical issue,” then. To me, that means there’s a trade off that the company isn’t willing to make or a feature that they deliberately excluded for performance reasons. Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, there’s no technical reason they didn’t include IrDA, or GPS, or a swappable memory-card slot, or a higher MP camera, or any of the other features people have complained that the iPhone doesn’t have. It’s technically possible to have all of those things since, after all, other cell phones include them.
Except that including some or all of these features would have been outside their design parameters, which to me does make it a technical issue. The “magic battery life” is whatever the lead designer, or in this case probably Jobs himself, decided was going to be their target. Apple obviously decided they wanted to shoot for roughly twice the battery life of a typical smart phone, and that along with other considerations was important enough for them to limit the capabilities in hardware and software. How is that not a technical issue?
IMHO, anything that can be addressed with software or training isn’t a technical issue.
Apple (or Adobe, I don’t know which) already has code that pops up a dialog box informing the user that scripts are causing the browser to run slow, do you want to abort? So, if Apple really wanted to have Flash running on the current iPhone, they could just add code that says “Some Flash animations are sucking your battery down really fast, do you want to disable?” Seems that there are a lot of people who would be willing to make the tradeoff just to be able to view some otherwise unusable sites.
No, I’m pretty sure it’s not the battery issue that drove this decision…