Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
[*]Is this a good or bad thing? To what extent does "no new Flash player on mobile" coupled with the rising sales of tablets mean you'd have to be an idiot to be writing new content in Flash?
I'd say it depends on the content. I think anyone creating a Flash-only public website these days is a dolt, with the exception of desktop-only entertainment/interactive/rich-media work that cannot be created using other tech. Restaurants remain some of the biggest culprits here, using weeeee pretteee Flash bollocks for simple sites and that doesn't work on iOS (i.e. not for many people out and about and maybe looking for a local restaurant), nor, often, terribly well even on tablets that claim to support Flash.
Flash in and of itself will still have a fairly long life, though; that said, it's just effectively become Director—an authoring environment for apps and games. I'm not thrilled about that prospect. The Flash bits in CS are dreadful (such as the FW palettes that don't bloody well work on Mac or Windows), and I've been chatting with game devs about Flash games on iOS lacking optimisation; the response: if games are fun, backwards compatibility doesn't matter anyway. In this case, 'backwards compatibility' meant 'anything other than the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S'. Gnh.
Quote:
[*]Would this have happened if Apple had allowed Adobe to ship a Flash plugin for the iPhone?[/list]
No, or at least not nearly as rapidly. It's Apple's moves that 'forced' a bunch of companies towards HTML5* video; it was also one of the things that really pushed a huge amount of creativity and development regarding web standards and libraries for fairly advanced tasks. (And before someone goes "Well, you would say that, Apple fan-boy", I'm making this statement on the basis of being heavily immersed in web design/dev through my regular contributions to .net, which have involved talking with dozens of devs since Apple's announcement. Even the hugely pro-Flash people I once knew barely touch it now, with a few exceptions, such as 2Advanced—and even those guys aren't relying on the tech for almost everything these days.)
* And, yes,
I know, but blame W3C, not me.