Saturday, August 21, 2010

Flash on iPhone - sure

As we all know, Apple does not allow flash on their mobile devices. Unfortunately many websites are utilizing flash for videos, games or advertising. Flash is a good tool to build fast user interactive elements with not worrying about the browser type.
HTML5 is coming which can do many things we use flash for, but is not available for all browsers (internet explorer does not support HTML5).
Apple wants that companies are moving away from flash, which is great and hopefully comes sometimes.
I think flash is in certain ways very useful but used too much here in the USA (Europe is not so much flash heavy).
But till companies moved to the lighter and faster HTML5 we have a problem with Apple mobile devices.
The alternative is to buy an android phone with version 2.2 or download for the iPhone an app called "cloud browse".
This app does basically build a remote connection to a server which will serve the pages for the user. The webpages will be rendered on the remote computer, your iPhone is basically just a window.
You will be able to navigate and interact with flash parts, but it is slightly slower and a mouse arrow appears when you do things (which a native mobile device does not has) but who cares as long it works.
Cloud browse works pretty fast, but unfortunately only an iPhone version is available. Hopefully an iPad version is coming too. The app is free, which is great.
I tested it for a few days and it worked remarkable good, speed was faster as expected. Because you surf the Internet from a remote computer, the pages will be never shown as mobile pages, hence the remote computer is not mobile.
I am not sure how fast the surfing will be when many people are going to use this service.
I would not recommend this app as your main browser, but when you know you need to go to a website full of flash then the app is a good choice.

The screenshot below shows walmart.com surfed with cloud browse. The image with the pasta is actually flash as well the poll.




The same page accessed with the native safari browser on the iPad. As you can see poll and the pasta are missing.



- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

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