As anyone with an iPhone or iPad knows, Steve Jobs has some major issues with Adobe Flash.  He’s correct in some of his concerns, but in my opinion, he’s currently putting his products (and users) at a disadvantage.  I’m not going to venture into which of his arguments are reasonable, and which are far-fetched.  Apple dictates what its products support, and Steve Jobs dictates what Apple does.  So, what does this mean for the development community?  Over the past few years, Flash has been increasingly billed as the more and more universal platform for developing multimedia.  With support on so many browsers, Flash had a penetration rate that was unrivaled.  Now, Flash development needs to be effectively abandoned, because so many users want to enjoy the content on their mobile devices. When someone looks at a website on an iPhone, and it tells them “Flash is required to view this site,” the site might as well not even exist.  There are some wonderful Javascript libraries out there (jQuery for one) that provide good cross-browser animations.  However, the issue with JavaScript remains that all code is available to anyone who knows how to operate Firebug, once the code is used on a site.  Another issue exists with video.  Flash provides a good, universal platform for delivering video content to users.  HTML5 supports the direct embedding of video in HTML pages, without the need for a browser plug-in.  Not all browsers currently support HTML5, and the ones that do can’t agree on a universal video codec.  So, this still leaves us compressing videos twice.  Ultimately, the move to more open technologies is a good one.  Unfortunately, full support is not quite there, and probably will not be for some time.  Mr. Jobs is making a bold move by trying to expedite the transition, but it’s a little “too soon.”

Steve Jobs – Thoughts on Flash