It's a skirmish in the closed proprietary standard verses the open standard war. Not the Apple v. Adobe war.
Flash causes the devices to CRASH...It is the primary reason Safari crashes. It's also one of the primary reasons Internet Explorer crashs... and then Apple, Microsoft, or the other device manufacturers get the blame when the fault lies with Adobe. Adobe FLash is a resource hog on ALL platforms it's on. On desktops, that's not much of a problem, but when you get onto portable devices with limited resources, it is.
For touchscreen devices, the input problem is inherent at the core of Flash... it expects input that the touch screen devices CANNOT PROVIDE... mouse overs, mouse clicks, and keyboard inputs... because the touch screen devices do not have these input devices choosing instead to utilize the screen itself as the input device. FLASH does not know how to handle that input. FLASH also puts up pop-up menus within it's own animations, and expects to be able to handle it's own input... from, you guessed it, mouse overs, clicks, and keyboard inputs. Those things cannot happen from a touch screen tablet.
Rewriting FLASH to accept input from touch screens is not the answer either... because there are literally thousands of FLASH scripts out there that expect the OLD paradigm inputs that still will not work with the new devices... so there will be two levels... new FLASH content that will work, and old that will not. Still not a good thing. The best approach is to replace the old, proprietary FLASH with modern open standards accepted by the HTML international body charged with making sure that the Internet IS open and accessible to all.
Thanks! You have been very helpful, and I actually learned a few things!
Y’know, I gotta say, Sword...that’s the best explanation for touch-screen devices not using Flash that I’ve read.
I use Flash a lot here, but I usually get the spinning beach ball until the resources clear...
See ya’,
Ed