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Senior director of engineering at Adobe Paul Betlem confirmed the company is working on a mobile version of Flash player for Apple's iPhone. The announcement was in response to a question asked at a town hall meeting Tuesday at Brighton, UK.
The iPhone has a fully capable web browser except in one respect: Flash. However, the iPhone is a proprietary platform, and concerns have been voiced as to whether Apple's increasingly guarded system will support Adobe's multimedia player.
The demand for Flash by users is definitely there. It is currently installed by default in 95% of web users browsers, which makes the software a legitimate part of any web experience. Most uses of Flash involve embedded videos, but there are many flash applications from games to ads to menus used around the web. Flash is so built into the modern web experience, there is a tendency by web surfers to barely notice when they are seeing a Flash movie. That is, until you pick up an iPhone and realize what you'd be missing.
Adobe's last foray into mobile Flash, dubbed Flash lite, was less than bright. The streamlined flash player had limited capability, but there was no way to limit Flash movies played on the device based on compatibility. We assume the new player will be able to handle anything the desktop counterpart can handle, or at least be able to tell the website it needs a mobile-capable version of the movie.
Whatever the case, there's no word from Apple yet if they'll accept the application on the device. It is possible the webkit-based browser will be looking at other ways to achieve the same thing without depending on Adobe for interactive media. Aspects of HTML 5.0, for example, have some of the same feature sets as Flash. However, HTML 5.0 is brand new and is only starting to see integration in browsers. Flash is available now.
[via Flash Magazine]
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