Systeme D

19 January 2007

iPhone and Flash

I'm still intrigued as to whether the iPhone will support Flash, not least because a hand-held OSM editor would be very cool.

The usual pixel-analysers spotted a broken plug-in image when a New York Times webpage was displayed in the keynote. Since then, there's been any amount of speculation, largely fed by just two interview snippets. First from David Pogue:

Markoff: “And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?”

Jobs: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

Markoff: “Flash?”

Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”

And then from Andy Ihnatko:

The lockdown on software is an area of ongoing suspicious interest. I noticed that the iPhone's pre-release browser was missing some plug-ins. I asked if Real and Macromedia et al. would be writing media plug-ins for the iPhone's Web browser, and was told that no, the browser would ship with plug-ins, but Apple would be writing them all in-house. Odd, that.

Maybe not so odd. Apple has previous with the SWF format. QuickTime has long contained a Flash Player for SWF v5, still present though disabled by default. Keynote imports and exports SWFs. The SWF format (which has been comprehensively documented and reverse-engineered in countless open-source projects) is fairly simple: perhaps the hardest bit is executing the ActionScript bytecode. Guess what? Adobe open-sourced the ActionScript Virtual Machine the other month.

So an Apple-written SWF player in the iPhone seems very possible. Conspiracy theorists might argue it'd be a neat swipe at Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or whatever Microsoft's latest "Flash killer" might be, but I'm way out of my depth with that.

(The other posting worth reading is one from Mike Downey, Apollo product manager at Adobe.)

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