Mark Lyn­der­say

The bat­tle be­tween Ap­ple and Adobe over the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Flash in their mo­bile plat­forms heat­ed up a few weeks ago when the iPhone cre­ator changed their de­vel­op­er agree­ments to specif­i­cal­ly pro­hib­it the Flash-to-iPhone com­pil­er that Adobe planned to use to get Flash based ap­pli­ca­tions run­ning on the iPhone OS. In a per­cep­tive piece on his blog, Dar­ing Fire­ball, John Gru­ber points out that Ap­ple is try­ing to stop "meta-plat­forms" from be­ing de­vel­oped on top of the iPhone OS. These de­vel­op­ment plat­forms, which in­clude Nov­ell's Mono­touch, an im­ple­men­ta­tion of Mi­crosoft's. Net pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment and the game plat­form Uni­ty, would al­low de­vel­op­ers to cre­ate soft­ware that runs on any plat­form that sup­ports the un­der­ly­ing code, open­ing up a much broad­er base of cus­tomers for de­vel­op­ers. This isn't a sur­pris­ing new mod­el of soft­ware de­vel­op­ment. It was the ba­sis for the cre­ation of Sun Mi­crosys­tems' Ja­va de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment, which al­lows all Ja­va soft­ware to run on any com­put­er which can run the Ja­va Run­time en­vi­ron­ment.

For users, it's a sim­ple as in­stalling Ja­va on their com­put­er and then run­ning any Ja­va soft­ware. It's in­stant plat­form neu­tral­i­ty. This seems like a big win for de­vel­op­ers and users, but it hasn't worked out that way for Ja­va. Soft­ware de­vel­oped us­ing Ja­va tools re­main slow­er than soft­ware that tar­gets a spe­cif­ic soft­ware and hard­ware plat­form, Ja­va ap­pli­ca­tions are no­to­ri­ous­ly ug­ly and of­ten user hos­tile, and the growth of the en­vi­ron­ment has been slow and plagued by con­stant op­er­at­ing sys­tem and hard­ware re­vi­sions. De­spite be­ing a good idea, Ja­va hasn't changed the world of soft­ware pro­gram­ming. Adobe's Flash, po­si­tioned as a de­vel­op­ment plat­form, is a fair­ly re­cent idea. In­tro­duced in 1995 as a com­peti­tor to Macro­me­dia's Shock­wave, Fu­ture Splash An­i­ma­tor was a faster way of in­tro­duc­ing ba­sic an­i­ma­tion to a Web site. Af­ter Macro­me­dia bought and re­named it in 1996, Flash be­gan to ab­sorb Shock­wave's fea­tures, all but re­plac­ing it as the de­ploy­ment plat­form of choice for mul­ti­me­dia rich Web sites.

Flash, it should be not­ed, evolved as a way of meet­ing the needs of de­sign­ers and de­vel­op­ers who want­ed to build in­ter­ac­tive Web sites while the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium (W3C) dithered through the de­tails of for­mal stan­dards for the In­ter­net. Some of what Flash was orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed to do has since be­come pos­si­ble us­ing open stan­dards like XML, CSS and Javascript. Even the W3C is catch­ing up with the mul­ti­me­dia crav­ings of the web with stan­dards in HTML5 that out­line stan­dards for dis­play­ing me­dia on­line. Ap­ple's own re­sis­tance to the Flash plug-in prob­a­bly stems from the epic aw­ful­ness of the soft­ware on the Mac plat­form. Steve Jobs' dis­plea­sure with the plug-in has been vo­cal and pub­lic, but Ap­ple and Adobe, as blog­ger Kei­th_in_TnT re­mind­ed me, have been squab­bling since the in­tro­duc­tion of Type 1 Post­script fonts.

Flash use on the web has surged and Adobe claims (with sta­tis­tics ac­knowl­edged as da­ta ex­trap­o­la­tions) that the Flash plug-in is in­stalled in 98.9 per cent of to­day's web browsers. Still there's in­ter­est in so-called 'Flash block­ers,' soft­ware that stops the plug-in from load­ing con­tent un­less the user specif­i­cal­ly clicks a but­ton.

For all its ubiq­ui­ty, Adobe's Flash re­mains a pro­pri­etary so­lu­tion and the Web hasn't been kind to pro­to­cols that aren't tru­ly open. Ap­ple's re­sis­tance to any de­ploy­ment of Flash on the iPhone and the iPad isn't like­ly to hurt Adobe as much as ac­cep­tance of al­ter­na­tives to the age­ing plug-in tech­nol­o­gy will. That pos­si­bil­i­ty is like­ly to prove to be more dead­ly to the con­tin­ued dom­i­na­tion of Flash as a tech­nol­o­gy than Ap­ple's strate­gic petu­lance.

An ex­tend­ed ver­sion of this col­umn, with ad­di­tion­al notes and sta­tis­tics, is post­ed here: http://lyn­der­say­dig­i­tal.com/bd/10.html