Slacy’s Blog

Just a quick note for another item that will be the death of flash: Netbooks.

As the computer market continues to move down in CPU power, price and size, the ability of a standard netbook to run sites like hulu.com has become questionable. The little Atom 1.6GHz processor just doesn’t have enough oomph to play large-format videos. (Youtube.com works great, its just the other sites that are pushing larger resolutions and larger bitrates and more sophisticated codecs).

Additionally, flash is just something that sits there on web pages using up your CPU, and that means that it’s using up your battery, which is bad. So, I’ve disabled flash altogether (via FlashBlock) on my netbook’s configuration, and I’m tempted to do so on my desktop machines as well. FlashBlock gives a nice “click to play” experience that I really prefer over the default of many sites which is to just start playing flash videos & sound as soon as you enter the page.

Maybe the netbook processors are going to improve, and maybe that means that in another year or so flash won’t be such a big deal, but in the interm, I think Adobe is in a pretty bad situation, especially due to the mobile factors I mentioned in my last post…

I’ve been curiously watching the developments (or lack thereof) surrounding Adobe and the use of Flash on mobile platforms like the iPhone and Android handsets. Here’s my summarization of the situation as it stands today:

• No browser (mobile or otherwise) has Flash built in.  All browsers require a “plugin” provided by Adobe to play back Flash content.
• Mobile browsers are behind the times when it comes to plugin support, but even though, Adobe isn’t providing mobile phone manufacturers any sort of mobile flash experience. (FlashLight excepted, but this isn’t on major mobile platforms)
• Adobe got the short end of the stick when it comes to Flash.  Their playback platform powers the worlds largest sites (youtube.com) but they don’t see a dime of revenue from it’s popularity, because most users consume flash content but don’t produce it, and flash producers are who Adobe has previously marketed their products to.
• In all likelihood, Adobe wants to be paid for porting Flash to platforms like the iPhone and Android.  I don’t think that either Apple or Google would have any part in paying Adobe for such a “right” to use flash.  As proof of this, I present the YouTube non-flash applications on iPhone and Android, which offer a rich non-flash experience that could easily make it’s way back to the desktop browser.

Assuming that Adobe stands fast, and Flash never becomes an integrated part of the mobile browser platform, and, as the mobile platform base grows, sites that rely on Flash for their user interface will be locking out the mobile browsing platform.  So, these sites will realize that they would reach a larger audience if they offered a non-flash mobile-friendly experience.  Thus, they’ll port their flash user interface to AJAX, which works on both desktop and mobile browsers.   Flash usage will begin to decline.  As Adobe gets more anxious to squeeze the dollars from Flash, then the free mobile-supported alternatives will arise.  Greater use of SVG graphics, more AJAX, and possibly even some open-source flash-like technology that will be free and usable for mobile browser developers.

Did I mention HTML5’s <video> element?

Did I mention ViXimo?  This is just the beginning of mobile-enabled flash alternatives, and proof that the above is coming true already.

This time its called Chain Factor. Read the brief instructions on the right before starting. It’ll take a game or 2 before you get the hang of it…. then, you’re addicted, like me.

Normally, these sorts of amusements aren’t worth mentioning, but this version of ‘launchball’ is really fantastic implementation of games in the ‘rube goldberg machine building’ genre. The twist here is that it uses real ’scientific’ principles like heat, magnetism, steam, solar, and wind power. I really enjoyed it.