Apple’s hatred of Adobe Flash is increasingly coming back to bite it. It is promoting the new iPad tablet as a video optimized device – but one that doesn’t support Flash based YouTube and most other web video. And the lack of Flash is deterring content partners and some consumers, leaving Hewlett-Packard and Dell with a powerful selling point for their upcoming Windows slates.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs continues to argue that the iPhone and new iPad need a heavier duty media viewing plug-in than Flash, even though the full PC version of the technology is available for sufficiently powerful mobile devices. He also cites battery life and other arguments, rather as he does for failing to support multitasking in third party apps. But while Apple has more power than most to direct what the public wants to buy, there are limits, and the lack of Flash is becoming a sticking point for many users. Apple will almost certainly give way on multitasking in time for iPhone OS 4.0, but will it do the same for Flash?
If lack of Flash becomes a growing factor for many programmers and end users, it could impact the uptake of the iPad, and in turn, reduce Apple’s negotiating power with content partners. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is having problems finalizing many of its hoped-for deals for the tablet, even though it has positioned the device as heavily driven by integrated content from books to video. Its potential partners are concerned about the impact of Apple deals on their traditional business models, and may be holding out to see whether the iPad really is a hit – making it even more urgent that the product does not have any features, or omissions, that would seriously put customers off.
According to the WSJ’s sources, Apple wanted to offer TV show subscriptions and individual TV episode sales on the iPad, as it does on iTunes, but was pushing the TV networks to drop their average episode price from $2.99 to 99 cents for the iPad versions. The TV networks fear this could eat into cable or satellite TV subscriptions, for which they receive a substantial per-user fee.
As for magazine and newspaper publishers, many see tablets and ereaders as the saviors of their business from free web-based content – if they can deliver a sufficiently compelling experience on these optimized gadgets to lure users to pay fees. But many publishers are reportedly unable to get their iPad apps finished in time for shipment in the US on April 3.
And one reason brings us right back to Flash. The usual tight regulations and red tape with which Apple surrounds its developer bases have caused problems for the publishers, but they are also hampered by the lack of Flash, which is used extensively for video clips within their titles. Some firms are said to be unwilling to abandon Flash on Steve Jobs’ say-so, while others say it will just take them longer to ready their products if they have to use an alternative.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will support Flash on Windows Phone 7, and indeed, the Adobe browser plug-in will be ready before the Redmond giant’s own Silverlight alternative. The Silverlight rich media platform will be the primary development environment for the new OS, once release 4 is finished (before that, programmers will receive a version of Silverlight 3, enhanced with some release 4 features, for development purposes).
But in its plug-in, viewer guise, Silverlight will not be able to run in early Windows Phone 7 devices, because most have insufficiently powerful processors. Microsoft says it is evaluating a plug-in model for subsequent releases of Windows Phone.
A fine irony would be to see Silverlight on the iPhone, and that will soon be possible – at least in the version created by the open source Novell Mono project, which puts Microsoft .Net development technologies on non-Windows platforms. This project is stepping up its mobile efforts, and has its eye on the iPhone and Android. It will preview MonoDroid in August, and at the same time, will show off a version of Microsoft’s rich web toolkit, Silverlight, for the iPhone. The Mono-based Moonlight project previously put Silverlight on Linux, Mac and Unix.
Another upcoming release from the open source Novell unit is Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, which integrates with Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE to enable development of Mono-based applications. This will also support Android and iPhone in future. And the head of the project, Miguel de Icaza, indicates that Mono will soon add support for the Nokia-Intel mobile Linux platform, MeeGo. This is not surprising, given that the first open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux was created for Moblin, the Intel half of the MeeGo technology.
Unlike some attempts to split Microsoft tools from Windows, Mono has the support of the Redmond giant. When the Moblin version of Silverlight was mooted, it commented: “We see this is a clear extension of our current efforts with Novell where we are building an open source implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight that is targeted at the broad range of Linux.”
This was mainly a PC oriented move, but Novell pushed Mono into the mobile world last year, when it unveiled its first Apple targeted product, MonoTouch, its first app for creating .Net programs for the iPhone. (Microsoft has also worked directly with Nokia to put Silverlight on Symbian).
Ethan Nagel of developer firm Nagel Technologies told Techworld at Microsoft’s MIX conference this week: “Mono’s amazing. It’s a surprisingly flexible environment. It’s quicker than rewriting your code every time, and you’re not making any compromises.”
Novell also demonstrated Xbox 360 games being translated into iPhone apps, and when it does the same for Android, it could take Xbox apps into the mobile mass market. At MIX, Novell showed an iPhone running an open source derivative of an Indiana Jones game for Xbox and Windows Phone, which was created using Microsoft’s XNA framework, based on .Net.