Skyfire App Brings Flash to iPhone

By: Chloe Albanesius
From: http://www.pcmag.com/

Among the few drawbacks of Apple's iOS is its incompatibility with Adobe Flash. Video sites like YouTube and Hulu have gotten around this by creating standalone apps for the iPhone and iPad, but what if you just want to watch a video in a browser window? Until now you've been out of luck, but an app from Skyfire could change that.

Skyfire has been developing an app that brings Flash to the iPhone for several months now, but the app has reportedly received the seal of approval from Apple, and is set to hit the Apple App Store at 9am on Thursday morning for $2.99, according to CNN Money.

The app transcodes Flash content into HTML5 so it will play on your iPhone. In an October demo video (below), Jason Guesman, Skyfire's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the app has been designed as a full-fledged Web browser. It includes an address bar, Google search box, and popular trending search terms.

The app embeds the Safari browser; if you click to a site with Flash video, you'll initially encounter a Flash error on the video you want to watch. But the "SkyBar" at the bottom of the screen analyzes the page and pops up a thumbnail of the requested video; click the thumbnail and the video will start to play after it's transcoded to HTML5.

Guesman also promised adaptive streaming, which will provide coverage in areas where the network connection is weak.

"Skyfire for iPhone was built in accordance with Apple guidelines, including the use of a WebKit browser core shared with Safari, and h.264 adaptive streaming," Skyfire said in an October blog post. "Skyfire enables Flash on Apple devices by transcoding video content into HTML5 on the fly from millions of web sites; it supports iOS devices via Apple's HTTP live streaming. Skyfire's famed cloud-computing technology also adapts video content based on connection strength, giving the user the best video experience that will play smoothly given their wireless network conditions at the time."

The SkyBar also includes an explore icon that will recommend other content based on the current Web site, as well as a share icon that lets users share on Facebook, Twitter, or via e-mail.

A Skyfire representative could not immediately confirm the App Store launch time.

The battle between Adobe and Apple over Flash on iOS has not been a private one. In the wake of the iPad announcement in January, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs reportedly told employees at a town hall meeting that Apple avoided Flash on the iPad because it is too buggy and HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe naturally disagreed.

Jobs took it one step further in April when he posted a note on the Apple Web site in which he called Flash closed, unstable, and antiquated. Adobe issued a rather subdued response, saying it will instead focus on Android development. Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch later accused Apple of creating a walled garden of content.

Apple further irked Adobe in April when it released an updated version of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. As a result, Adobe announced that it would no longer invest in iPhone-based Flash development. In September, Apple relaxed those rules and Adobe said it would resume development on Flash for the iPhone.

Run Flash on iPad with Frash

Posted by: Ronald Williams
From: http://hardgeek.org/

Flash on iPad ? Steve Jobs says, “No, it can’t happen because flash is not meant for its touchscreen technology.” But he is proven wrong by a developer with his new program, the Frash. With Frash, he was able to run flash on an iPad.

Frash is originally an adobe flash plug in that was released for the Android phones recently. You can use flash in the mobile Safari browser of iPad with Frash. See below the video of playing some flash games like “Kitten Cannon” on iPad with Frash.

Frash is still in its unstable form but it will soon be ready and Apple will have to find some other excuse for not running flash on iPad and iPhone. You have to jailbreak you iPad to use Frash. But if you don’t want to miss all those cool flash games, why not jailbreak you iPad. It may even work the same way on iPhone but only on the 3GS and iPhone4.

No Flash On The iPad? No Problem. Brightcove Turns Videos Into HTML5.

by Erick Schonfeld
from http://techcrunch.com/

The lack of Flash on the iPad is a sore point for many and often listed as one of its greatest potential weaknesses. Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is bad enough, but on the larger iPad with full-screen browsing, its absence will be much more noticeable. Or will it? Already the Web is adapting. Videos powered by Brightcove, for instance, will stream in an HTML5 video player when it detects an iPad. On the iPhone browser, the video thumbnail will open up the Quicktime player. It will also work on Android phones.

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is agnostic about the Flash Vs. HTML5 debate. “HTML5 is great,” he says. “It is an open standard, and firmly entrenched in the Apple device platform. Flash can’t reach those platforms for political and business reasons.” But HTML5 simply cannot do everything Flash can, especially when it comes to supporting advertising, audience measurement, customized players, and social sharing. So he decided to bring HTML5 video to parity with Flash for anyone who uses Brightcove. (Note that this is for videos playing in the browser. Brightcove already supports video playback in iPhone apps).

It will take until the end of the year to reach full parity with Flash, but that is his goal. At first, Brightcove videos will play back in a very basic HTML5 player when they detect an iPad. But over the next nine months or so, Brightcove will add the same audience measurement and advertising features available in its regular Flash player. Brightcove will still display the video in Flash when the viewing device supports it, but for the iPad, iPhone, and even Android phones, videos will play in HTML5 and most viewers probably won’t notice the difference.

Already today you can see who these videos work on the iPhone. For example, Brightcove turned on the capability for Techcrunch videos such as this one when viewed in an iPhone browser. When the iPad comes out, you will be able to watch our videos on there as well, along with videos on the sites of the New York Times and Time magazine, who also use Brightcove.

Making HTML5 playback available is just something all video platforms will eventually do. Ooyala is set to offer it for the iPad as well, and YouTube is moving in that direction as well.

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CrunchBase Information

Brightcove

Website:	brightcove.com
Location:	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Funding:	$91.1M

Brightcove is an Internet TV platform/network that allows content makers to monetize their content with ad revenues. The site has two different content makers in mind, independents and established media entities. Brightcove provides different… Learn More

iPad

Company:	Apple
Website:	apple.com/ipad
Launch Date:	January 27, 2010

The Apple iPad, formerly referred to as the Apple Tablet, is a touch-pad tablet computer announced in January 2010, to be shipped on… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

NPR, WSJ plan Flash-free Web sites for Apple iPad

By Katie Marsal
From http://www.appleinsider.com/

In addition to new App Store software, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal also plan to create specific versions of their Web sites completely devoid of Adobe Flash for iPad users.

This week Peter Kafka with MediaMemo revealed that both NPR and the Journal will convert at least some portions of their Web site to load properly on the iPad. The custom-built sites will feature the same content and run concurrently with the traditional and iPhone/mobile-friendly versions of each Web site.

"Visitors to the newspaper's front page will see an iPad-specific, Flash-free page," Kafka said of the Journal's iPad Web site. "But those who click deeper into the site will eventually find pages that haven’t been converted."

The news comes weeks after Virgin America revealed it dropped Flash content from its new Web site in order to allow users with iPhones to check in for flights.

But the Journal and NPR are both also creating App Store software specifically for the iPad, suggesting that content providers are taking a multi-pronged approach to Apple's forthcoming multimedia device. Kinsey Wilson, head of digital media for NPR, declined to give Kafka an advance look at the organization's forthcoming iPad application or Web site, but did provide a hint as to what the experience could be like.

"Wilson says that while iPhone apps are a 'very intentional experience' --you load the thing up and seek out specific content -- he thinks the iPad will be a 'lean back device,'" Kafka wrote. "That's traditionally the distinction multimedia types use to differentiate between a computer and a TV. Intriguing."

The exclusion of Adobe Flash from the iPad and subsequent comments attributed to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in which he allegedly called the Web standard a "CPU hog," have led to a considerable amount of debate over its merits and shortcomings.

Contributing to the conversation in January was Google, which added support for rival format HTML5 to the most popular video destination on the Internet, YouTube. The beta opt-in program is available only for browsers that support both HTML5 and H.264 video encoding. Apple, too, has placed its support behind HTML5.

For more on why Apple isn't likely to add support for Flash in the iPhone OS, read AppleInsider's three-part Flash Wars series.

What Steve Jobs Said During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo

From: http://gawker.com

We know that Apple's CEO is no fan of Flash, the Web animation software. But it sounds like Steve Jobs really unleashed on the Adobe system to try and convince the Wall Street Journal to ditch it for the iPad.

Welcome to the nasty side of Jobs's famous Reality Distortion Field. The fun side had its turn when Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet computer in San Francisco last month. The dark side came several days later, when Jobs sat down with select Journal staff on the third floor of the News Corporation building in New York as part of a broader media tour.

Like other newspapers, the Journal is heavily invested in Flash as a way to deploy not only video but also slide shows and other interactive infographics and news applications. So when Jobs showed off his iPad, editors were sure to ask him about the device's lack of Flash, at least when they weren't pissing him off by posting to Twitter from the device.

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.

But he also called Flash a "CPU hog," a source of "security holes" and, in perhaps the most grievous insult a famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology." He then compared Flash to other obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch....

• ... like the floppy drive, famously absent in iMac,
  
• .... old data ports, including even Apple's own FireWire 400, gone from iPods and now all Macbooks,
  
• ....CCFL backlit LCD screens, now entirely replaced in Apple's lineup by LED-powered screens (except for this). (Correction: We originally said Apple replaced LCDs with LEDs; LEDs are a type of LCD backlighting.)
• ...and even the CD, with Jobs apparently crediting Apple's iPod, iTunes Store, CD-ripping software and "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign with doing in the old music medium (sort of: though CD sales are in free fall, around 300 million were sold last year in the U.S. alone, 80 percent of all albums).

No doubt, Flash is a known CPU hog and security problem on Macs, a major source of system headaches that, infuriatingly for Apple, it can't control. Even factoring in the fact that Flash can't leverage graphics processors built into many Apple devices, it's a pig.

But let's compare apples to appples. At the Journal, Jobs claimed the iPad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash, we're told. That sounds like an unfair comparison; the iPad would unlikely achieve its advertised 10 hours of maximum battery life while continuously playing video of any sort, iPad optimized or not.

But Jobs offered more than a thorough evisceration of Flash; he also used his Reality Distortion Field to sell the Journal on alternatives to the technology.

Ditching Flash would be "trivial," he suggested.

For one, he suggested the newspaper use the H.264 video compression system ("codec" in geek), which is compatible with both the iPad and the Flash Player installed on most Web browsers.

Jobs reportedly said the Journal would find "It's trivial to create video in H.264" instead of Flash. Depending on how the Journal handled the video conversion, that could be true, and for the moment H. 264 is a cheap and effective way to distribute Web video. But we assume Jobs didn't mention that H. 264 is patented, privately licensed and could get expensive fast.

Even setting that aside, H. 264 does not fully replace Flash. While it can handle video, it does not comprise a system for the rapid development of interactive graphics, as Flash does. Yet Jobs also reportedly said Flash would be "trivial" in this sense, as well — that it would be "trivial" to make an entire copy of the Journal website with the non-video Flash content also redone.

That's just not right; even assuming the Journal could duplicate its Flash slideshows, infographics and other news apps using iPad-friendly technologies like Javascript, it would take a decidedly nontrivial amount of time and effort to create or acquire such a system, hire staff who understand it as well as Flash, train staff on how to use it, and integrate it into the Journal's editorial workflow. It might be a great way to advance web standards like HTML5, and a great way to get the Journal on more devices, but it would hardly be "trivial."

It's not clear to us how assembled Journal honchos collectively reacted to these statements, but its worth noting that shortly after the meeting, on Feb. 10, editorial board member Holman Jenkins issued a WSJ op-ed comparing Apple to Microsoft and saying the company "is in danger of becoming preoccupied with zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals." His primary and lead example of this sort of "maneuvering" was Jobs' decision to keep Flash off the iPad.

Jobs' Reality Distortion Field may need a bit of fine tuning, then. But we have a feeling the Journal will swallow its objections and hop on the iPad gravy train. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has had its impressive moments of influence in the history of American conservatism, but these days that's little match for the power of Steve Jobs when he puts on a black turtleneck and strides onto a stage.

(Power aside, if you've got any informed opinions on how difficult it would be to replace Flash in the editorial workflow of a large newspaper or magazine, we'd love to hear them.)

(Update: Added some context on Flash's objectively sucky performance.)

(Top pic: Jobs speaking at Yerba Buna Center in San Francisco, Jan. 27. Getty Images.)

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

Adobe Desperate to Install Flash on the IPhone

The following quote is from Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayan, regarding Flash on the iPhone.

It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating [...] The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.

What on Earth can this mean? Apple has repeatedly poured scorn on Flash, calling it too slow and inefficient for the iPhone and even saying that it doesn't work well on desktop machines. Adobe, for its part, keeps yapping away and snapping at the iPhone's heels like a faithful, over enthusiastic doggy. Back in September last year, Adobe's Paul Petiem said that the company was already working on Flash for the iPhone.

We know that Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, has a history of denying new products and then shipping them soon after, so we'll leave aside the speculation and look at some facts.

First, does the iPhone need Flash? YouTube, which is Flash-based on the web, recoded all of its video in the h.264 codec to run on the iPhone. The Safari Web browser even shows a still preview of any YouTube video embedded in the page. The seamless result works great, and is Flash-free.

The other major use of Flash (other than terrible, annoying websites which should frankly be banned) is in interactive web services like Flickr slideshows or "cloud" photo editing applications. A fair point, until you realize that the tiny iPhone screen isn't great for any kind of editing, photos or words. If a company has to recode a site to fit into the iPhone's screen, why not do it in as lightweight a way possible and skip Flash altogether. This is what Flickr has actually done.

And possibly even more important is the drain on resources. Last night, the Lady's MacBook was screaming like a leaf-blower after thirty seconds of YouTube video. This isn't an old machine either -- it is just over a year old and is stuffed with RAM. If Flash can drain her battery like an Englishman can drain a pint of lager, surely an iPhone version would be even harder on the tiny battery.

Last, for Flash to behave as it does on the "desktop web", it would need to work as a plugin for Mobile Safari. As of this writing, this is not allowed. Apple, of course, can stick whatever it likes inside Safari, but third parties are prohibited. The Google Maps application for the iPhone was actually written by Apple, not Google as many people think, as Apple likes to control what is going on. If Flash were implemented, it would come from in-house, not from Adobe.

Which brings us back to that odd quote from Narayan, "Apple and Adobe are collaborating." It seems straightforward enough, but is likely to be just bluster and wishful thinking. In fact, compare it to a statement made by Narayan on the Adobe earnings conference call, all the way back in March last year:

we’re also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we’ll work with Apple. [emphasis added]

Sound familiar?

Adobe’s Narayen Says Flash on IPhone Is a Challenge [Bloomberg]