All of Morgan’s points focus around UI, and that has nothing to do with what’s currently happening with the whole Flash/Apple hissy fit.

I currently have a all-in-one PC with a touch screen, and for kicks, I tried a bunch of different things totally mouse-free tonight. (I don’t think I’ve actually tried to use the touch-screen much before tonight in fact! I’ve got a mouse and a full keyboard, & the concept of having a touch-screen when you have a keyboard and a mouse RIGHT THERE in front of you frankly baffled me, but this is what they gave me for an RMI’d hardware failure replacement for my old system.)

The results were mixed: I was able to watch Flash-based media sites and navigate most other websites just dandy, but games and applications were between “meh” and “unworkable.”

That’s it. Whoo-hoo.

Using a touch UI didn’t totally kill the content that I can’t (currently) get on my mobile device. In most cases, it didn’t affect it at all (Hulu, Ze Frank, and many others that are based on Flash). In some, not even related to Flash, it just made things weird (copy-and-paste vs. scrolling: which on would you give up?) In some cases (mostly games, Flash and not-Flash), touching was simply unviable.

And that’s OK with me.

I understand that using a mobile will not give me the same experience. Users of mobile devices don’t care: we KNOW that we’re not getting 100% of a website, because we’re holding a phone or tablet in our hands instead of a keyboard and monitor that has to sit on a table or on our laps.

So, the UI argument is kind of semi-valid.

Yeah, mouse-over vs. click does something important, but not all that important. Most applications don’t need it, many are slightly less functional without it. Some applications that are made for things-that-are-not-phones-or-tablets, would be completely crippled by the UI issue. And these are applications like word processors and video games that you’d probably want to access on your desktop anyway, because the UI is better.

What it boils down to is this:

I can’t access a huge portion of the internet from my portable device. I’d be OK with some kind of broken access; it’s better than no access at all. Broken access is what you get with a portable device anyway. It’s expected that a 4×2 handheld won’t give you the same experience of a desktop.

Garbage-y Flash games have brought my tower to a standstill on many occasions, and would probably do the same thing to my phone. This happened tonight, in fact, and I had to use Task Manager to kill my browser more than once. But many phone apps have decided that they needed my phone’s resources more than, say, my ability to call people. That’s just bad programming, and has little to do with the runtime that it was built on.

So I gotta say, mousing habits won’t affect most users’ experiences beyond what what we have to get used to when switching from a desktop to a portable touchscreen device. UI conflicts are important, but they don’t really break the user experience at this point.

spoken from the viewpoint of a user who has used touch UI to experience non-portable developed content

Can you look beyond your knee-jerk reactions to see that I’m not arguing that Flash is awesome? I’m just saying this: This post argues that Flash CAN’T work on gestural devices because rollovers won’t work. That argument is obviously wrong.

I’m all for criticism of Adobe. I love my iPhone. I’m all for getting rid of Flash in favor of open standards. jQuery is a beautiful thing. If I could program tomorrow in JavaScript and HTML5 what I can do today in Flash, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

What I’m not all for is people taking an illogical premise, presenting it as fact, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, and then attempting to introduce new points when their argument is refuted. If you want to label anyone as a supporter of “grand design” in this argument, I’m afraid it’s you, my friend.

You write good stuff. This is a well-run site. Everyone gets things wrong from time to time. It’s OK! :D

[I have to say I find it annoying and irritating that you think I should respond to this platform advocate/evangelist's troll as if it's a credible argument that demands serious attention. Also, you can cite yourself as a Flash developer with an informed opinion if you like, but once you claim anyone from Gizmodo as having something to contribute in terms of analytical skills, it again becomes difficult to take your position seriously. - Dan]

b) Steve Jobs
Where did Steve Jobs say that Flash couldn’t be used on iPad because of the rollover (non-)issue? Critical thinking: This is the premise of your blog post. Steve Jobs doesn’t support your assertion. You can’t cite him as support.

[The idea that navigation and gameplay is often dependent upon mouseovers is established in the article and you acknowledge it below. The idea in general that Flash isn't optimized as a platform for building touch-based interfaces but is subject to improvement as Adobe patches up its platform is a subject open to debate, but the fact that existing Flash content is dependent upon this is not controversial. Therefore Adobe's claim that today's existing Flash content is desperately important is completely undermined by the reality that none of it, from mouseover-dependent games to non-optimized video playback, really has all that much value at all. It's all obsolete and going away, so it doesn't matter if Adobe can fix some specific element. It's irrelevant.

Jobs referenced Flash's lack of multitouch support in general terms, because the details are boring. The fact is, we can all work really hard here on out to entrench Flash as a future standard, or we can work on web standards and continue to build something that Adobe (or any other one company with interests in contrast to everyone else) doesn't own. There's a reason why people who are finically dependent upon Adobe are for Flash, and everyone who wants things to just work well doesn't care that much about it. ]

c) Me
I have to say, you don’t seem like a trusted source. You’re not a developer, you seem to have a clear bias in favor of Apple and are vehemently anti-Adobe (how many articles have you written as cricism of Adobe?), and have been unable to present any logical argument or citation for an exterior source to support your argument. By contrast, you’ve been presented with a number of options which disprove your argument, including:

[This is why I won't be responding to your future comments. You are being a complete dick. You throw out a bunch of unfounded claims, and then fellate a hysterical Adobe shill. I can't respect that. You're being a troll wasting my time without a real point. ]

* http://theflashblog.com/?p=2027 (you assert that this guy is hysterical and seem to imply therefore that his video was doctored or misleading in some fashion. Ok, so let’s ignore this link)
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIl1k7wX7Fk (this video shows how they addressed the lack of a literal mouse in mobile platforms. Seems like the rollover issue is a non-issue again. However, since this guy is an Adobe evangelist, you may assert this reference must be ignored as well. OK)
* As suggested, try running CloudBrowse on your iPhone, going to a Flash website, and attempting to interact with it. While the app is slow as hell, you can see that interaction works just fine.
Critical thinking: Should I take the word of someone who ignores multiple sources of evidence yet provides none of his own?

[The evidence is that the most successful smartphone is doing fine without Flash, as are the most successful media players and tablets. In fact, the only people bleating about how great Flash is are people like you, who make their living from it. There is no evidence you're presenting here, just some attempts to ignore the overall problem and concentrate on pointless ways to find reasons why the industry should stand on its head to make excuses for and complex solutions to solve portions of the problem, so you can keep doing what you did and continue to profit from your relationship with Adobe. You're acting like you've won an argument. You haven't, you've just trolled out paragraphs of answers to the wrong questions. You think you are so very smart, but I disagree.]

By the way: I think the big bone of contention here is not whether gestural devices CAN support mouseovers (all the links above demonstrate that it IS possible).

[That was never the issue. Did you even read the article? ]

The bone of contention comes from two assumptions that Morgan makes:

» Assumption #1: “The use of rollovers is so widespread in Flash applications, and so important to their functionality, that the loss of the rollover renders such a majority of Flash sites useless as to make Flash unusable.” Unfortunately, the reality just isn’t so. While Mouse_Over events are definitely used in Flash applications, most Flash websites usethem simply as decorative rollover effects. Most video players will pause and display controls on click, then stay visible for a period of time, allowing you to click and then control them. All other examples (such as tooltips, maps and diagrams, etc.) are basic “web” functionalities that apply to JavaScript as well as Flash, and it is therefore illogical to say that Flash is impossible to use while JavaScript is OK. I will agree, however, that a large number games will be broken without the mouse_over ability. Does that really mean that it is fundamentally “illogical” to use Flash? I would say no, but I have a feeling you will disagree :)
» Assumption #2: “The only potential ’solutions’ to the mouseover problem are terrible ones.” Most of the examples of Flash sites working fine on gestural devices that I provide above use Morgan’s solution D) Having a visible mouse pointer. Morgan seems to feel that the visible mouse pointer is so awful as to render the whole gestural device pointless. I would argue that the examples provided above demonstrate that the solution is far from awful, and in fact provides an excellent user experience. Additionally, his assumption also rests on the premise that the only possible solutions are the ones he offers. With all due respect to Morgan, I believe there are other solutions out there. (Assuming it NEEDS to be solved in the first place… see my argument against Assumption #1).

Nobody likes admitting they’re wrong. Just man up and do it on this point :D Believe me, you have PLENTY of other, valid reasons to criticize Adobe!

[Not only are Morgan's "assumptions" well presented, but you even agree with them enough to where your counter-arguments are irrelevant. And your huffing about non-important tangents fails to grasp that the problem here is Flash, not Apple's lack of support for a player that doesn't yet exist, not my articles pointing out the fallacy of Adobe's arguments and its specious attacks that have no merit. The problem is that Flash is a shitty substitute for web standards within the browser, for a lot of interlocking reasons. You can't pick at one part of the overall argument and say, "hey, there's a way we could make this touch stuff work if we do a bunch of clumsy backward stuff to support a terrible platform that is slow, full of bugs, riddled with security holes by design, and really doesn't need to exist."

Flash sucks, we knew that long before the iPhone showed up. Did you miss the memo on Java clients not being all that? It got passed around like ten years ago. Having another version of the same thing with not just greater dependance upon a single vendor, but having that vendor being the clusterfuck that is Adobe, is not an improvement that is going to make Flash/Flex a superior replacement for desktop Java, let alone JavaME. It's pretty clearly the same turd with a different owner - Dan ]

> the people disagreeing with you are a) a professional Flash developer

Are you serious? I’m a professional Flash developer, and almost surely have been so for longer than your source (since 2000). I’m sure many other commenters are too. More importantly, the author of your article is a Flash developer who, when he was writing, had never seen Flash 10 on mobile devices. He was speculating; we are not.

> b) Steve Jobs, who knows something about how Flash works

Steve Jobs, who recently attacked Adobe for being slow to move to Cocoa even though iTunes and Final Cut haven’t moved yet. Messaging from Steve Jobs is marketing, not technical information.

> c) Me.

i.e. a non-developer who, so far, has not been able to name a single website that suffers or will suffer the problems predicted in this article.

But, what I would really like is voice command or voice to text that was relatively accurate. Nuance has a product that is very close on the PC side.
—
Flickr could come up with a Flash alternative to it’s Slideshow, but I’m currently enamored by Prezi (which is Flash based).

Dan, your whole premise of this article is, in your own words:
“Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device… because of the hover or mouseover problem…. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking.”

So if this is the point of your article, let’s ignore “slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes” as you say.

Now, go and watch the video at http://theflashblog.com/?p=2027. Check out the video links to examples on Android devices provided in the comments above. Recognize that whether a cursor is visible on the screen or not, the same programming elements are happening in the background.

You could also try installing CloudBrowse and going to a Flash site to see how it works (although CloudBrowse barely ever can connect).

Now realize that your original argument, namely that current Flash sites won’t work because of the need for rollover & click, is proven incorrect.

No big deal – there’s plenty of other reasons to rant against Flash for Apple. Just admit that you got this one wrong :)

[You can keep insisting that you're right and that you understand the issue, but just consider: the people disagreeing with you are a) a professional Flash developer who wrote the article I published b) Steve Jobs, who knows something about how Flash works and investigated putting it on the iPhone before rejecting it c) Me. In contrast, the person blowing smoke up your ass is the "platform advocate" of Flash, paid by Adobe to blog things that are often completely ridiculous, as his last post I mentioned, where Adobe actually had to edit his hysterics to avoid embarrassment.

Consider the potential that you're failing to grasp the concept of critical thinking - Dan ]

But you’re right that the change is in Apple’s best interest. It’s just not in user’s best interest, and it’s very very very not in developer’s best interest. I mean, there’s no getting around it – if obj-C is best, developers and users can choose it. The problem is that if obj-C isn’t best, they’re still legally prevented from choosing anything else.

Well now, I’m a customer and I prefer Apple’s products. I could care less if they run on Windows or Linux or whatever. Furthermore, I dislike applications like TweetDeck that have an unfamiliar user interface. I think that was developed on one of Adobe’s platforms.

Apple must believe that companies like Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, HTC, Palm, HP, Google, Dell, and Research in Motion are all working hard to create iPhone and iPad knock-offs. I think that’s obviously true. Before the iPhone there was nothing like it. Now these companies are all coming out with iPhone knock-offs. So why should Apple assist them in their copying efforts by making it easier for them to run software created for Apple’s platforms?

Seems to me that Steve Jobs arguments are pretty much correct. It is in Apple’s best interests, Apple customer’s best interest, and loyal Apple developer’s (those who write Apps using the Apple SDK and Objective C) to discourage cross-platform developer tools. So what if Flash developed products would run OK on the iPhone? That’s not the point.

Again, in practice it’s going to be a market decision. If Apple is wrong to cut Flash out and to make it difficult to use anything but their own approved languages, they’ll find out the hard way. The problem is that right now the market really isn’t punishing them for the choices they’ve made. (The recent reports that there are now more Android devices being sold than iPhones is the first chink in the armor, but that’s a rebuke to their exclusivity with AT&T, I suspect.)

With that said though, dazweeja, I think the trouble with the video people keep linking is that Dan won’t have any take on it at all. In this post he relayed arguments that were supposed to support a conclusion he agrees with, but his agreement was never actually based on those arguments. He believed it before the arguments were made, because he’s the kind of person who says things like “flashtard”, so it’s natural that he should continue believing in it after the arguments turn out not to reflect reality.

Unfortunately I think this is what tends to happen when non-developers speculate on technology… People who program must unavoidably keep accurate opinions on the tech they use, or they won’t be able to make anything, but people who merely comment are under no such obligation.