Apple not allowing Flash to take a bit out of it
June 2010 |
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Fashion is a very fickle business. Tastes change so quickly and people are easily led by what the so-called experts tell them.
The web is no different to the fashion world from this point of view. There are a lot of people who claim to be experts and are quick to tell you what to do and what not to do. For example, back in the early noughties Flash was all the rage. If you didn’t have a site designed and built in flash it meant you had no fashion sense at all and weren’t down with the kids.
The things you could do in Flash were great and really moved the website world up to another level: Pages would sing to you when you opened them, buttons would beep at you when you pressed them and logos would spin around every time you moved your mouse. As annoying as it was to have sound effects blasted at you when you were sneakily surfing the web whilst you were supposed to be working, it really was rather good.
Over time, however, things moved on. It became mandatory for blind, deaf mutes to be able to navigate around your website and Flash started to become less accessible. People also got bored with buttons going beep all the time and moved on to the next new craze. It was just like that old Spliffy jacket I begged my mum to spend a fortune on in the 90’s because all my friends had one but then only wore it for a week because it went out of fashion and I was no longer cool.
I don’t know exactly how it works in the fashion world because I’m not a homosexual but I imagine it works the same way as the Internet world in that the expert designers either decide what the next big thing should be and tell everyone to start buying it or they fit a well known celebrity with their stuff and wait for the sycophantic sheep to copy their idols and spread the word on their Twitter page.
The death of Flash as the most popular way of building websites was largely down to the rise of Google and their assertion that text was the way to get higher rankings because Flash gives Google little to no information to read. Search Engine Optimisation companies started pushing this point home even more to the point where Flash almost became seen as something evil.
It still had its place on sites. It could be used for creating header images or banner adverts with fading text and pictures on. More recently it has also become the standard format for online videos because it works across multiple platforms (for the uneducated that means it works on both Mac’s and PC’s!) Sites like Youtube pioneered the Flash video concept and the online video market continues to grow – so much so that I’m convinced that within a few years DVD’s will become obsolete.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Flash started taking more of a back in terms of its prominence on sites. Given that animations and fading text effects can be easily achieved using free Javascripts that can be found all over the web, this makes using Flash rather redundant because these free scripts don’t require you to have any knowledge whatsoever. This means that even a brainless consultant could do it. Well probably not because consultants can’t read – and most don’t even have opposable thumbs – but you see the point I’m trying to make.
Now there is an even bigger problem for Flash-driven websites. What is the latest fashion accessory in the geek world? That’s right; the iPhone. And what have Apple categorically said they are not going to support? That’s right; Flash.
Basically Apple are not allowing Flash because it can be used as a development platform of its own. This would simply be too dangerous for Apple because they are a company that understandably wants to maintain control over both its hardware and the software that runs on it. By allowing Flash would potentially open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone. They would easily be able to code them in Flash and put them on a web page rather than develop them as a legitimate iPhone app. This would divert business from the App Store which would of course mean less revenue for Apple.
So what does this mean for people with websites built entirely in Flash? Well, what this means is that those fancy looking sites that probably cost five squillion quid to build will not work for the ever increasing number of people who surfing the web on their phone. OK, so the relative number of users surfing the web using an iPhone isn’t anywhere near the sort of level of those still using a proper computer and using the devil of a browser that is Internet Explorer but it’s still a big number. Given that 41 million people have an iPhone now, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the potential disadvantage of having a site that doesn’t work.
Most people are starting to build mobile versions of their websites now, which are basically slimmed down duplicates of their main site that have been stripped of all the unnecessary crap and imagery.
Despite this, there are still people who are spending a fortune getting Flash websites designed and built. Not only are these sites notoriously rubbish from a search engine optimization point of view because there is nothing for Google to see but they won’t work for the aforementioned millions of people who browse the web on their iPhone. In other words, by having a site built in flash you are telling the majority of your visitors, in the words of MC Hammer (who was fashionable back in the early 90’s and also wore shell suits) “You can’t touch this”.
Now what ever happened to him?
