The tablet that couldn’t
With the unveiling of the new iPad Apple has created their usual media storm, opinions range from it euphoria down to apathy. While i feel that the iPad has some fundamental flaws (namely the lack of multitasking) and the tablet platform as a whole has problems, i want to focus on just one thing: Flash.
Consistent with the iPhone the iPad doesn’t support flash and despite some hope otherwise, Apple seem determined to stick with that decision. I hope that they do. For a long time now, amongst web developers that care about standards, Flash has become almost a dirty word. Flash can be made accessible but more often than not it is left as a solid lump of content that can’t be accessed by either disabled users or Google. We have left behind most of the flash based menus and agonizing intro videos with no skip option to be left with two bastions of Flash: video and games.
Games are a large market for Flash, one that is well suited and not one that the combination of canvas and Javascript any time soon. Video on the other hand the once unassailable bastion of Flash seems to be built on very shaky foundations. The young upstart of HTML5 video is here, and it’s hungry. Already places like YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion have HTML5 implementations which mean that all of a sudden Flash isn’t wanted. If YouTube, one of the biggest sites on the internet, is starting to get rid of Flash others will surely follow.
Ok so now we know that gaming on the iPad will be handled by native apps, people will be missing out on some games but they will be catered for in the whole. Video will also be fine on the iPad you can watch funny videos of people falling over to your hearts content as Safari supports HTML 5 video. So what is everyone shouting about?
For Adobe this isn’t good news at all, their once proud product is getting eaten away to nothing, no wonder they are shouting that it is really bad that the iPad doesn’t support Flash. But what could come out of this, the fact that the whole Apple mobile range sticks two finger up to Flash, is that a more open web could be forced on us by a platform that is anything but.
There are issues of course, Apple only supports h.264 encoding for videos which is almost universally seen as swapping one problem implementation for another. It probably something to do with them having a stake in the standard. Mozilla is pushing for Ogg Theora as the codec to use as it is open source and royalty free while h.264 costs each browser vendor $5 million in licensing fees to implement a decoder. With Apple refusing to implement Ogg Theora and Mozilla refusing to implement h.264 the future seems bleak for open video.
The one possible ray of light is Google’s purchase of On2 and their codec VP8. Ogg Theora originated when On2 open sourced their VP2 codec which was adopted by the community and has since been improved. In the meantime On2 have still been working on their codecs and have gone through several iterations to finally arrive at VP8. The hope is that Google will open source VP8 which is rumoured to be better than both h.264 and Ogg Thedora. If they did then that would have the support of Mozilla and most likely Opera, Safari’s concerns about possible submarine patents would hopefully be solved as Google would hold them all.
So there is a slim chance that this will all be fine and that everyone will all get along but then as well all know one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
