Flash on the iPhone - Flash runtime written in Javascript

[ben schmidt]

Does anyone know what "an open source flash runtime written in pure Javascript" means? e.g. Does this mean someone could put up on the web a sort of 'proxy'? And that you would point the proxy to a Flash-based site, and then point your iphone to the proxy, and then after-a-fashion have Flash-on-the-iPhone?

   http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

Anyhoow the above demo's run (albeit sloowly) in the Safari built into my iPhone 3G.

...ben schmidt

PS. Backstory: The iPhone/iPod Touch Safari browser does not support Flash-based web content. Initially the reason was that Flash-on-an-iPhonen is too CPU-intensive for acceptable performance and impact on battery life. But another school of thought has it that Apple is very much interested in discouraging alternatives to HTML for delivering web content, such as Adobe Flash, MS Silverlight, and Java. Hence the omission of all three on mobile Safari.

[Dan Millar]

Hi Ben,

I think you're speaking of "Gordon" (as in Flash Gordon, ha-ha). No, there's no proxy involved, the code is executing locally, i.e. on your phone. Breaking it down a bit, it is open-source (i.e. free/code available), flash runtime (compiles Flash code into JS-equivalent code and SVG vector graphics on the fly, i.e. at runtime) in pure JavaScript.

This is Toby Schneider's piece of work, and it is intended to allow Flash, that is .swf, files to run on non-Flash equipped browsers, like Safari on your iPhone. This isn't the first attempt to do this, but it is the most successful one I have seen to date - and only one guy did all the coding to make it happen. Obviously, not all the features of SWF are supported, but most developers are only using the animation capabilities, and the demo runs pretty well considering the alternative, that is, nothing at all. This is all still pretty new, and only running at the demo level right now, but soon we'll have a either a plug-in for normal browsers, or developers can embed the script right in their web page so non-Flash capable/equipped machines will still see Flash content. I think the use will be limited, but it is still a good alternative to... nothing, which is what you see most of the time when you don't have Flash enabled.

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, there are a lot of people that would rather Flash did not exist. This will make a lot of those people (myself included) very happy.

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

No, there's no proxy involved, the code is executing locally, i.e. on your phone. Breaking it down a bit, it is open-source (i.e. free/code available), flash runtime (compiles Flash code into JS-equivalent code and SVG vector graphics on the fly, i.e. at runtime) in pure JavaScript.

Thanks Dan. Yeah, I realized that Paul was not providing a proxy service.

But what I was trying to get at, and didn't phrase clearly, was that, as awesome as Paul Irish's code (javascript) is, it still needs to be installed on every webpage where the web author has Flash content and would like to make this content visible to iPhone/iPod Touch users. Paul's javascript code is not a general solution to surfing the web from an iPhone/iPod Touch and being able to see Flash-based content, that's currently not accessible.

Sooo, I was thinking however that Paul Irish's code could allow someone to put up a proxy service to which iPhone/iPod Touch users could point their browsers, and then that proxy service would auto-detect Flash-based content, and, on-the-fly, swap it out for Paul Irish's javascript code. Whew!

Just writing the above sentence, I see how it sounds that such a Flash-to-PaulsJavascript Converting Proxy would be a hero experiment, rather than a viable service. (But you never know.  Who would of thought that Anchor's free hotspotshield.com Anonymizer service would be a viable business? Presumably paid for by the webviews of ads on the homepage.

Guess we'll have to wait to see if Adobe and Apple have a meeting of minds on the question of Flash on iPhone/iPod Touch, or more likely wait for HTML 5 to slooowly negate the need for Flash on the web.  And not having Flash means that I get exposed to a lot fewer ads on my iPhone, and the only cost is not being able to read the odd website which has content I would like to read, delivered in Flash.

[Dan Millar]

Yeah, I thought you may have been asking that in a roundabout way! It would be a slow, but suitable-when-you-need-it kind of service. I was thinking along the lines of a plug-in that would attempt to render Flash files locally - something like the plug-in that exists already for turning Flash off and on as needed.

Happy Mac'ing

Dan