technochocolate

no flash

Over lunch I read a great article on the Apple Tablet by Andy Ihnatko. He gave what I consider to be a very pertinent observation of Apple’s design process that most people don’t really understand.

You want to try to figure out the UI of the [Apple Tablet]? Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10” on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.

You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.

While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time.

Think about how a user interface would have to incorporate those observations. Now imagine that you’ve been doing this experiment for four years and not four minutes.

Yesterday, there was some chatter on twitter about flash not being on the iPhone. To me it’s a no-brainer that flash is “missing.”

Think through this same design process with interacting with flash on an iPhone. Go to a few flash websites. See how they interact with your mouse cursor, with hovering over buttons, with keyboard input. Now imagine how any of that works on an iPhone without a keyboard, and without a mouse. It doesn’t, but nearly all flash centers around this type of interaction. It’s not a question of the iPhone’s technical capabilities, or Apple wanting to subvert the ubiquity of flash. It just doesn’t work with a touch device. And if it doesn’t work, then Apple doesn’t ship it.