CSS Animation to replace need for Flash in MobileSafari? Not likely

Those who say Flash games are mostly crap/poorly coded have obviously not played any Flash games recently.

I need only point to Kongregate.com and Newgrounds.com (amongst other portal sites) where one can find extremely well coded and designed games with high quality of presentation. As someone I know said : "Give someone the best hammer in the world, and he'll still manage to break something".

When gifs came out the web was inundated with animated gifs. When Flash came out the web was inundated with Flash ads and sites. When Javascript came out the web was inundated with popups and scrolling texts.

Don't blame the technology. Blame the people who use it wrongly.

As for why Flash, not Java or Silverlight.
Java does not have proper designer tools.
Silverlight does, but only runs on Windows.

And now for something more on topic, which I'll sum it up as such.

"CSS Animation? Oh god... not another thing for IE to screw up"

At least with Flash, I know when I deploy something it'll look and function the same resource hogging way on IE, FF, Safari, and Chrome.

http://www.laptops-battery.co.uk

MacRumors's Arnold Kim suggests that Apple may be looking to obviate the need for Flash on the iPhone and iPod touch through the implementation of web tools like CSS Animation.
http://www.laptops-battery.co.uk/apple-a1185.htm
All of these can be solved through open-source methods (or QuickTime), with an appropriate time investment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that games, however, blow apps out of the water in terms of popularity.

You may be looking to close and missing he forrest for a few trees. Sure, it's hard to do this stuff with a text editor using only CSS and Javascript but who says it has to be done manually?

Take a look at what Dashcode can do if it has the appropriate template. For that matter, check out Rapidweaver or even lowly iWeb. Got MobileMe? Check out the innards if your online photo gallery.

Look for Apple and third party apps that combine HTML 5, CSS 3, Javascript and SVG. They're not here yet but maybe soon...

Flash games pale in comparison to what's offered in the App Store.

The only real use for Flash is for web sites that -require- it (which, quite honestly, I hate because it's slow, hard to search, and hard to link to--which I understand can all be avoided but few developers do).

For my browsing experience, Flash plays an extremely minimal role with the most common thing being advertisements.

The truth is that if Flash was ever made available for Mobile Safari, I would likely turn the Enable Plug-ins switch to Off in Safari's settings on my iPhone.

While for the web developer, Flash is an obnoxious technology that makes SEO more difficult, your sites less accessible, spikes bandwidth usage through the roof (you can just about rule out rural 56k and ISDN users) and is a hog of local client-side resources, it is a necessary evil. The W3C is moving at a snail's pace publishing all of the CSS3 modules, let alone the amount of time that will pass before it's reasonably (read: usable) well adopted. Consider that the most popular browser of all time still doesn't have complete standards compliant support of CSS2.1, let alone CSS3.

The most popular websites on the internet use Flash for a myriad of things, the most important of which is on-demand video streaming, like YouTube and Hulu. Scribd also uses Flash to distribute its iPaper format, the reason being that Flash is platform and browser independent.

There may be comparable technologies in WebKit that could eventually mimic the functionality of Flash, but the fact of the matter is that the iPhone is far too insignificant a number of visits for web developers to cater to specifically. Flash is a virtually omnipresent technology which provides lots of useful functionality for modern websites. Apple would be foolish to ignore it forever.

Most *useful* websites have html alternatives. The ones that don't are usually superfluous where a web presence isn't really necessary—sites like Nike, any car company, movie sites, etc.

Even if you could get Flash on the iPhone, I can't see all those sites rendering very well on the iPhone anyway. Go dig up an old iBook G4 (800mhz I think) and go visit a few modern Flash websites and let me know how that goes for you. I tried that—needless to say, I didn't get very far very fast.

And Flash gaming isn't even optimized to use OpenGL so you'd be stuck with crappy framerates in those games anyway.

Just say no to Flash on the iPhone.

The whole is very simple ; bringing flash just against the behalf of Apple on iPhone. Why bother to open a portal for someone else to make money without benefiting yourself ? Did Apple build iPhone for this ? Would Apple allow flash come to iPhone 'just' because users ask for it ? History has told me that they would never do this without a good reason 'for them'.

The CSS animation thing is less of a replacement for Flash than it is intended to make some of the animations used on web sites using toolkits like jQuery render faster in the iPhone Safari (presumably by writing mobile Safari versions of those functions that take advantage of the CSS animation capabilities in mobile Safari).

For animations/simple games, why not use SVG now (instead of waiting for Flash)? For instance, the following example uses a combination of SVG and JavaScript. It runs in Safari and Firefox on a computer and somewhat works on the iPhone (would work fine if it weren't intended to be controlled by a keyboard... a simple addition of some buttons and minor code modifications should do the trick):

- http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg

Also, check out the extensive examples (most work fine in Safari/mobile Safari):

- http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples

Something this will not help with (for those that are used to Flash) is that this method (and most methods outside of the App Store) do NOT allow you to technologically protect the source code from download. This matters a lot to some developers and sending the entire source code to the browser as SVG, using Canvas in the browser, and CSS animations do along with JavaScript and all the images won't please everyone.

Apple is right that you CAN use these open alternatives (that will work and are already built into the browser) but they aren't a one size fits all solution for developers. Hence the App store opens more possibilities if you play by Apple's rules (and give them a cut if you want to charge for it). Flash would open the marketplace for more complex paid games/applications outside of the App store.

I think we're all missing the point here:
The iPhone is a very different platform to the desktop. While it works very well to have webpages displayed on the device (this is no accident- the W3C have ensured that it is easy to use HTML with a variety of interfaces), there is no reason why flash interfaces designed for the desktop should be anything but horrible and clunky on the iPhone. It's got no keyboard, no 'mouse' that can do anything but click, and a small screen.

So all that existing flash out there (especially games) aren't really going to work. If you had a flash app/game, you're probably going to have to adapt to put it on the iPhone. So why bother? It's not going to be as good as it was on the intended platform.

Another consideration is Apple's perspective- they really like having the control over the apps we can have on the iPhone (for better or worse), I really can't see them let this stuff invade their platform.

What I do miss is flash video. I don't see any reason why the iPhone can't just play .flv files without fully blown Flash.