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Flash on the iPhone, in demo form

by Erica Sadun Jan 13th 2010 at 5:30PM

Flash has finally made its way to the iPhone, with the help of some sneaky developers. The open source Gordon project, hosted over at github, has provided a JavaScript-powered Flash runtime. With it, you can actually load and view Flash's .swf files, even on the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser. I gave it a try earlier today and was delighted to find that several Flash demos ran fine on my 3GS, no jailbreaking or other installation necessary.

Admittedly, this is a very preliminary build, that supports just these SWF tags. Also, to make this work, Flash developers will need to encapsulate the SWF into an HTML wrapper, importing the Gordon JavaScript source and then loading the swf, as shown here. I am not a Flash expert by any means, but this seems like a pretty cool development for any iPhone enthusiasts who would be interested in seeing the platform support that technology. At this point, there's not much to show for it besides a few demos (and who knows what Apple will think about this), but at least there's a currently viable way to run and view Flash on the iPhone.

Thanks, August Joki. And yes, the project name is apparently a riff on Flash Gordon

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Flash has finally made its way to the iPhone, with the help of some sneaky developers. The open source Gordon project, hosted over at...
 

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frank.lowney

What I'd prefer is a utility that took a Flash file and turned it into a Javascript/CSS3 rendition. Then we could stop inflicting Flash on innocent victims for most of what Flash is used for, images and fonts flying around the screen.

January 14 2010 at 10:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve Rubinstein

This will never make it.

The iPhone could easily have Flash, if Apple allowed it. But they don't want, because it requires to be running in the background. And this is against Apple's dogmatic iPhone policies.

Adobe will always be major steps ahead of the Gordon project, simply because they have hundreds of people working on Flash. How is the Gordon project supposed to ever compete with Adobe?

Forget it.

I bet this is one of those marketing gags by Apple themselves. Not having flash is one of the reasons why many, many early 2G adopters (like me and a whole bunch of people I know) did not buy an iPhone again.

I am really thinking about switching to a Palm Pre when it's coming to Verizon. No more iPhone crapload. No more jailbreaking. An open plattform based on Linux. Verizon got a much better 3G coverage and the Pre will have Adobe Flash onboard with their february update. Well...

January 14 2010 at 9:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Steve Rubinstein's comment
Howie Isaacks

Wow! What a positive and upbeat analysis! Yes. I really am trying to be sarcastic.

January 14 2010 at 11:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dale

Let us know your battery life, bandwidth usage and general browsing experience when you have Flash on your mobile phone, mmmkay?

January 14 2010 at 12:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cesare

Happy to see the feasibility of viewing swfs on the iphone. That does not mean we have a Flash player on the iphone. The run is looooong until we get there ...

January 14 2010 at 6:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bryan

Very cool idea. However, I can see this becoming an uphill battle. It's going to take a lot of time and complexity to "translate" the API calls into native JavaScript. Performance is dismal, but it can be improved. They should run the translation before the fact, and have an option to deploy on different runtimes, saving the start-up overhead costs.

January 13 2010 at 10:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
urth



you need Internet Explorer to make the basic internet function on iphone

January 13 2010 at 8:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andrew Hammond

I doubt this will ever really take off...

January 13 2010 at 8:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
raff

First of all, how many SWF today don't use any ActionScript ? (and this "Flash Player" only support a few SWF tags and no ActionScript)

Second: even if I think the demos are impressive, all this is doing is converting from one vector format (SWF tags) to another vector format (SVG). It would probably be faster to run the conversion once, when you install the SWF on your server, and have the HTML page just import the generated javascript.

January 13 2010 at 7:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
GLacy

Please port "ClicktoFlash" for the iPhone. Flash is THE most annoying thing on the internet.

January 13 2010 at 7:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dogcow

1)Sweet! Seriously cool implementation-great work.
2) Guuuh! You know the first people to use those tags will be the banner ads.

January 13 2010 at 6:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Martin

Smart people can be real stupid sometimes. Great work guys.

January 13 2010 at 6:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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