If you follow tech news at all, for the past month you have probably seen plenty of the Apple vs. Adobe Flash battle royale. While Apple is standing behind it’s claim of choosing exclude Flash on their iDevices for stability reasons, an innovative group of developers appear to have come up with a solution which runs Flash via JavaScript: Smokescreen.
While still in the developmental (but functional) stage, this piece of software is quite impressive. There are several demos available on their site which show they have successfully ported both Flash based movies and ads.
It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to this. My opinion of this whole debacle is Apple blocked Flash because it would allow application developers to circumvent the Apple App Store to distribute applications (in which case Apple loses both money and absolute control over what their devices can run) all the while using security as their reasoning. When Smokescreen becomes production-worthy and Flash can essentially run via JavaScript, this could be the “jail breaking” equivalent for the iDevices.
So what do you think about this? Is Smokescreen going to potentially change the game?
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It just might. There is no way to tell if jailbreaking accelerated the the appstore deployment.
I also think that the Apple/Flash thing is about Flash games. It is ALWAYS about money. There are a gabillion free Flash games out there that would seriously cut into iTunes store sales.
(They also don’t want you to see the performance difference between a tower defense game on your dual core laptop vs. an iPad that costs the same.)