Devblog

Having gotten over the honeymoon period with my iPhone we’ve now settled down together and I’m beginning to see some of it’s flaws. I have to say though, there’s not much wrong with it. Either as a phone, a mobile computing device or a mp3 player it does the job amazingly. OK, but what can’t it do. Well, the first thing is without a doubt the biggest. Flash.

This isn’t a tiny little inconvenience like “My bank has blocked access to my phone” or “I don’t get on with the touch screen”. This is major. If we are truly going to move computing forwards in the ways that everyone is talking about – the TV being the digital center of every home connected to and doing everything, desktop PCs being retired to museums, laptops being used for work and the kids bedrooms and then our phones becomming fully functioning mobile computing devices, then we need Flash.

Adobe, Apple – listen up – I don’t mean a way to convert Flash applications into Apps. I mean Flash within the browser. The Internet is going to continue to be the center of the computing world and if the iPhone or any phone wants be be part of it then it needs Flash in the browser. It’s one of the main technologies in today’s internet along with JavaScript (and thus Ajax).

The bit that annoys me though is not that the iPhone doesn’t have Flash built in – it’s that it should have and almost certainly could have. I think the reason it doesn’t is business politics, not any technological limitation. My thinking behind this? DOOM. Yes, that first-person shooter from the early niineties. The one that ends up in quite a few “Top 10 Best Games of All Time” lists. I know that it’s nothing special now – the graphics, gameplay and everything else are two decades old – but it is still a 3-D PC game – and I’ve got a copy on my iPhone. If this is possible as a £4.99 download, surely there’s a programmer capable of putting one of the most important peices of software on one of the most important computing devices?