The feud between Apple and Adobe regarding Flash support for Apple's touchscreen mobile devices is long and ongoing, with the rivalry found all the way at the top, with the CEO of the Cupertino-based company, Steve Jobs, being no big fan of Adobe's software. A lot of people complain that Apple should support the technology, though during the weekend, an engineer who is currently working on Flash has explained the technical issues that are stopping it from becoming a reality.
Morgan Adams, the aforementioned engineer, explained on the AppleInsider forums the blatantly obvious that many have seemed to miss: Flash is heavily reliant on the cursor. Be it mouse-overs, or just simple interactivity, Flash needs a mouse to function correctly a vast majority of the time. Gizmodo added to this, explaining that, sure, Apple could implement Flash support, and some portions of it would work. Video players that simply require activating any play or pause buttons available should work as intended (for the most part), but everything else would simply fail. They continue to argue that users would be even more frustrated seeing content they couldn't interact with, rather than simply having nothing there at all.
Adams believes that the only viable solution is to have all Flash content rewritten to support touch screen devices, which would take a lot of work on the part of multiple parties, so currently it isn't really an option. "So it's not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn't make Flash sites work now," Adams stated, and correctly so. Either way you look at it, the possibility of an acceptable port of Flash on touchscreen devices seems less and less likely every day.
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