It’s really no surprise, actually

Jan 29, 2010 13:24 GMT  ·  By

As if Apple was going to support Flash out of the blue, without saying a word to anyone (including Adobe), Adrian Ludwig of Adobe has posted an update on their blog, expressing great discontent towards Apple’s move to not include Flash support in its latest product.

During the January 27 keynote presentation delivered by Steve Jobs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the new Apple tablet was demoed by several Apple bosses, including the CEO. As Mr. Jobs was doing his own demonstration of the iPad’s capabilities as a web-surfing device, one of the web pages showed the annoying icon symbolizing the lack of Flash plugin support (pictured above).

iPhone and iPod touch users are quite familiar with this logo, while the entire Apple fanbase has been on Apple’s case for years, trying to get it to support Flash. However, the Mac maker has always been prompted to adopt the best strategy for a good power-to-battery life ratio. Flash wouldn’t fit here. Some think it’s a politics thing. Either way, it seems that many, including Adobe itself, hoped the iPad would remove these limitations, thanks to a more powerful, in-house designed chip, and other elements. As it turned out...

“It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers,” Ludwig writes. “And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

“If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab -- not to mention the millions of other sites on the web -- I'll be out of luck,” he goes to say.

“Adobe and more than 50 of our partners in the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliver to any device, so that consumers have open access to their favorite interactive media, content, and applications across platform, regardless of the device that people choose to use,” Adobe’s Adrian Ludwig concludes.