Good Luck With That, Adobe

The web’s abuzz regarding this nugget from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during their quarterly finance call yesterday, after being asked about the state of Flash for the iPhone:

“We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.”

So, (a) according to Narayen, it’s only running in the simulator (which is x86, not ARM, and a lot of things that run OK in the simulator run slowly on actual iPhones); and (b) they still have no solution to the problem of getting Flash content to display in MobileSafari. MobileSafari has no third-party plug-in API. It isn’t going to happen. The best Adobe can do is provide a standalone Flash player app for the iPhone, along the lines of Apple’s standalone QuickTime player.

★ Tuesday, 17 June 2008