Dorian Kernytsky

It’s been really interesting to see how the iPad, particularly Steve Job’s intensional demo of it’s lack of Flash, have allowed this conversation about Flash and it’s place in the web. My major grib with Flash was same that Zeldman made, lack of accesible and open standard. I can understand that there are advantages to ana closed system. Flash and the web isn’t one of them. Over the years Flash has become loud and heavy and is something I didn’t realize till I heard how Apple says plugins (replace that with Flash) are the number on reason why OSX crashes. I found that a bit hard to believe that the whole OS would crash because of a browser plugin, until i notices how often some Adobe service is continuously ping something or another in the Console.

The thought about Apple, Flash and performance made me thing of iPhone multitasking and performance. Recent events show that Apple clearly wants to push the open web standard of HTML5 over Flash. Apple also placed a focus on web apps over natives apps. This could be because the SDK wasn’t ready at the time or the were hoping that web apps would take off. The advantage for Apple and web apps is it’s seems to be easier to control multitasking, hence battery life will improve. Having 3rd party apps running in the background of the iPhone (or in my case a jailbroken iPod touch) can be a real hit in battery life. I’d used it for a number apps just to have quick access to them. The hit in battery was enough for me to stop the practice. I think that might be the main reason why we haven’t seen it yet. Until we see some radical improvements in battery life or Apple finds that magic API call that will have 3rd party apps running with a minimal or no hit to battery, we won’t see multitasking.