iPad and the Flash war
by Mark ~ March 7th, 2010. Filed under: business, technostress, website news.I have been working on a website redesign steadily for about the past 2 months or so. I finish off little bit by little bit. When anyone works on web design, you are likely to go out and see what’s out there lately. One thing I noticed is that a lot of photographers use Adobe Flash on their websites. Whether you love Flash or hate it isn’t really what I care to debate here. I have seen some pretty cool stuff done with Flash and have little bits of it on my site now. But one thing that is soon going to bubble over is this ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe on support of Flash on Apple’s mobile devices.
If you aren’t up to speed on this battle, I can try to summarize it (and probably oversimplify). Apple has not placed Flash support on the iPhone (drawing the ire of many users), and does not currently intend to support it on the iPad either. The rumor mill states that Steve Jobs is apparently trying to snag deals with the big media conglomerates, and in the process highlighting why they should not be using Flash. Instead, Apple is promoting the newer video standard of HTML5. Apple’s reasoning against it that Flash is one of the biggest slowdowns and CPU draws on the OSX operating system, and to implement support for it on their mobile devices would drain battery life drastically.
Of course, Adobe’s counter states how widespread the use of Flash is, and how any device that doesn’t support it is limiting the experience of the web for its users. Adobe does state they are working on addressing the high CPU usage on Macs though. I can see merit in both sides.
Not having Flash on my iPhone has been a minor annoyance for me. I can imagine this annoyance is going to increase when someone has a larger web browsing device like the iPad. There will likely be a market who wants the iPad instead of any computer at all. If this device takes off like the hype behind it says it will, it is going to make a lot of web developers start thinking about accessibility and audience. Will web developers hungry for an iPad user audience be willing to change their sites to accommodate them? Will Apple and Adobe ever come to an agreement on its implementation?
There are a lot of photography websites that would likely look beautiful on a device such as the iPad. The touch navigation seems like a natural fit with some of the capabilities of a flash driven site. However, no one will be able to see them at least for the short term. Unless the issue between these two is worked out, I can see it being a major issue for photographers especially if the iPad becomes a portable device of choice for art consultants, photo buyers, and other clients.
A page from within my new site that will offer a peek at example installations.
As far as my redesign on my site, there is no Flash. A preview is shown here. It is much more CSS driven and not many Flash sites that I have seen rank highly in search engines. There are enough issues in just worrying about different browsers displaying everything correctly.
Sorry Internet Explorer 6 users, there may be parts of my new site may not work for you. Time to upgrade! 
That is such a horrible browser as far as compliance to any sort of web standards. It is amazing that so many people are still using it. My Google Analytics show that 57% of the visits to my site are on IE, and of that 57%, about 18% of them on IE6. Ugh! That isn’t a small number, but I am faced with a decision, not unlike the Flash issue, on how many compromises do you make?
For now I can sit on the sidelines on the Flash war and watch this whole thing play out without being affected too much. But for a photographer who has a site driven by Flash, this issue could eventually have significant impacts on your visitor traffic.
March 7th, 2010 at
Mark, thanks for this update/info. I have used Flash sparingly for the reasons you bring up (mainly iPhone usability). My thoughts on the subject would be to use it when it is the best tool for the desired outcome (slideshows, etc.) but not on the entire website which would prevent viewing for some people.
Looking forward to seeing your redesign!
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March 7th, 2010 at
Thanks for this interesting information. As I don’t have my own web site about photography and as an amateur photograph not selling his work I do not need to care about such things as visit statistics and what kind of browser visitors use. But noone knows what will be in future and so I’ll bear your findings on my mind.
I understood that you do your photography for a living. May I ask if the biggest income comes from visitors of your web site or is it some other way (show room, other web site…)?
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Mark Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at
Hi Tomas. The browser stats give you an idea of what the visitors coming to your site are using, so if you are testing changes in the design, you know which browsers to focus on. Typically it is all the more popular ones, IE, Firefox, Safari, and now Chrome. But with the issue on Flash, it would affect those that run non-commercial and commercial sites when viewed with an Apple mobile device.
Also, I only earn part of my living from photography, and most clients find me via the website.
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March 7th, 2010 at
[...] More here: iPad and the Flash war | Graf Nature Photography | Notes from the … [...]
March 8th, 2010 at
Hi Mark,
The preview of the new site looks good!
To me it seems to me that Apple and Adobe have each other to partly thank for their mutual success over the years, so it is a bit surprising to see these battle between the companies. Limiting Apple users with a 32 bit version of Photoshop is another sign of what appears to be a souring relationship.
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Mark Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at
Thanks Ron.
You make a good point. Afterall, Photoshop did start on a Mac, and I don’t think you will find a single design firm that uses Macs and does not use Adobe products as well. CS5 isn’t too far away to finally give us 64 bit, although I have been working fine with 32.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
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March 8th, 2010 at
Mark…the Flash battle aside, I am amazed at how multi-faceted you are. It is tough enough having a day job, doing photography, blogging, and keeping up a great website…let alone programming an updating one!
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Mark Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at
Jack of a few trades, but master of none I am afraid Howard – that’s why I have been working on it for a long time already. Thanks though!
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March 9th, 2010 at
Mark, You are right aout iPad and Flash, but you also haven’t touched too much on the bigger issue I see, and why photographers sites you like that use Flash don’t show up high in search engines. Flash isn’t seen by search engines very well – if at all. So they loose unless they have an html version as well for those who don’t have – or can’t see Flash. Just another one of the problems with Flash. No I confess, I do have some Falsh on my mackphoto.com site but on my sister site quietlightpublishing.com we didn’t use any for that very reason. I, like you am currently updating the mackphoto.com site and it will not include any Flash this time around. The reason many photographers use it as far as I can see is for security reasons and not being ripped off by image downloads. Watermarking will at least help this issue, which is an entirely different blog post entirely! Good luck with your redsign – looks great, but then I’ve liked your work for along time!
Cheers,
Richard
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Mark Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at
Thank you for your comments Richard. You definitely brought up some bigger points that could be material for many other posts – use of Flash, love it or hate it, SEO, etc, etc. I didn’t want to get into that so much as just this issue of accessibility.
I have read on some sites that people think Apple doesn’t want to push Flash because it takes people away from the iTunes store, which I think is a bunch of bunk. They are actively promoting HTML5 and open source – so the content could be found anywhere. Still, it is a bit unnerving knowing that Apple can be so powerful to drive such changes on the internet. I am not sure if they will succeed or not. I am hoping the two find a middle ground to address the issues caused by Flash on Apple systems, and give people access to Flash content if they so desire.
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March 9th, 2010 at
Great discussion, Mark. I admit I recently added some flash to my website in order to facilitate slideshows and full screen display. Also, there’s a great plugin to Lightroom (SlideshowPro) that makes it really easy (not something people say about Flash!). I wasn’t too concerned about SEO because it’s only my image galleries that use Flash.
But not being able to display the galleries on the iPad – ouch! Hope this gets resolved quickly. I suspect it will. There will be a lot of pressure on Apple from the creative community, who they claim to care about.
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Mark Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at
I haven’t tried that plugin Bob, but it sounds interesting. There are a lot more methods for slideshows available now. The one I am implementing on my new site design is pretty much driven by CSS only.
I agree, Flash is typically not easy. I dabbled in it a little bit for the animation on my welcome screen now, and even that simple thing took me awhile to figure out.
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March 10th, 2010 at
Interesting subject, Mark. I can understand Apple’s stated reasoning for not wanting to support Flash and I personally believe HTML5 would eventually provide a better and more standard solution, but it will tike time. Millions of iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads on the Internet not supporting Flash might make it happen sooner. I do know that the iPad not supporting Flash will cause issues for photographers. For example, I currently use Zenfolio for my gallery and it’s slideshow appears to be Flash based — it doesn’t work on the iPhone and will not work on the iPad. SmugMug and some of the other such sites might also use Flash.
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Mark Reply:
March 11th, 2010 at
I believe that is what Jobs is hoping for. Some of the portfolio sites may be reconsidering their content in a few months!
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March 11th, 2010 at
interesting post (as always) Mark. I look forward to seeing your new website. I’ve been toying with the idea of a new website design myself. I joined photoshelter because of their great rep and the new ability to be able to integrate that with a wordpress and they actually allow you to have flash or normal gallery slideshows but the help tutorials advise against flash for many of the reasons you all explained here. I’ve actually abandoned that idea now anyway since that solution seems too expensive for my needs (would be $330 per year for photoshelter + $45 3months graphpaper press + £8.99 for wordpress hosting). I’m currently thinking of having galleries based on the hosting via wordpress plug ins & css and if I need to start selling I can hook in fotomoto
That would just leave me with the hosting charge. I think I’ll be playing with it for a while before anything comes of it though.
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March 11th, 2010 at
That is quite expensive Suzy. Hopefully you will find a good solution. I have seen some photographers do their entire site with Wordpress.
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March 21st, 2010 at
[...] War’ between Apple and Adobe seems to be continuing. No Flash support for the Ipad. Here’s [...]
April 1st, 2010 at
We’ll see how fast HTML5 is adopted in the newer browsers. Apple seems to be banking on that as a substitution for Flash (in combination with their own Quicktime codec.
What pixel dimension are you going to be designing for? 1024px wide? With the iPad being this dimension and the increased size of most monitors now that might a safe bet.
I’m looking forward to seeing the new site. I would not burn too much energy on the Flash transition issues. Be sure to use a noflash script with a browser sniffer and you should be fine. It’s the best solution to cater to Flash and non-Flash devices.
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Mark Reply:
April 5th, 2010 at
Jim, sorry for the late reply. I think some pages are going to be designed for the 900-1000 px range.
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