iPhone 3GS A Month Later. Still A Lot Missing

by Sebastien on Jul 20, 2009

It seems it was yesterday that I unboxed my iPhone 3GS for the first time. Of course it was love at first sight. It is fast and elegant, but now that I’ve been using it for a month, I notice there is still a lot missing to make it the perfect phone.

Copy/Paste is Clunky

Woohoo, the iPhone finally has copy/paste. It only took Apple 2 years to implement this basic feature… The reality is that they did a terrible job. I think copy/paste on the iPhone is clunky and intrusive. Now everytime you touch your iPhone screen, you have this annoying popup asking you if you want to select/copy/paste. Apple products usually are about amazing user experience and copy/paste for the iPhone is a big fail. Read More

 

Apple and Adobe Collaborating on iPhone Flash

by Sebastien on Feb 1, 2009

Flash for the iPhone kinda reminds me of copy/paste for the iPhone. It’s something that should have been there since day 1, but never was because Apple made the non-sense decision to not having it. Why? I don’t know for sure but I am certain Steve Jobs has a rational explanation for this.

The Flash non-sense is now coming to an end as Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced last week at the World Economic Forum that Adobe and Apple are working together in an effort to bring Flash to the iPhone. That’s about time!

In an interview to Bloomberg, Narayen said that “it’s a hard technical challenge and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are cooperating to try and get it done as soon as possible”. He also said that “we have the developer kit and the onus is now on us”.

According to RWW:

The debate has been long and tough. In March last year Narayen said that with or without Apple’s blessing, Adobe planned to develop a Flash player for the iPhone/iPod touch platform. Unfortunately Apple CEO Steve Jobs had already made it clear the current Adobe offerings were not acceptable. Flash Lite, the version designed specifically for mobile devices, just wasn’t good enough and Adobe’s desktop product was just too slow on the iPhone. According to Jobs, what was needed was a “missing product in the middle.”

It seems that Adobe has been working on this missing product and while there is no time frame, we certainly hope to get Flash on our iPhones sooner rather than later…

You can watch Narayen interview below.

Via RWW

 

Flash Finally Coming to Your iPhone With iMobileCinema

by Sebastien on Dec 22, 2008

It’s completely unofficial and still very buggy, but yes, you finally can get Flash on your iPhone… kinda. iMobileCinema is a new app available for free in Cydia that aims at being the “Flash for iPhone” application.

iMobileCinema is in fact a Safari plugin for playing internet videos on your iPhone or iPod touch. I personally gave it a try on several websites and it worked pretty well.

After installing iMobileCinema, simply visit any webpage that has Flash content and it will show you a big “play” triangle on top of videos so you know you can play it.

Is iMobileCinema a Flash Player for Safari?

The answer is no. Even though iMobileCinema acts like a Flash plugin, it can’t play Flash content such as Flash games and ads. It only plays Flashvideos that are embedded in a webpage.

iMobileCinema can’t decode Flash files (.swf) but it ca decode Flash Videos (.flv). It decodes and plays the flash video in real-time while it’s buffering.

According to iMobileCinema’s blog, they are also coming up with some cool new features…

Some live broadcast sites are using rtmp protocol to deliver videos, e.g., mtv.com, hulu.com. We’ll try to support the protocol later. And playing embedded mp3, like singsbox.com, is a good idea and we’ll try to support it too.

iMobileCinema is available via Cydia. You will have to add this source to Cydia: http://d.imobilecinema.com

Here is a short demo of iMobileCinema in action…


 

The iPhone will get Flash…

by Guest Author on Nov 30, 2008

Flash needs to be on the iPhone. Adobe knows it, Apple knows it, we know it. Due to Flash’s many integrations on the Internet from advertisements to games and even full blown web sites, people are craving this functionality on their iPhone everywhere and a quick search on Twitter shows you what I am talking about. Not to mention it flys in the face of Apple’s own statements that Mobile Safari browses “the true web” as it most certainly does not without Flash, Java and Active-X support.

The Good News, Flash streaming video is close …

Streaming flash video for example can be interpreted by iMobile Cinema but it is only available for 1.x version firmware at the moment. According to the website the 2.x firmware version is in the works. Can’t wait for this to be a reality as it is the main reason I want flash to perform on my phone.

Many sites are also offering iPhone friendly video now as they realize the political lockout of the Flash player may take a while to get resolved.

The Bad News, Wired says it will never happen …

If you read the doom and gloom article over at Wired you may agree with them and give up hope.

Personally, I think they are dead wrong because hackers or 3rd party developers will address the solution if Apple does not. My prediction is that a jailbreak version of the Flash player shows up mid-next year at the latest. Can’t wait.

 

Flash finally coming to the iPhone?

by Sebastien on Sep 30, 2008

That’s a feature that has been expected since the very beginnings of the iPhone. Apple has always turned down Adobe’s request to include Flash on the iPhone, mostly due to the fact that the iPhone (and other phones for that matter) aren’t fast enough to handle most Flash-driven sites. Even Flash Lite, a shrinked-down version of Flash specifically developed for mobile devices, is requiring too much CPU power.

But according to Flash expert Jens Chr Brynildsen, Paul Betlem publicly confirmed for the first time that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for the iPhone.

“My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.” He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.

It looks like we’re almost there. I guess the hardest part is not to develop Flash for the iPhone. The hardest part of the job is to get Steve-o approve Flash…

How much do you want Flash? Let us know in the comments why you want (or not) Flash on your iPhone.

 
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