Comments on: iPad and the Flash war

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:35:21 +0000

Jim, sorry for the late reply. I think some pages are going to be designed for the 900-1000 px range.

By: Jim Goldstein

Jim Goldstein — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:24:02 +0000

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.

By: Flash Wars and Ipad » The Photo Nomads

Flash Wars and Ipad » The Photo Nomads — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:43:39 +0000

[...] War’ between Apple and Adobe seems to be continuing. No Flash support for the Ipad. Here’s [...]

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:14:45 +0000

That is quite expensive Suzy. Hopefully you will find a good solution. I have seen some photographers do their entire site with Wordpress.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:08:37 +0000

I believe that is what Jobs is hoping for. Some of the portfolio sites may be reconsidering their content in a few months!

By: Suzy Walker

Suzy Walker — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:57:42 +0000

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.

By: Earl

Earl — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:56:58 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:56:26 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:46:00 +0000

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.

By: Bob Cornelis

Bob Cornelis — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:31:35 +0000

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.