February 08, 2010

Adobe Systems Inc., trying to get its Flash software onto Apple Inc.'s devices, said a lack of cooperation has blocked its efforts and that using the new HTML5 format instead would throw video back into "the dark ages."

Flash is ready to work on the iPhone and new iPad -- it just needs Apple's support, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief technical officer. The lack of Flash on those devices is making it difficult for Apple's customers to view more than 75 percent of the video on the Web, he said.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs told Apple workers last week that the industry will move to HTML5, Wired magazine reported. That standard -- the next version of the HTML language, which tells Web pages how to present information -- won't be able to replace Flash for video, Lynch said. The format won't work the same way in different browsers, he said. "Users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues," he said in a blog posting.

Jobs said in March 2008 that Adobe's Flash software is too slow to be useful on the iPhone and a mobile version of Flash isn't powerful enough. At the time, he said he wanted Adobe to create a third version of Flash, with features that fall between the personal-computer edition and the mobile version. "We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen," Lynch said.

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, didn't immediately reply to a message seeking comment.

Flash is installed on about 98 percent of Internet-connected PCs. The Flash player can be downloaded for free. San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe makes money from the technology by selling programs that Web designers and graphics professional use to create Flash-based animation and video.

Source:-http://www.delawareonline.com/