Is anyone actually going to try that? Would you walk into an Apple store and try to play Farmville, before trying out anything else? I doubt it. The iPad is primarily a mobile device. How many mobile phones let you play Farmville? none that I know of. Do people expect to be able to play farmville on their mobile devices while they are out and about? Sadly I know a number of people that play the damn game and none of them ever play it at anything other than a desktop computer. Even with a windows netbook and flash ‘the screen is just too small to see my farm properly…’

Flash performs very badly on any apple device, which is a known problem (hence the awesome browser plugin click2flash). People are aware that flash isn’t supported on the iPhone, is the fact that it isn’t supported on the iPad that much of a surprise?

Personally I would see flash gone tomorrow. It sucks. Never mind HTML5, with HTML4.01 and jQuery you can pretty much replace 99% of what flash does. And you don’t need flash to play games – hello app store. What’s the difference between playing a free flash game and playing a free app store game? One of them isn’t built using something that sucks. That’s it.

Great article, enjoyed the read

1. I’m sure the SD slot was omitted because they plan on adding a camera soon.

2. Multitasking introduces significant technical complexity – greater demands on the battery, CPU, memory, etc. I’ve yet to hear of a scenario, which I consider practical for this device, for which I would be willing to trade battery life, or system performance/stability.

3. Amen.

4. Yeah, I agree, only time will tell.

5. My biggest beef with the name is the inevitable confusion that will ensue re: iPod vs. iPad. For the average person, the kind who don’t follow Apple keynotes on Twitter, the distinction may be unclear.

Thanks for your comment!

2. Why are you still defending the lack of multitasking at this point? This is a weak argument at best. You may not need it, but it should be there. Jailbroken apps like Backgrounder show that multitasking is even usable on the original iphone. This is a serious omission, especially if this tablet is to be used for productivity apps where you may be going back and forth in your document and spreadsheet app and whatever.

3. 100% agree. The sooner everyone drops flash, the better.

4. I guess I agree. I don’t think it makes sense now, but in a few months to a year, people will start figuring out how to use this new form factor in new and excellent ways.

5. I think the name’s fine, myself.

Cheers!

If you take a look at the Balsamiq website, for example, you will see that they have their entire mockup application available as a flash file. Other examples are Photoshop.com and the Aviary.

I agree it is a business decision, but it is a business decision that ends up screwing the web user experience of those who buy the tablet.

The ability to do things like convert a Photoshop design into a pixel perfect SWF is exactly the kind of feature that facilitates all the Flash abominations out there. I won’t dispute that in the right hands, Flash/Flex can do some interesting things, but I don’t think it’s the future of web applications.

Also, let’s not be naive, allowing Flash games on these devices would hurt App Store sales, which I’m sure is a contributing factor.

The world won’t switch to HTML5 overnight, but Apple has never been about making devices for now, they build devices for tomorrow. Right or wrong, their decision shouldn’t be surprising.

I recall when Apple transitioned their notebooks from iBook and PowerBook to MacBook and MacBook Pro respectively. People didn’t like the change, but it didn’t hurt the success of the products in the slightest.

Should the tablet succeed, over time people will accept the iPad as Apple’s tablet – defined by the experience it provides rather than the silly relationships we currently form in our minds that are invoked by a part of its name. To the next generation, ‘iPad’ (don’t know how Apple & Fujitsu will work things out ultimately, though it appears Apple has the better case) will seem no more odd than ‘iPod’.

That said, I hardly see myself as an early adopter and would struggle to justify needing such a device, but as the author is suggesting it would be wise to wait for version 2.0 if you do not immediately see the benefit.

As mentioned in this post by Adobe ( http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/apples_ipad_–_a_broken_link.html ), it’s hard to take the ipad as a serious netbook alternative when 70% of web video and 75% of web games won’t run on it.

I can just imagine the number of lost sales come March when a person goes into the Eaton Centre Apple Store, logs into their Facebook account and is unable to play Farmville. http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703

The problem with your complaints about Flash is that even if flash is somehow removed, people are going to figure out ways to re-do all the annoying ads in HTML5. Greasemonkey scripts to disable will be the new hotness.

As a developer, it is very frustrating to have this blatant holdout from Apple. Flex 4 introduces many very interesting development ideas that makes it miles ahead of HTML / Javascript development. Flash Catalyst, for example, lets me take a photoshop design and convert it into a pixel perfect SWF file without a line of CSS change. Flash Builder 4 let’s me build UIs with drag and drop in-line CRUD generation based on web services. There are no equivalent HTML5 development processes that do the same thing.

In the perfect world, everyone will switch to HTML5 overnight. But in our world where 60% of business still run ie6 and Google Street View is still coded in Flash, no Flash on the iPad is baffling.