Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

Following on from Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ widely reported disparaging comments about Adobe and Flash this week at an Apple Town Hall, PCWorld is reporting that Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has written a blog which starts off by addressing the fact that there’s no Flash on the iPad and goes on to defend Flash’s record, stating that it is used in more than 85 percent of the top Web sites, as well as being a major player in the smartphone market. PCWorld points out that although the iPhone has done just fine so far without using Flash, there are plenty of people out there who think that the iPad should definitely have some sort of Flash capability. This is what Lynch had to say on the matter in his blog post:

“So, what about Flash running on Apple devices? We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash. In fact, some of these apps are already available in the Apple App Store such as FickleBlox and Chroma Circuit. This same solution will work on the iPad as well. 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.”

“Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today. We work directly with the major browser teams — including Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft IE, and Google Chrome — and review any emerging issues so we can resolve them together. Before we release a new version of Flash Player we run more than 100,000 test cases and have built an automated system that has scanned over 1 million SWFs that we use for testing from across the web.”