“Apple has hitched its wagons to HTML5 for dynamic content, and won’t be supporting Flash until Adobe’s platform develops into something that works really well on mobiles and customers start demanding Flash playback as a feature,” Dilger reports. “Unfortunately for Adobe, that’s unlikely to ever happen because the iPhone OS now makes up such a large and conspicuous chunk of the smartphone, media player, and tablet markets that content developers are now rethinking how to publish their content in a format that can be viewed by Apple’s influential users.”
“Web developers sensitive to Apple’s affluent demographic have already begun removing Flash from their websites, from Carnival cruise lines to the Virgin America airline,” Dilger reports. “But rather than anticipating this trend, Condé Nast forged ahead with Adobe on a Flash-centric publishing partnership, only to find out, too late, that Adobe’s backup plan for automatically generating native iPhone apps from Flash Professional wouldn’t meet with Apple’s App Store approval.”
“In order for Condé Nast to ship an iPhone OS app for iPad, it would need to build the app using Apple’s development tools, not Adobe’s middleware solution,” Dilger reports. “”Rather than design original content for iPad or simply create a custom, standards-based website in HTML, Adobe sold Condé Nast on distributing its existing InDesign pages as large graphic files presented using a standard iPhone OS viewer app built according to Apple’s rules.”
Dilger reports, “The result was that Adobe could claim relevance as an essential link in the publisher chain, and Condé Nast could sell its magazine published as an iPad app without too much extra work. The downside is that there’s nothing really interesting or novel about the iPad version of Wired, apart from the fact that Adobe’s workaround results in a huge ‘app’ that weighs in at around 500MB.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: All you need to know about the lazy Adobe ingrates is that, after putting Condé Nast through the wringer* and then “helping” Wired excrete their iPad “app,” Adobe issued a press release patting themselves on the back. Patting themselves on the back for yet another job shittily done.
*We’re not absolving Condé Nast. At some point a bad decision should be recognized and changes made. Condé Nast continued down an obvious dead end for far too long. Unfortunately, from the quotes featured in Adobe’s press release, Condé Nast still hasn’t turned around.
