One of the most common complaints about the new iPad is that it doesn’t support Flash. In a recent criticism of the device, Adobe’s Adrian Ludwig writes, “Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.” While Adobe is offering a number of workarounds, dark horse Tobey Schneider’s open source HTML 5 Flash Interpreter Gordon is an ambitious project with heroic intentions.
In the past we saw entire companies built on the fact that “dead” file formats could be rendered as something better and easier to use. Do you remember when Scribd launched as a way to render PDFs into Flash documents? Well now thanks to the fact that Apple’s iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone do not support Flash, developers are returning to the idea of open standards.
Gordon plays Flash files natively. It loads and interprets swf files with javascript and renders them as scalable vector graphics (SVG). The beauty of this is that it allows developers to put their applications on devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. In theory this would allow advertisers to circumvent Flash advertising blocks and game developers to run their products on iPads. In reality, speed has always been an issue with SVGs and it’ll be interesting to see if the open source community rallies around this project to make it a truly functional solution.
