Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Apple controls the whole software stack. So, unless Adobe were to open source the whole of Flash or give or sell Flash to Apple, there was no way it was ever going to be on the iPhone.

If a web page embeds a PDF, what happens? I've not used an iPhone enough to know personally, but I'm guessing that it opens an external application. Why would that not work for embedded Flash applets? Or is Mobile Safari so closed that it cannot deal with any objects it doesn't have preexisting knowledge of?

We've covered this before a little bit in the old "iSlate" thread (oddly I can't link to the threaded view), but as a refresher, the iPhone allows any app to register and be called by another one, including from Safari. They can register as a handler for an entire domain (IE, Apple has a Gallery app that can run when visiting http://gallery.me.com), or to handle a file type. As for your specific PDF question, they just open in the browser, since OS X is PDF based. It will also open .doc, and other MS Office formats without any 3rd party software.

Adobe could go the route of making a flash player for the phone as a standalone app, but the issue would be how web sites handle it. Since it wouldn't be installed as a plugin, websites may just display the "download flash player" button, instead of sending down the swf. I'm also not sure how Actionscript is handled, it may come afoul with the SDK agreement.

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
but that involves a lot of transcoding of source material that's not in a codec that HTML will handle (Sorenson Spark, mostly),

Sorenson Spark was the default in Flash 6 (2002) and 7 (2003). 8 (2005) moved to VP6 by default, and 9 update 3 (2007) moved to H.264 by default. Most of the big video sites are on Flash 9 at least.