Quote:
Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, Andriod, Google or magical new hardware.
That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.
Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.
All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work. Users would hate that broken promise much more than they hate gaps in pages, missing banner ads, and the need to download a game once from the App Store instead of re-downloading it every time they visit a Flash game page.
Mouseover examples:
* Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise. (This seems to be the norm, in fact. Whereas a click on the same video does something different: usually Pause. Try Hulu for instance.)
* Games where you steer with the mouse without clicking (extremely common).
* Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click.
* Buttons that have important explanations/summaries on mouseover, which you need to understand before deciding what to click.
* Functions that use mouseover to preview and click to commit; such as choosing hair colors for an avatar: you mouse over the colors until your character looks the way you like, and then you click to commit.
* Maps and diagrams that don’t use click at all, but pop up info as you mouse around.
* Numerous other custom mouseover functions that “just work” with a mouse and need no explanation.
None of these things can work right with a finger (or traditional stylus) because on a touchscreen, pointing at something without clicking isn’t a mouseover: it’s just holding your finger vaguely in the air. The device doesn’t even know it’s happening.
yawn
