There has been much said about Flash on Apple's iPhone/iPad and Flash in general. As a Flex developer, which uses the Flash player, I have a real interest in this.

From personal experience, the Flash experience on Apple products is very fustrating. Is it Adobe's fault? I do think they need to take partial blame but I think the majority of the blame lays with Apple. I will stop just short of saying Apple tries to sabotage the Flash experience on OSX.

This whole argument between Apple and Adobe is about more than just Flash however. This war has been coming for many years. 2-3 years ago Apple, without warning or reason, removed support for Flash in Quicktime. This directly affected a project I had been working on for 2-3 months, all that work, just gone. So like I said, this isn't new, this is just more overt and in everyone's face. I have to think the real motivation is nothing more than money. I don't know what Apple hopes to gain overall. Is Jobs really that concerned about our internet experience?

Why do I use Flex and Flash? Well, I used to use HTML and CSS and Coldfusion. And here is what most average user doesn't understand. When you make a web application with such technologies, I am not talking a video player here, I am talking real web applications. You run into issues when using HTML/CSS and Javascript. How things look and run varies depending on the browser. I used to build basically, not to get overly technical here, 3 different pages depending on the browser (sometimes 2 just for IE, Firefox, Safari). I have introduce Flex to a number of developers who have used Ajax, HTML/CSS, etc and the common theme with using Flex, was how nice it was to make once, deploy everywhere and the experience was the same, didn't matter what the browser was. The hours wasted tweaking applications not built in Flex/Flash, to work and look properly in every browser flavor is staggering. My application was originally built with these other technologies and I spent almost as much time tweaking it to work in IE, Safari, Firefox as I did building it.

If you think Flash is nothing more than playing videos, heres one of my favorite Flash applications, Aviary.

Flex was my savior. I now produce a product 1000 times better. I produce it quicker, with a slicker interface, with more features. To give you an example, my first application took 3-4 years to get to the same level of completeness that my latest application took me a month and a half. Thats why I use Flex/Flash today.

Now for some quick hits:

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