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Adobe Executive Kevin Lynch Discusses Flash on Mac, iPhone, and iPad

Wednesday February 17, 2010 9:45 am PST by Eric Slivka
BoomTown today sat down with Adobe Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch to discuss the relationship between Apple and Adobe and the deployment of Flash on Mac as well as the iPhone and iPad. Apple's decision not to include Flash Player capabilities on the iPhone and now the iPad has resulted in apparent tensions between the two companies.

Lynch's comments about Flash on the Mac indicate that the Adobe is working hard on CPU usage during video rendering, acknowledging that such tasks use more CPU cycles on the Mac than on Windows. Regarding the iPhone, Lynch defends the importance of Flash on the Web, noting that he is hopeful that the adoption of Flash capabilities on a number of smartphone platforms will help convince others such as Apple to follow suit.

Well, there's a lot of Flash content on the Web, and so, right now about 85% of the top websites have Flash on their website. So if you want to view the whole Web, not having the ability to view Flash really is kind of limiting in terms of the experience on the devices, and so we're really focused on making sure that we can bring the ability to view Flash content and interact with it across all of these devices...I'm hopeful in the smartphone space, for example, that as people start to see that you can get a great experience with Flash in the smartphone, for example on Android, and Palm, and Nokia, and RIM, and these other devices, that that will encourage others to adopt Flash as well on their devices.

In the interview, Lynch also discusses Adobe's efforts on its AIR platform, which bundles the Flash runtime into applications, allowing developers to easily port their applications to a variety of platforms, including the iPhone.


In a follow-up article, BoomTown's Kara Swisher also posts a video of Lynch showing off a digital version of Wired magazine has developed using Adobe AIR. The working concept, which Wired expects to be able to easily port to the iPad via the AIR platform, has also been previewed by Wired.

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