Flash Coming Back To The iPhone, iPad And iPod Touch

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs previously posted an open letter elaborating on the reasons why Apple has chosen not to allow Adobe Flash on their platform. But for those of you who are curious to find out how Flash will look and feel on the iPhone then you can checkout Smokescreen.

Smokescreen is a new open source project aiming to bring Flash to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch without the need of a plugin.

Here’s how it works, according to Simon Willison:

It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

The beauty of the whole ordeal is that you won’t need to hack your iPhone to make it work. Flash developers will need to manually insert a few lines of Javascript code so that the Flash content is visible on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Smokescreen could allow users to watch videos and other Flash animations on their Mobile Safari web browser without the Adobe Flash plugin. Smokescreen is also equipped to receive input from users for playing Flash based games.

You can checkout the video of Smokescreen in action below:

You can also checkout the live demo of Smokescreen displaying Flash content on your iDevice by following this link.

But its still early days for Smokescreen. Flash based banner ads with basic animations work fine with Smokescreen but is still too slow for smooth video experience.

Smokescreen reminds us of the Gordon project that we had reported about earlier this year. Gordon is a Javascript based application created by German developer Tobias Schneider that enabled Flash developers to make their projects render on the iPhone by inserting a few lines of custom code into their application. However, as we had noted back then, a Javascript based workaround could be quite resource-intensive and may not be an ideal alternative to render Flash content on the iPhone. Since Smokescreen is based on a similar technology, we have our doubts regarding the scalability of the Smokescreen project but it will be interesting to see how it pans out nonetheless.