iPad 2 Revealed – Flash Player 11 Revealed – Not Together – Making Mountains out of Molehills

Good to see Steve Jobs well enough to promote the iPad 2 today.   Another glamourous product but as an iPad 1 owner I can’t say I’ll be rushing out to get the new one.

Reasons to own an iPad

I bought the iPad as a family device and for testing my work on (and coz it was a new shiny toy that everyone was talking about).  Have to say it doesn’t get as much use in our household as the 5 year old MacBook.  Could be my home wireless is not so great, but I find it slow to connect and pretty useless with stuff like the BBC iPlayer which runs great on the MacBook and iMac.    Shame that as I kind of saw myself watching stuff in bed, on the couch etc but it just isn’t up to that.

Bored of Saying / Hearing This – but no Flash

As a Flash developer I am obviously going to moan on about lack of Flash support.  The arguments for / against Flash on iOS are well rehearsed and there are valid reasons why Flash shouldn’t be on the iPad.  But let youth speak on this issue.  Not me, my 9 year daughter. She doesn’t like the iPad.  Why?  Because she says the “internet doesn’t work on it”.  What she means, is that there is no Flash and her favourite websites like friv just don’t work.

Making a Moutain out of a Molehill

So whilst Apple will undoubtedly get acres of press coverage for the new iPad 2, Adobe quietly put out a Flash Player 11 codename “Molehill” preview, incubator, experiment, whatever. But hold on this is a massive jump for the Flash Player. Adobe just banged out Flash Player 10.2 very quickly after the Flash Player 10.1. And Flash Player 10.1 seemed to take an absolute age to be released. Adobe seem to have stepped things up a gear and Flash 11 Player is going to be BIG news.  Adobe describe it as “a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes”.  What does that mean?  Watch this:

High quality 3D gaming, through the Flash Player, through your web browser – through dare I say friv!