Published in News

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 gets ported to the Apple iPad

by on05 July 2010
adobe_flash_player_logo fireworks_logo

Independence Day at its best


As you’ve probably heard many times by now, one of the biggest complaints facing Apple’s mobile platform on the marketplace is its inability to run native Flash Player code. While the real reasons behind the Apple-Adobe cold war still remain inconclusive, the company simply does not want to negotiate with Adobe because of its heavy involvement with the standardization of HTML5, not to mention its rubbish hypocritical argument that Flash Player is a closed standard.

Regardless of the war being fought behind Mother Apple’s revolutionary mobile i-devices, the rebels have responded by declaring independence from this tyrannical oppression by running Flash on an iPad. The guy behind Spirit untethered jailbreak tool for the iPhone cleverly managed to port the Adobe Flash runtime for Android over to the device using a compatibility layer by comex.

Interestingly enough, the port is named “Frash” and is currently able to play Flash content natively in the Safari browser on the iPad. The developer has mentioned that iPhone 3GS support is planned soon, as well as support for iOS 4, and there is a call for developers to move forward with the project at GitHub. “Frash uses a multi-process model similar to Chrome on the desktop, so a crash in the Frash/Flash plugin doesn’t take down the browser,” says the developer. “You can see this while I’m playing Alien Hominid: the ad above crashed (probably a Frash bug), but Safari stays open just fine, and continues to play other Flash content on the page.”

At this point in the development cycle, video and keyboard input are currently not supported. The former is expected to require major reverse engineers of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, and the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.

Of course, the port only works with an iPad running the Spirit jailbreak that was released back in early May. Based on our sources, Comex has been working on this project for some time now, and we are definitely sure that it will attract more attention from the independent developer scene over the next few weeks. In all honesty, the preview couldn’t have come at a better time than July 4th and we have a feeling that a couple geeks will be lighting off some bottle rockets to celebrate this grand victory against Apple.

Check out the video below.

Last modified on 05 July 2010
Rate this item
(1 Vote)

Media

Frash for iPhone

Read more about: