Flash - A Touch too Much?

I was lying in bed the other night doing one last check of all my favourite websites before going to sleep and I was looking at this very Mac Forum when I realised I couldn't get the little yellow box's to come up on my iPod Touch.

You know, when you hover over the titles of posts and you get a little taste of what the post is about. And then I was thinking, well of course you can't. The Touch surface of the ipod and phone aren't driven by a visual cursor. your finger IS the cursor. If I try to highlight the post title I just select it.

So it came to me that maybe it is the lack of this function (through Apples want to strip away any pointless features for need of streamlining - and therefor bettering) that means it would be hard for Apple to implement a Flash plugin.

I mean, I use Flash a lot, and one very popular (and old and therefor popular) function of buttons and interactivity in a flash file is the rollover function. You know, when your mouse cursor rolls a button or section of the screen and something happens.

Now, with a cursor-less input device, these rollovers wouldn't work, and more so on flash based sites or plug-in's which have hidden buttons and rollover areas.

It just struck me that if Apple said 'Ok, here, have the flash plugin for the touch and iphone' half the sites wouldn't work properly anyway.

Do you think that's the reason for Apple leaving the flash plugin out of the Safari Browser? that they have realised their own break through interface wouldn't allow half the flash stuff to work properly?

One solution I thought of would be for Apple to release a firmware update which increases the sensitivity of the touch display so it can track your finger about 5mm above the screen (which I think it does anyway, but doesn't input the information until you touch the screen) and then display a small transparent circular cursor underneath your finer so that rollovers and so forth could exist.

What say ye?

another $10 just to have Flash? I think I'll pass....

but good idea, nonetheless!

yes there is a reason why they left flash out , well there are 2 possibilities

1. they wanted to save time and work on the other features

2.It could cause an overload and make safari run really slow

melmation said:

I was lying in bed the other night doing one last check of all my favourite websites before going to sleep and I was looking at this very Mac Forum when I realised I couldn't get the little yellow box's to come up on my iPod Touch.

Click to expand...

sorry for the double post but you can actully get that feature that your talking about just touch the part that you want that box thing to come up and hold you finger at that spot for 3-4 seconds. and it will pop up

AH! great! ha ha, I missed it on the touch. DId you also know that with FW 2.0 you can tap the home and sleep button simultaneously to take a snapshot of the current screen? and then when you connect your ipod it lets you browse it as a camera to download the images you took to your computer! (I suppose this is how it is on an iphone when you take photographs)

Mel

yah and you can also save pictures too just hold your finger down on the picture until a menu comes up and touch save picture and it saves the picture strait to your ipod touch/iphone (for FW 2.0 )