Well, HTML5 is great - but for now Flash is still wanted. A lot of users have been trying so hard to enable Flash on their iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, etc. For Hong Kong users, their main purpose to play Facebook Flash games as well as watching videos on their Apple devices. Although these wishes are still not yet made possible, there comes a new technology called iOS Flash Video, which supports more Flash formats.
In the past, there was a technology called Frash which supports playing Flash on Apple devices, but that limits to simple Flash animations only - like the banner ads that you often encounter. And then some time ago Skyfire made Flash available on their mobile browsers, but still many video websites are not supported, like the beloved myTV for Hong Kongers.
Now, iOS Flash Video offers an option to view Flash content without jail-breaking (note: you may not have heard the term jail-breaking, but it is not the theme of this blog to introduce it here. Readers are advised to consult the wikipedia). All the users need to do is to use their Apple device to navigate to a website (via Safari) provided by the development team, bookmark the link, and then delete everything before the Javascript (intuitively some scripts will run by accessing this bookmark, and I advise users to understand the security threats behind before proceeding).
I have tried it on my iPad and it does work, but it only supports a limited number of video sites, which include Flickr Video, MegaVideo, Dailymotion, etc. Very often, these sites offer videos of alternative formats which can be viewed directly by iPad without using this hack. What's more, I usually don't watch videos on these websites, which are probably more popular among Americans. So my conclusion is that this new technology isn't very useful for me. Nevertheless, it is always exciting to see that running Flash on Apple devices are gradually becoming possible.
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