**Beware: The following blog post is basically just rambling thoughts.**

Like a lot of people I’ve been pretty excited about Flash Player 10.1 on hand held and touch devices. The fact that I could use the same websites and play the same games on a mobile device that I can on my laptop sounds just plain awesome.

But there’s a dark reality that most people haven’t quite thought about (well maybe they have but I haven’t found it to read yet), and something I just keep forgetting.

Garth Braithwaite (@GarthDB) reminded me of this fact during a conversation on twitter. He said, “Flash 10.1 is not going to be develop once/deploy everywhere like people expect.” We were speaking in terms of video on mobile devices and how well it may or may not perform.

This statement sort of kicked me in the side of the head and got my brain running about possible issues of interactive sites that may run on mobile devices in the future.

I do have to disagree with Garth in that Video is Video. It really should be able to be played everywhere the same way. That’s pretty much the point of Flash Player, especially with video. But this is also a big issue with Flash.

Now Flash Video pretty much needs an entire overhaul if it is going to be usable on mobile devices – even beyond 10.1. Hulu videos using Flash Player 10.1 still runs at over 90% and makes my laptop very hot. This needs to be addressed by Adobe’s Flash Player team and fast.

I imagine that if you watch that same video on a handheld device, you wouldn’t want to hold it for long. This is a huge downfall. You wouldn’t want to go back to that site simply because you know your hand would burn if you did. It is one thing for desktops and laptops to heat up, they have fans and aren’t in your hand.

There are couple other issues with having Flash on mobile devices that I have yet to see as a topic of much discussion by the Flash community.

First, sites and games that are already compiled are based largely for mouse/keyboard set up*. Not touch screen. This is a big “OH Shite” moment. Why? Because of a little thing called a button. A lot of times buttons should work fine on any device. But just go to Adobe’s own homepage and try to bring up the Suites Promo at the top there. You may have to refresh a few times to get it.

See how if you mouse over one of the boxes a dialog popover appears? That simply wont work the same with touch screens. My best guess is that you can place your finger on the box and will need to carefully slide it to the popover to go to the link inside. This presents a problem. There are a great deal of sites currently live on the web that use a “button-inside-a-button” kind of setup. In this setup if you rollover the main button, a popover appears in the “over” state of the button which then contains another button. (This is an absolutely terrible way to set up rollovers and dialogs and such, but, unfortunately it happens.) The second button is a pain to try and click on. Now try to do that with just your index finger. Probably not doing to well with that imaginary button.

I’ve played with the HP TouchSmart at in store displays, it’s pretty freakin cool, and Flash tends to work fine. But there is still funky little issues with rollover popovers and drop down menus and such.

Now, on the graphics side. There are countless instances of button rollover animations that are probably going to go unnoticed, rendering the designer’s countless hours creating them useless. Mostly because the user’s finger and hand will get in the way of the visual effects. Just play with any application on the iPhone. You just don’t see the “over” state of a lot of buttons that are finger size. This size is intentional, but what about on sites that are already built? Go check out Disney Channel, for example, where elaborate rollover animations are used intentionally for increase pizzaz. They didn’t take the smaller screen size into account and are really only thinking about monitor resolutions. Will the smaller screen size result in the loss of the fun factor of button rollover animations?

On top of rollovers, the hit areas (the area on or around a button) on a great deal of buttons on the internet are considered for desktop/laptop monitor sizes as well, and may be just too small to properly “click” on on smaller screens. This is going to lead to much frustrations to the user as they repeatedly try to touch a button and can’t, or end up touching buttons they don’t wish to navigating somewhere they don’t wish to go. This happens to me quite often when browsing sites on the iPod Touch or Blackberry Storm that I carry everywhere. And it drives me insane.

Also, how about how all of these buttons are programmed. There are multiple ways to handle mouse events in ActionScript 3 but I’ve seen multiple ways of how to handle when the events call to perform the “click” action. I know that the “proper” way is MouseEvent.CLICK, but I have seen some sites that use MouseEvent.MouseDown. This is just bad, but it happens, and it could very well annoy quite a bit of users.

Buttons aren’t the only element of a site that will be problematic on smaller screens. The site/game/app itself will not look as good. Size to SWFs is incredibly important as they tend not to scale dimensionally. SWFs are generally set to a certain height and width. For designers, this again is based on screen size. But what if you’re holding one of the new Android phones, for example, in portrait? Either your entire page, including SWF, is going to scale making it look horrendous, or it won’t and you will have to scroll to see all the content. This sucks for Flash files as most designers tend to use ALL of the real-estate of the SWF and with the nature of Flash, animations or other content may be missed when scrolled to the other side. The same goes for height if the device is held in landscape mode. Static content is one thing. Scrolling is still ok when reading a blog post, or the local news site. But not really with Flash. That sucks. I, personally want as much of my content visible at one time as possible.

We designers take great care in designing for common screen sizes and haven’t really needed to think about screens so small. So much of our content may not scale nicely, it will probably look terrible. Not just not ideal for any decent designer, it’s just unacceptable.

Many Flash based games are going to be rendered completely useless on touch screen devices. There are tons of games with keyboard controls that just won’t work on devices that don’t have keyboards, and the ones that do will probably be very difficult to use. And for the games that are mouse based? Your hand is just plain going to get in the way, and you won’t be able to SEE much of the game.

BUT, I can see that there might be a whole plethora of games tailored for the smaller touch screens. So that will be fun.

Much of this can be easily solved by simple device detection which sends the user to a mobile, or parred down, version of the site. But this isn’t the intent of Flash on mobile devices as mobile pages are generally static. Of course, those mobile pages can also be created with Flash, but then the full experience is nearly eliminated. (I could go into the marketing, budgeting, and project production of building a Flash based mobile page on top of the full experience, but I’ll spare you that complex system.)

The reality is that what Garth said is true to a point. No, Flash Player 10.1 won’t necessarily be “develop once, deploy everywhere” because of the possibility of usability and visual quality dragging down the user experience on mobile devices. None-the-less, I am still very excited about getting Flash on hand-held devices.

If you can think of other examples where Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices may or may not be as ideal as it should, please comment. I would like to hear your thoughts.

Note: These are, of course, just thoughts and may or may not be the true reality once mobile devices are able to run Flash.

*I read an article stating something along the same lines, and if I could remember where I saw it, I would link to it as reference.

Tags: Flash, FP 10.1, Mobile, Thoughts