Lee Brimelow on flash and touch based devices

by Justin Horn on May 12th, 2010 @ 1:27 pm

You guys all remember Lee from, the iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience, right? Now he’s back arguing against point 5 of Steve Jobs open letter on flash:

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Lee created a video (below) to demonstrate that flash sites don’t need to be rewritten to support touch devices.  The problem with the video is the touch device is an old school, mouse cursor where you put your finger device…not the modern multitouch devices like the iPhone.

Even though I disagree with Lee that most flash sites work perfectly on a touch device, neither do a lot of non flash sites. Rollovers are not a flash issue, but a user interface issue facing any website, program, etc. written for a mouse and and keyboard. New websites will have to created to work well on both a traditional mouse based computer and a touch based device. Depending on the website, it might even be necessary to make a sister site geared only for touch based device.

Here at When Will Apple our new javascript based charts make use of the hover effect. You hover over the chart to see the number of votes for a particular month. On iPhone OS devices you tap on the bar to see the “number of votes popup”. Yes, we could create a touch based version of the site that would work a bit better, but this is a good compromise and falls into the category of sites working well for both interfaces.

Even though I disagree on this being a flash problem, I do agree with Steve on his other point…If you need to redesign, why not use the latest and greatest?

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