Most of the thinking on iPad’s exclusion of Flash has been focused on battery life, performance, stability, or control of the application market, but here’s a Flash developer who’s thinking differently. Morgan Adams argues it’s all about the mouseover, and he raises a point that is just as relevant to rich Javascript apps.
Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.
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Mouseover examples:* Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise. (This seems to be the norm, in fact. Whereas a click on the same video does something different: usually Pause. Try Hulu for instance.)
* Games where you steer with the mouse without clicking (extremely common).
* Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click.
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He claims all the alternatives are unsatisfactory, e.g. re-coding every application manually, introducing gestures, substituting double-clicking for clicking and clicking for mouseovers.
The issues are relevant to Javascript developers; for example, PPK has previously speculated on the demise of mouse* events, as well as hover in touch environments. How will that play out with a web app that relies on them?
It’s a bit like Dion’s recent tweet: “I find myself typing click^H^H^H^H^Htap 20 times a day at the moment. Is there a term that abstractly could mean both? :)”. We can get away with simple substitutions with straightforward web apps maybe, but it gets a lot more complicated with seriously rich interaction styles, the kind traditionally seen in some Flash games and now possible with Javascript. We tend to think of mobile device design as a matter of massaging the look with some CSS…the harder part to get right is often the “feel” in the look-and-feel equation. Platforms, like the web, which want to support multiple interaction styles, need to provide ways to ease the transition for developers, automating degradation and enhancement in the first instance, but allowing application designers to customise further for each device. Dan Saffer’s sideshow below makes the point well, regarding gesture design in touch devices:
