Many of our clients are very tech savvy companies and they want their websites to be fully iPad and iPhone compatible. From a development standpoint this means that we need to use JavaScript instead of Adobe Flash for animations and video. Currently the iPhone and iPad (or any Apple device) does not support Adobe Flash. While this does create a few challenges, our developers have fully embraced the idea of using JavaScript to achieve a 100% iPhone and iPad compatible site.
There is one drawback however. Currently Adobe Flash is the most widely used format for supporting video playback for websites. While many could of course use Apple Quick Time it’s just a lot less intrusive to use Adobe Flash for your video. Not to mention the compression is great and you can simply do more. Even our own website uses Adobe Flash for our introduction video on the Pennsylvania Web Technologies homepage. We have however decided to display a JavaScript slider as the default so that when an iPhone or iPad user visits our website they don’t see a large blank box where our introduction video is. Let’s face it, even the video giant YouTube uses Adobe Flash for all of their videos and I don’t suspect they are going to reprogram their entire website just to cater to Apple’s refusal to use Adobe Flash.
In best practices, it’s important to use any technology tastefully. While we can’t design websites that cater to everyone, every browser and every device we can however do our best to come up with a creative balance that covers the majority of people.
After all, companies spend good money to create beautiful websites and they want their visitors to be able to see their website the way it was intended to be displayed.
