iPad gets Flash as Apple says 2 million iPads sold

Apple today announced its achievement of over two million iPad sales in just 60-days -- confirming demand is off the charts -- as pioneering work from one ad agency and developer, Chris Smoak means you can look forward to Flash on your iPad.

Adobe Flash and Apple sure have been hot topics this month. Apple's refusal to support Flash on its family of iPhone-powered products has seen the Department of Justice begin an investigation into Apple on Adobe's request.

Despite the imminent introduction of the iPhone 4, the DoJ investigation is stupid. That is because it really doesn't matter if a piece of Adobe software is supported on a device.

What matters is that content or service offered via that software can be made accessible using that device.

Apple isn't a monopoly -- it just leads the pack

Apple can also point to its fast-growing competitor, Google's Android OS, and point out that Flash is supported (at cost in terms of battery life and device performance) on that platform. Apple doesn't have a stranglehold.

The growing evolution of an audience of rabid, slightly obsessive Android fanbois underlines that in this case the competition is no flash in the pan..

(Incidentally, if you are an iPhone-using Android fanboi, you may want to visit here for a video demonstrating Google's mobile OS running on a jailbroken iPhone).

It is completely possible to run Flash content on an iPad without Adobe's plug-in. There's a new solution in town, Smokescreen, which lets you do just this.

Developed by mobile ad startup, RevShock developer, Chris Smoak, Smokescreen runs entirely in the browser and is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5.

Cleverness -- to go

It does this by reading SWF binaries and unzipping them in native JavaScript. It then extracts the images and embedded audio and turns them into Base64 encoded data, before stitching the whole thing together to serve the Flash-based content as an animated SVG file -- which plays on most every device, including the iPad, as seen in the demo above.

"With Smokescreen you can reach new platforms without learning any new tools," the developers promise.

Smokescreen should appeal to developers who want to continue using their existing Adobe tools for ad development. These are the one group of graphic professionals who most want Apple and Adobe to reach some form of detente.

The developers are making their solution available as a preview release. Admittedly, this solution is slower than Flash, partly because it must disassemble and reassemble the Flash content. This can only improve.

HTML5 will improve - does Adobe want to kill it?

Apple's move to champion the HTML5 standard seems likely to accelerate development of that technology. Perhaps one day HTML5 will offer all the essential features of Flash?

If so, then is Adobe's argument that Apple is being anti-competitive in forbidding Flash actually a smokescreen to that developer's unstated intent to slow development of competing mobile-friendly multimedia standards?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs in correspondence with Gawker wrote: "The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

What are your thoughts on this?