91ÊÓƵ

The buzz on the Web today is Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ . Not surprisingly, they’re not good ones.

Flash, made by Adobe, is used for animation and interactivity on Web pages. We use it on this site (see our Flickr photo slideshows), and many, many building and construction companies use it for their websites. and are examples (To check if an element on a website is Flash, right click on it. Flash elements give you a “About Adobe Flash Player” menu item). Construction-industry websites are too often entirely Flash-based. That’s why I’m bringing this up.

Flash is not supported on Apple’s iPhone, and now the iPad, the arguable leaders in smart phone and mobile technology. This has been a big point of contention in the Web community, as Flash is a really popular and potentially useful platform, and Apple seems to be ignoring it.

Now, it seems, Apple wants to kill it.

In Jobs’ letter, he outlines the reasons he doesn’t like Flash and warns that no future Apple product will support it. If mobile is the future, and Apple is mobile, that doesn’t bode well for Flash. Jobs’ reasons for not liking Flash are as follows:

• Flash is not “open.” Openness usually refers to a platform’s source code being open to modification and redistribution for innovation purposes. Flash is controlled by Adobe, and its source code is not open. Apple uses HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, which can do a lot (but not all) that Flash does. HTML5 is a new open-source Web standard that is controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
• Games and video are better with Apple. Most games (Facebook) and video (Hulu) on the Web are Flash based. But Jobs says Apple offers a more modern format, H.264, in addition to video from YouTube and apps like Vimeo, and 50,000 games in the App Store.
• Flash is flawed. It makes Macs crash. It doesn’t perform well on mobile devices. It performs worse on touch-screen devices like the iPhone and iPad. It drains battery life.

The most important reason, Jobs said, is not associated with the Flash software itself, but with the fact that Flash is a third-party software that Apple doesn’t want to come between it and its products. And with that, Jobs said something about Flash being the past, like PCs, and Apple being the future.

What does this mean for you, a construction CEO with a Flash-based website? Well, I don’t want to sound rash, but it means you need a new website. Right now, no one can see your website on a mobile device, and Flash is not going to win this battle.