If you surf the Web on an iPod, iPad or iPhone (or are about to when you get your 4S on Friday or afterward, despite my advice), you likely have come across videos you tap and tap and tap, but they won't play. You get an annoying message saying something like "…you must have Flash 8 or higher installed on your computer." You are instructed to download this Flash thingie but you can't. Hair pulling, shirt rending, and cursing the memory of Steve Jobs ensues.
If you don't understand what "Flash" is – and therefore might not grasp the import of the app I am about to describe – well, that's why they pay me the medium bucks.
Flash refers to Adobe Flash (Adobe is the name of the company, the one that makes PhotoShop). Flash is a video format – a way of programming the video on a Web page so when you click or tap on it, the video will play.
The reason these videos won't play on your iPad or iPhone is because before his sad and ridiculously untimely passing last Wednesday, Steve Jobs absolutely refused to include the capability to play back Flash videos on Apple mobile devices.
Why? According to experts, Flash consumes too much power and, therefore, drains your mobile device battery faster. Jobs doesn't like anything that robbed his devices of battery life and believed you wouldn't, either.
Flash alternatives
Because Jobs wanted iPhones and iPads to be able to operate longer on a single battery charge, he chose instead to allow playback only of Web-based videos encoded in a more power-efficient video format called HTML5.
Flash compatibility isn't just an iPxxx issue. Many Android smart phones and tablets also flushed Flash for the same power-sucking reasons. The companies who make Flash-compatible Android devices make a marketing point of saying so as if that's an advantage.
Considering there are more than a quarter of a billion Apple mobile devices along with millions of non-Flash-compatible Android devices wandering around out there, Web page designers have slowly but surely been adapting, transforming their Flash-based videos into HTML5. Even Adobe has enabled Web site makers to convert their Flash video into HTML5.
But there are plenty of Web sites that still employ Flash for video playback, such as the movie trailers on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and videos on People.com.
Skyfire solution
Since the Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad can't playback Flash videos, you may think you're SOL on watching Web videos on your iPad.
Not so fast, Flash. It's now time to explain Skyfire.
Skyfire is a Web browser like Safari and the browser on your Android phone. But unlike these browser, Skyfire can play back Flash videos on both iOS and Android devices.
When you come upon a page with Flash video on them, Skyfire presents a video playback pop-up window. Or, you can ignore the pop-up since you may not want to play the video right away, and simply tap right on the video.
Flash videos play, just not right away. You'll have to wait around 10 seconds for Skyfire's servers to reformat the clip into HTML5. But when it does play, it looks just as sharp as it would if were playing HTML5 naturally. And since the conversion takes place of Skyfire's servers, it doesn't consumer any additional battery power, at least as far as I can tell.
Skyfire's other advantages
Skyfire offers more than Flash playback. You get a variety of customization and social networking tools not offered in Safari, such as private browsing (no need for anyone else to know what pages you've been gazing at), "Like" and "Share" functions for every page, not just those that include these options, as well as Facebook and Twitter integration – no need to go to a separate app or to those sites. Skyfire also offers a Home page icon.
These extra social networking tools are arrayed across a black row across the bottom border of the Skyfire window, limiting the viewing space. But you can eliminate both this bottom row and the top navigation row with the tap of an icon on the far right. This icon remains translucent on the Web page, allowing you to easily recall these black bars.
My one complaint is you can't import bookmarks from Safari or anywhere else. For this reason, I still use Safari as my primary browser (that and force of habit), and fire up Skyfire when I encounter a Flash site – it's just too much work trying to re-create all my bookmarks imported from my desktop Safari browsing.
But the more I use Skyfire, the more bookmarks I add. Perhaps it will become my primary browser after a while.