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Seattle-based creative consultancy Artefact has come up with a concept to get Flash and Silverlight up and running on the iPad, and they’ve got the “proof-of-concept†videos to, um, prove it! The stated aim of the folks at Artefact was to create a site that uses Flash in Mobile Safari without having to install any extra apps. They’ve managed to come up with a solution that they say is not jail-broken, and doesn’t need an app or a plug-in to work. In fact all it needs is the default Safari browser.

To achieve their aim, Artefact used Google’s open source Chrome browser (Chromium) to render images on a server and then transmit the images to Safari. Then, they used Javascript on an overlaid layer to send all touch interactions to the server. Artefact says that the main downsides of running Flash this way are that it eats up more CPU time on the server, it doesn’t run as fast as running Flash directly would, and so far it can only show images and not sound. But, they’re trying to fix that by using the h.264 codec.

Source: Artefact

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A little slow, but it's do-able and it's a great start.

This is similar to what Smokescreen | is doing.

When is someone going to do a local server like air video that renders flash on your desktop and smoothly streams it to your device?????

I hope they make this work!

I dont have very high hopes for this. It would be cool, but the simple solution would just be for Jobs to get off his high horse and let flash on the iPad. If its so horrible, then give me the choice to turn it off or not.

it's really good that flash and silverlight is working on iPad. I really like it.

I think if this was actually the normal way to run and interact with flash, Apple wouldn't have a problem with it and likely wouldn't have banned it from their mobile devices. But like the article admitted, it eats up CPU on the server and that (plus crashes and memory leaks) makes it a poor choice for iOS devices.

I only have a couple sites I visit that still use flash video that I would like to be able to view...so I guess people will give up on flash when there is zero need for it.

I dont know, but its everywhere. I ran Flash Lite on my slow Windows Mobile Phone. It didnt fully support every flash object, but it have you the ability to navigate flash sites and play You Tube on the site. It worked pretty well on Windows Mobile with a slow CPU and no GPU. There ought to be a way to get some limited support on the iPad.

HTML5 keeps being mentioned. Does the iPad / Safari use html5?

HTML 5 is great. I think Safari and many browser already support it. The problem is that HTML 5 has not even been finalized and adopted as a standard yet. You cant expect the internet as a whole to drop technology that 90% of internet users have no problem with and redesign their sites just because something new will be out soon.

Giving up

Maybe giving up on Flash but not on Silverlight.