Stanford is closed for the end of the year, and so during that time I’m going to repost some (slightly amended) material that I posted elsewhere (such as at HASTAC during my time as a HASTAC scholar). Here is a short bit from Summer 2010 about running Flash applications on the then newly released iPad. Looking back on this post, it seems strange the urgency with which the academy approached the newly released iPad. Here at Stanford, the medical school quickly adopted the new platform, as did Academic Computing and a bevvy of scholars here and everywhere else. I waited for the inevitable Android tablet that would run the Flash-based software I’ve produced, and the inevitable wait has grown interminable–the Samsung GalaxyTab seems to have garnered some positive attention, but it seems it won’t be until January or February before any Android tablets arrive that take advantage of Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). However, despite being sans tablet for six months, it doesn’t seem that the frantic pace of adoption and strategic planning within the university reflects the actual effect that the iPad (and tablets in general) will have on academia. Reports from the field indicate that the device is serviceable for less intensive academic work, useful in its capacity as a status symbol to be handed so as to establish trust and a sort of ethnographer’s multitool. The intuition is that these devices will radically change the way technology affects the university, but as yet there has been no academic equivalent to Angry Birds.
This is a video of Carlos Seligo, academic technology specialist in Human Biology, and I checking out the usability of Flash on an iPad by running a remote client and hosting the Flash app on a nearby MacBook. This was an impromptu investigation, and so I apologize for not performing a more rigorous and involved test run, or showing off a more engaging Flash application, but given all the fuss about how Flash just wouldn’t work for iPad for stylistic and technological reasons, I have to say I was shocked at how attractive and functional these applications were, given that we’d spent absolutely no effort optimizing them for multitouch. Even the much-maligned rollover caused no trouble at all (in the case of this test, rollover events were only triggered if your finger left the screen at a rollover point, which is actually rather interesting functionality).