We've been enjoying our iPads for so long, sans Flash, that many of us have all but forgotten about the once-coveted technology. Still, the web has not fully evolved past Flash, and at times it's still necessary. Now with Puffin, the iPad is no longer excluded from the Flash community, at least not completely.
There's nothing worse than hitting a Flash-dependent website when surfing on the iPad. Many sites have updated their pages for viewing on the mobile web, but others are still stuck in the past. Whether it's a home page that is built entirely in Flash (and thus impassable on the iPad), videos that only load in Flash players, or even Flash games that haven't yet been ported to the App Store, you're bound to hit a roadblock sooner or later.
Sites that still use Flash benefit from the browser.
Flash will never be allowed in iOS; that's a fact of life. But there are ways around it, and Puffin is the one of the best, if not the most economical, answers to the problem. Using cloud computing, Puffin essentially streams you a live broadcast of web pages that you choose to load. Think of it as the Onlive equivalent of web browsing. Because you're not actually loading the page natively on your iPad, there is a certain amount of lag that is inherent to the process. Pages take a bit longer to load, and scrolling through long pages takes a bit more time to process.
That being said, the app actually works as advertised. Whether it's a Flash-based ad, a Flash-based site, video players, or games, everything loads. As Flash applications are designed with a computer in mind (and thus often a mouse and keyboard), you can still expect some things to not work properly. Games for instance, will load, but a simple touch interface may not suffice to actually make it usable. We tried to play Alien Hominid over at NewGrounds, for instance, and while it loaded, we couldn't actually control the character without keyboard keys at our disposal.
The app picks out relevant Flash video on the page.
Flash animations as a whole run a bit slowly, and the app description declares that it's not built for games, so it's hard to complain. Where it shines are the more practical iPad applications. Sites like Buffalo Wild Wings are now fully accessible, and navigating Flash menus is a breeze. You can watch all the HomeStar Runner cartoons you can stomach (although the sound is at times out of sync). And video sites? Those work to a degree.
Feel free to visit Hulu, bypassing the need to pay for a Hulu Plus subscription. The app is designed to detect Flash movie players and allow you to play them in full screen mode. This eliminates all of the chopiness that you see if you try to watch a video in-browser. Unfortunately, videos that are preceded by advertisements tend to get stuck. You can watch the ad in full screen, but it is not able to launch the video that follows.
Again, the developer warns of this, so it's not a shocking revelation. In time, the app could be improved to make this work better-- something we'd love to see. For now, though, we are content to just be able to load more websites than we previously could. Everything in addition to that is a happy side effect.
In full screen view, Flash videos run perfectly.
Puffin is not the only browser on the market that can achieve this. Skyfire Web Browser is great at loading Flash video, and Photon Flash Web Browser and Cloud Browse also work, although they are either more expensive apps, only load Flash content once you force it to load, or come with limited free minutes of cloud-computing time per session.
Puffin is not perfect. It needs work to become what we'd call fully featured, but there's also no denying just how essential it is to have in your app library. It opens up new avenues on the web for the iPad, and for such a cheap price, it's one of the best apps we've purchased in a long time.
2 Comments
Add a Comment