A little social commentary from our favorite family, The Simpsons.

This is probably the most reasonable commentary on the topic of Adobe Flash Player’s absence from Apple’s iPhone. Since the day the iPhone was announced I have fielded questions on this topic in almost every single presentation that I have given. No exaggeration. 

I still can’t provide any “insider information” even though I’m no longer with the company (and I don’t really have any anyways – seriously). But the reasoning that Wired’s Brian X. Chen provides is exactly what I would suggest in conversation.

[...] Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.

I first heard this idea while at Microsoft’s MIX ‘08 conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer was asked (probably in jest) whether the iPhone would ever support Silverlight. Balmer snickered and then proceeded to explain that Apple’s (then recent) announcement of the iPhone SDK and marketplace was a signal that they intend to completely control the marketplace and developer platform for iPhone apps. If I recall correctly, he said something to the effect of, “Apple isn’t interested in open development for the iPhone.” I’m sure Apple would counter that Safari-based apps count as “open development” but, well, you make the call on that one.

In my opinion, Apple’s model for iPhone app development is pretty smart. Before the iPhone the number of Cocoa/Objective-C developers was probably pretty small. I’d bet they’ve seen a HUGE increase in registered developers since the release of the SDK (I’m one of them, and I know my friend Mesh is as well). And I think Apple is one of the only tech companies that could pull this off. But I don’t know if they can sustain their tight grip on iPhone development for long.

Now, that said, I still think there’s a chance that Flash will make it’s way onto the iPhone. It would most likely be as a Safari plugin so users could actually browse “the real Internet” as Apple likes to say in their ads. In his recent keynote at Adobe’s MAX user conference in San Francisco, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch had much to say about Flash on mobile devices, including bringing Google Android creator Andy Rubin up on stage to talk about Flash running on Google’s new device OS. I think market pressures – more than anything – will force Apple to embrace Flash at some point.

My cousin, Kyle, recently called to tell me that he had purchased a very cool new device from Western Digital that allows him to play almost any media off of a portable hard drive on his home TV, including HDMI output. I hadn’t heard of devices like this yet so I started doing a little bit of research and learned about this little beauty: The Popcorn Hour A-110 “Networked Media Tank”.

From their website:

Popcorn Hour A-110 allows you to pull in digital video, audio and photos from various sources for your enjoyment on your HDTV or Home Theater setup.

You can stream or playback your digital media content from a variety of sources, such as your PC, NAS, digital camera, USB mass storage devices (Flash drive, HDD, DVD drive) ,  internal SATA HDD* and even directly from the Internet via the Media Service Portal.

It also serves as a NAS and a BitTorrent peer-to-peer downloader** to eliminate the need to switch on a PC or other device for this purpose.

I want one of these – badly.