Like so many others, I really like my iPhone and my iPad, but I get very annoyed when I try to browse to a web site that is flash based, or try to even pull up some of my blog posts that embed Xcelsius flash demonstrations. Well, I finally figured out a way to get swf to run on my iPhone and my iPad. It’s a very simple solution, that kind of bypasses the problem, and for the simple purposes of demoing dashboards on iOS or browsing with the iPad without having to get off the sofa to get the laptop each time you run into flash, this works very well. The idea is so simple: using RDP to remote desktop into a PC computer, and then using the web browser on that computer!
There are a number of free RDP (Remote Desktop) apps available for both the iPhone and iPad in the app store. I used pretty much the first RDP client that seemed good and was free I ran into. It’s called iRdesktop (http://www.irdesktop.com/). It was dead simple to setup. Just entered my host name, username and password, and I got a window into my PC. I pulled up IE, and began browsing.
First, I pulled a couple of dashboards on my iPhone. The screen is a lot smaller, so I certainly see a need to design the pages for such a small screen, but the flash itself came up with no problems and worked completely seamless. Here are a couple of screenshots from my iPhone:
Then, I pulled my blog with a couple of postings that have flash embedded in them in my iPad. They came up with no problems. I was able to activate the mouse, interact with menus and buttons on the dashboards, and the whole experience was completely seamless and blazing fast. Here are a couple of screen shots from the iPad:
While I certainly wouldn’t claim this to be a solution to the problem of running flash on iOS, this is a very simple and practical work around that works on a small scale, and can be used in presentations, demos and small groups situations.