Skyfire App Enables Flash For iPhone, iPad

App Brings Flash To iPhone, iPad

Do you own an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch? Do you long to play Flash content without jailbreaking your device? Well, you're in luck, because now there's an Apple-approved app for that.

Skyfire 2.0, a mobile browser application tool that converts Flash content to HTML5, will allow your iOS device to stream Flash videos from the Web. According to CNNMoney.com, Skyfire has been approved by Apple and will make its iTunes debut on Thursday.

How does it work? CNNMoney.com explains:

When users click on a page that contains Flash video, Skyfire's servers download, render and translate the video into HTML5, which is a Web standard that iOS devices support. Skyfire then displays a thumbnail that users can click on to stream the video from its servers. [...] Though three-quarters of Web video may be encoded in Flash, that doesn't mean that video is encoded only in Flash. More than half of the videos found online are also available in HTML5, according to a recent study by MeFeedia.[...] YouTube, for instance, encodes its videos in multiple formats, including Flash and HTML5, so it can be viewed on mobile devices without Flash support.

CNET provides more details:

Like its Android counterpart [released earlier this year], Skyfire for the iPhone runs on top of mobile Safari rather than as a separate browser. Skyfire's servers can adjust the resolution of the streamed video depending on the screen size of one's phone and the network connection, according to the company. The app also lets people share a video by e-mail or through Facebook and Twitter. Finally, up to eight different browser windows can be opened to surf a variety of sites at the same time.

Skyfire only handles video content, CNN reports. That means Flash games are out. In addition, Skyfire can't translate videos from sites like Hulu, which offers its own $10-a-month mobile app.

Check out the video below to see Skyfire 2.0 in action.

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