Flash on iOS devices with Puffin

Flash on the iPad? Has Hell frozen over?

Not quite. Puffin is a web browser that lets you view Flash content on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. However, it doesn’t make Flash run on iOS. Instead, it uses one of three US data centres to render web pages - including any Flash elements - remotely, and then streams the resulting display to your iPad.
Hang on. Post-Snowden, I don’t feel quite so comfortable about US-based data centres...

Well, if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to... No, you’re right, of course. Developer CloudMosa insists that while it will comply with law enforcement requests, it encrypts everything that passes between your device and its servers, and once you log off, it erases your history from its cache. Aside from enabling it to serve Flash content, CloudMosa also reckons offloading all the processing work to a server is quicker than tasking your iPad with retrieving every part of each web page itself, so browsing will be faster all round.

And is it?

Kind of. On our iPad, Puffin completed the SunSpider JavaScript test in 253.9 milliseconds; Safari took 1285.2ms. Like Safari, Puffin scores 100% in the Acid3 CSS test, so there’s nothing to choose between them in terms of web standards compliance.

Stats are only half the story, though. In general use, Puffin sometimes felt a bit laggy. For example, it impacted our score when using the test quizzes at MyMaths (mymaths.co.uk), an education site built using Flash, where we were able to answer 16 questions on an iPad 3 and get 15 right within a two-minute limit. On a regular Mac, we worked through 67 questions in the same time and scored 65. When your score depends as much on how many questions you see as on how you answer them, real-world speed is crucial.

At EducationCity (educationcity.com), we completed a French test on the Mac in one minute 40 seconds, and on the Puffin browser in two minutes 14 seconds

Puffin doesn’t support the latest version of Flash, currently topping out at 11.2, while Adobe is shipping 13.1. Nor does it support Microsoft’s rival, Silverlight.

How about Flash video?

Puffin does let you play Flash videos, but when embedded in web pages these were sometimes jerky and blocky in our tests. You also need to be aware that routing everything through the US means you’ll be identified as a US user. So UK-specific services like iPlayer’s TV content are off limits - although iPlayer works fine on iOS without Flash, so that’s academic. ITV Player didn’t work for us via Puffin even when we entered a UK postcode. On the other hand, you may find you can access US services you normally couldn’t, although you might be breaking their T&Cs.
And all this is free?

Not quite. The free version of Puffin only plays Flash during what it calls ‘daytime’ - currently 9am to 4pm, but this could change without notice. If you want to watch at other times, you need the £1.99 app. Alternatively, you can sign up for an auto-renewing subscription to the Flash rendering service, at 69p for six months.

Should I download it?

If you need to access Flash sites on iOS, Puffin is probably your best bet. It may not be as quick as a flash, but nor is it just a flash in the pan [you’re fired - Ed].

Try the free version from the iOS App Store and see if it works for you. Flash rendering is free round the clock for the first two weeks.

$840m win is not about the price tag, says Apple

Retrial increases previously reduced damages award against Samsung over iPhone design rip-off

Apple and Samsung faced each other in a US court in November in the latest instalment of a patent dispute in which Apple was awarded $1.05bn (about £642m) in August 2012.

That award was cut to $550m early in 2013 when Judge Lucy Koh, who had presided over the original trial, ruled that the jury had been wrong in its assessment of part of the damages award. She ordered a retrial to determine how much of the remaining $455m should be awarded.

Apple claimed it should get a further $380m, while Samsung reckoned $52m was appropriate.
The jury settled on $290m, bringing the total awarded to Apple in the case to $840m.

In a statement to tech news site AllThingsD, Apple said: ‘For [us], this case has always been about more than patents and money. It has been about innovation and the hard work that goes into inventing products that people love. While it’s impossible to put a price tag on those values, we are grateful to the jury for showing Samsung that copying has a cost.’

Jessie J had released no comment on the matter at the time of going to press.

The original trial focused on claims from both companies that each had infringed the other’s patents. The jury found Samsung had wilfully infringed Apple patents for software and hardware design, and was guilty of diluting the ‘trade dress’ of the iPhone by making its smartphones look and feel so much like Apple’s device that customers could be confused.

It also confirmed that Apple had infringed none of Samsung’s patents.

At stake was the look and feel of both the iPhone and iOS. The software patents in the case related to the user interface and the way users perform routine functions. These included the ‘bounce-back’ feature, also known as rubber-banding, which responds to the touchscreen user trying to scroll content past its end point by offering increasing resistance until the user lets go, at which point the content rebounds into place.

Samsung was also found to have infringed some of Apple’s patents relating to the design of the iPhone’s hardware, although the jury drew the line at Apple’s attempts to enforce a patent relating to the shape of the iPad, which some reports characterised as trying to claim to have invented the rounded rectangle.

Both sides can still appeal the judge’s ruling, but by early December neither had announced an intention to do so.

Apple hasn’t always been on the right side of patent infringement rulings in recent months. One dispute, with a company called VirnetX, is affecting the performance of FaceTime. At issue was the use of peer-to-peer technology for messaging applications. Accuit:.iiy t’.j Ars TeVnica. in a story sourced from a VirnetX investor, Apple originally routed almost all FaceTime calls directly between users. In other cases it used a relay server. Placing calls without a relay server was found to infringe routing all calls tnrough a relay, and this is why the maximum resolution currently transmitted is much lower than the FaceTime HD cameras in Apple products are capable of.

VirnetX claims Apple is spending $2.4m a month on this kludge - but it has a vested interest in inflating that figure, because the more it costs to use relay servers, the higher the royalty it can charge for the alternative method.