2.0 Screenshots (or, Your Flash Web Site is Useless on an iPhone)

One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.

This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:

Screenshot of iPhone looking at a flash-centric website.

That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.

Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.

Just a thought.