Author:
Joe Hakooz
Category:
General
Some of you may have noticed today that Google's ever changing homepage honored the 30 year anniversary of Pac Man. I didn't think much of it until I read a story about it "working" on iPhone/iPad. Apparently you could play the game!
It was built using JavaScript and CSS and offers the infamous "No Flash" experience which should give the user a bug free, speedy experience... right?
Well I immediately pulled it up on my iPad-nano (6 months left on the contract!) and clicked "Insert Coin" to see what this is all about. Oh my, was I blown away... It chugged along at what couldn't be 3 frames per second, and had no sound at all. The Atari performed like a super computer next to this bad boy. How could this be? An extremely simple JS and CSS based game running on the magical Apple device performing like a dog? And yes, I rebooted right before playing it.
I also recently came across a video from iBrent showing the iPad's performance with HTML5. Spoiler alert... it performs extremely poorly!
So what does this mean? I think it's safe to say that nothing really visually engaging, unless developed by Steve Jobs or one of his loyal geniuses, performs well on an iDevice. Not Flash, HTML5, or even Javascript/CSS... All of this may be moot since Android may be the next king.