I think you hit the nail on the head. Your comment does a great job summarizing our thoughts on the issue.

Which is why we’re really excited to announce that we’ll be making Clover in HTML5: http://www.speakingofclover.com/2011/11/clover-in-html5/

In our minds, a lot has changed about HTML5 in the past year and a half. When I wrote the post above (What HTML5 Really Means), there was way more hype than substance about HTML5. And I personally thought that it would go the route of most of the past W3C specifications (like XHTML which floundered for years, getting slowly and partially implemented adopted before being killed).

But amazingly, HTML5 has been adopted at a blazing pace. And it seems to only be speeding up in recent months with Chrome and Firefox releasing major versions every six weeks!

And honestly, for us it’s only been partially a technical issue. The real difficulty is that we’ve spent 25,000 man hours making Clover what is, and it’s going to take just as long to recreate it in HTML. So for that kind of investment, we wanted to make sure that the end result was truly worth it.

But now that we’re on board, we’ll be going for it with all our energy. And in the process, it should open up some new abilities to make features that we couldn’t do easily before. So I think it’s going to be a fun next season around here.

With the recent news that Adobe has abandoned flash development for mobile platforms, I’m wondering how Clover is feeling about the decision to wholeheartedly back flash.

I assume you were hoping Apple would get on board and include native Flash support for its iOS devices at some point. Now that this hope has been dashed and it is clear that Flash has a diminishing future in the increasingly mobile web, what are Clover’s plans?

I agree with Bill in that the HTML solution currently available for our sites leaves a lot to be desired, and at some point, I would really like to see a more full-featured experience for clients and devices that do not support flash.

Though I plan to quickly adopt the payments solution your rolling out next month, I would sleep easier about my decision to use Clover for our organization if you were working on functional matters that pertain to the inevitable decline of flash, in addition to revenue increasing implementations like Clover Donations.

Just one customers .02.

I’ve been back in the Mac camp now for about three years, and this is the main thing that frustrates me about Apple. This is how Apple is, and how they will be into the foreseeable future (only loosing market share is going to change this about Apple). Anyone who wants to be a Mac fanboy has to live with this fact: Apple makes a lot of the choices for you.

It’s the main reason I went with a Droid instead of an iPhone.

I think you are spot on about how early html5 is in its life cycle. And my hope is that Clover will become better at rendering the best website possible for each web browser and device. Clover has put together a solid solution for smart phones using html. However, for the iPad I would like to see Clover render the site with a similar navigation as the Flash based site. The iPad is a more capable device than a smart phone browser. For our site our users should see a horizontal “tab” based navigation on the iPad. This does not seem like a stretch for an html based site.

Thank you for all the hard work in creating a great product!

And this touches on something that I didn’t mention in my post. For as much as I think Flash will stick around for a long time, it’s in spite of Adobe not because of them. Adobe has been abysmal at fighting back against Apple, and unfortunately I don’t think that’s likely to change anytime soon.

http://flyosity.com/apple/why-apple-succeeds-others-fail.php

The battery life issue is also a valid downside. I don’t think anyone denies that running Flash on a website takes more processing power – and therefore uses the battery faster – than a site without Flash.

But then the core issue in my mind comes down to choice. Given those problems with Flash, should Apple decide for us and simply disallow it on its devices, or should it be our choice to use more of our battery so we can actually see every site on the web?

The thing is, I completely understand Apple’s strategy. People would probably blame them for the fact that their battery didn’t last long enough or that a website had a bug every once in a while. But I personally am beginning to get really frustrated with the fact that almost every day I have to put down my phone and open my laptop instead.