The long wait is over for users who desire to view Flash videos on their iPad. After the approval by Apple, Skyfire for iPad is now available in the App Store for $4.99.
Ok hold on. For those who don’t know what Skyfire does, it’s a webkit browser app that allows you to view flash videos on your device. It cannot render Flash components and Flash games and it won’t directly play Flash videos. What it does is convert those flash videos into HTML 5 video then play it from the browser.
I’ve used it before on an old Windows Mobile 6.1 device as well as an Android and I recently tried it on my iPod Touch. What happens with Skyfire is, when you visit a page with a flash video on it, it will allow you to play that video on its own player with a press of a button. For the iPod Touch, I noticed that it will stream the video in segments and there’s no way to skip to different parts of the video even after playing the whole thing.
It’s not a perfect Flash solution for the iOS, the additional layer just to convert the video will bring a bit of delay. Some sites (like Hulu) does not allow Skyfire to convert its videos. Live streaming Flash videos won’t be converted as well.
However, you would want to get this app because there are still lots of Flash videos out there that you would probably want to view. Most of all, it’s the perfect alternative for Safari. Skyfire renders pages just as good as Safari but it boasts of more features like social network integration, private browsing and force desktop view to name a few.