Smokescreen (preview) is an open source solution to the Flash question.  I am no fan of Flash, never have been, but I am also a text only email kind of guy, so take that with a grain of salt.

So in this fight between Apple and Adobe I tend to fall on the Apple side, but only to a point.  There is real value in using Flash for certain functionality and/or look and feel.  What I really don’t like is locking Flash out from all sorts of popular devices.  It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I don’t like any company to have that much power over another.

As an iPhone user [maybe iPad some day],  I really do not like being locked out from sites that utilize Flash, whatever the reason might be.   There is nothing worse than being greeted by that little blue cube when I am looking for information on a site.

Then there is advertising – a lot of ads are delivered using Flash and as someone who works with companies where a dominant portion of their revenue comes from online ads [and thus my paycheck] I get a little irked knowing that the little blue cube at the top is lost revenue.

The couple of demos I sat through seemed a little slow and it looks like there might be a few browser issues that need to be worked out, but it does look promising.  I would seriously consider looking into this if your site uses flash for any ‘mission critical’ tasks as navigation or call to action.  It would be a lot cheaper than rebuilding your entire site.