Veteran Flash developer & evangelist Mike Chambers has posted a note addressing the future of Adobe’s Flash Professional product:
The rumor is that the entire Flash Authoring team was laid off and that we are no longer developing Flash Professional.
Both of these rumors are false.
We are actively working on the next version of Flash Professional and have a long term commitment to its continued development.
Mike goes on to mention some of the features being built, including HTML5 export. (I hope to share more details on that one shortly.) Please see his post for details & to ask any questions.
Seems to have been a whirlwind couple of weeks for Adobe. Some brave choices are being made. Hang in there and keep creating great stuff!
A lot of great products, yes, but Flash was not one of them.
Thing is, I don’t think it matters any more.
Few will bother learning Flash now. It’s no longer cool and its audience is disappearing. The non-Flash future of the web is well underway.
Steve Jobs 2010 memo killed mobile Flash – this week, Adobe has merely conceded the inevitable.
@John Waller, It isn’t what Jobs said, it’s what Apple did. That and the success of the iPad (or failure of Android tablets, if you prefer). Mobile development is difficult and expensive. Apple also made it significantly less profitable for Adobe.
HTML5 export? You mean JavaScript export. And here we go… back to 90’s style JavaScript programming.
Apple just strong-armed Adobe out is all. The interesting thing is that Amazon’s Kindle Fire with the Silk browser comes with a “Flash player”. The Kindle Fire is already projected to equal or exceed the market share of the iPad.
Mike’s plot was to explain why Adobe is moving away from Flash, not why it will be continuing. He put developers on notice that even for the desktop, Flash will be going away over time. That hardly qualifies as strong support from Adobe going forward.
Saying HTML5 will replace Flash is like saying Microsoft Paint will replace Photoshop. Perhaps in 4-6 years, HTML5 + CSS + Javascript ‘might’ catch up to Actionscript 2. Currently, this is a non-argument. People who aren’t web developers should either spend more time educating themselves about the way things actually work, or just shut up about the whole thing. Echoing whatever Steve Jobs said about Flash, which to a real developer is laughable, is embarrassing. Jobs wanted to protect his cash flow, so he twisted around a bunch of crap as an excuse for keeping a superior application development product and platform from trumping his own development tools, which are just plain awful. The Apple fanboys accepted every word he said as gospel, of course, just like they always do. I am a web developer, and I will use whatever tools I can to produce the best product. I don’t care what company those tools come from. It just so happens that as of right now, Flash is the best web application IDE and platform on the web. Period. Nothing else is even remotely in the same realm. There is a lot more to this than just banner ads and photos with moving smoke, people. If you don’t really know what you’re talking about, then please just shut up and play with your little fart apps.
Love it! Someone who actually “gets it”.
I couldn’t have said it better (although I have tried). As a developer who has been using Flash since Day One I have been conducting Jobs Damage Control for years now. There are so many ignorant opinions out there about Flash and those of us who know better are sick of hearing them. I agree that we’re years out from finding anything close to Flash for authoring sophisticated and dynamic content. I’ve been playing around with Edge, Muse, and others and they are indeed not unlike using MS Paint. I’m praying that Adobe is retrofitting the Flash authoring environment so that those of us with a decade of experience with the app can transition seamlessly into the html5 environment. The Flash Pro demo is promising.
I could not say it better.
Compare HTML with FLASH is like comparing a cheap old car with a brand new Porsche.
Only people without any knowledge can repeat the shits Steve Jobs said.
Total nonsense. I don’t know how the american govern lets APPLE do this dump with ADOBE.
What is funny that now Windows 8 also did that on the METRO interface.
Can you imagine if each company, let’s say Sony, thinks that Java, or PHP are not good.
How can someone navigate on internet.
We are going to need many computers because each producer has a opinion about a language.
Internet has to have no limits.
I think there are laws that could be perfectly applied to sue APPLE and make them pay hard for this kind of attitude… They prejudiced the Flash developers that studied many years to develop the best sites on the web.
Phew!… I am hoping to spend 2012 in Flash as much as possible… As an artist/cartoonist/wanna be animator I don’t know how HTML 5 is going to compete with simplicity of the timeline environment?… I’ve decided to hang up my HTML/CSS boots for now as it was all getting too much for my ageing grey matter…. Fingers crossed there will still be a Flash Market for a few years yet!…
Since Flash seems to take up so much processing power thereby making it unsuitable for mobile tablets maybe Adobe should look into putting Flash on a separate chip that could be integrated into tablets. This could cut down on the processing and provide great performance for Flash. I love Flash – it is so sad that it is being pushed aside in favor of mediocre technology.
When product managers find out they can’t have all the seamless smooth animation and fullscreen interactive video to promote their brands and can only have jumpy basic JS animation that is not IE6 friendly, they’ll soon start to scream for Flash again 😉
[Yeah, I think they already do–but it’s all spilled milk. –J.]
“adobe have stopped developing the flash player for mobile THEREFORE flash is dying”
this is a natural assumption to make – its the one i made!!! but its wrong. some guy explained that the flash player on mobile phones wasn’t efficient & exporting to native code is a way better approach
this is true yeh?
if so, adobe should be telling people this. they’re bloody useless at marketing if they don’t, cos people will just assume en masse that flash is dead. hence a self-fulfilling prophecy & all that
The Flash is good for creating games and apps. It became to much more than just banner making technology. So it’s naturally that his last market niche is occupy by new HTML version. Hovewer, I don’t think we will see the complex HTML5 apps for a long time. So, long live to Flash in it’s new field of application and have a fresh breath with HTML5 for it’s old.
Long live Adobe Flash!!! I lived on flash alone for 10 years,.. now Jobs done came and f—-d that up. Luckily for me, the OOP principles i learned in actionscript enabled me to pick up other languages in a heartbeat. Flash is not going anywhere though.. its still the best for a lot of things.. and well educated clients know the difference. Its really all about the use case.
[PLEASE! Review the tabstops for this form! Thanks… :P]
Talking about HTML vs. Flash is like talking about motorcycles and cars… They all have motors, need a driver and so on… but they’re fit for different needs, so we can argue about which is better… but only where they overlap; otherwise, compare them is non-sense. I wouldn’t make a virtual shop in flash (no time to learn), and for the same reasons I would not make a pixlr or sumoPaint like app, or any sprite-intensive game using HTML+CSS+JS.