Cool, right? Flash is & was always just a means to an end (helping people express themselves, and making money selling tools to do so). Adobe continues to pour manpower into bringing Flash innovations (hardware-accelerated filters, better typography, etc.) to HTML. Check out CNET’s interview with engineering manager Arno Gourdol for more details for what we’re doing with blending modes, SVG, and more.
Oh, and if you want to help us move things along, see my next post.
Hey John,
I heard a rumor about Adobe discontinuing Air for mobile…please say it ain’t so.
I find it slightly amusing that Mark Fuqua’s libelous comment has been up for 2 months without Adobe deleting it.
While I know Adobe has spent a lot of money on Flash I think it is time that Adobe start thinking about retiring flash. I think if what flash can do (or most of what flash can do) can be done with HTML 5 then the need for Flash goes away and in the long term it will be best for everyone including Adobe.
Robert.. Please give me a list of HTML5 equivalents that do exactly what flash has done (games and apps not banners). If you have done projects that do everything Flash has done .. could you show us?
[Oh, it doesn’t matter: ideology trumped practicality a long time ago for a lot of people. It’s fun to associate with the “winning team,” so Flash caught a lot of unwarranted crap (along with some warranted). What’s done is done, and when the world puts a blockage somewhere in the network, it’s our job to route around it. I’m personally delighted that HTML is finally delivering on promises it made more than a decade ago. We could sit and bitch about slow progress, but it’s better to take an active hand in making things better. –J.]
“when the world puts a blockage somewhere in the network…”
You mean like Adobe dumping Flash in Android browsers while adding Flash to Metro browsers? Good luck explaining that.
[Apple destroyed Flash’s ability to be ubiquitous on mobile (and thus a viable mobile development target). Whether you think they were right or wrong to do so (and there are good arguments to be made in either direction), that’s what happened. Metro encompasses more than mobile, but I don’t have a lot more background on that decision. –J.]
Very heady and enthusiastic spruiking for a ubiquitous solution that seems just too far into the future. Despite the promise, most current interactive and graphic design tends to lack innovation and newness, it appears we have become very willing to take a step back with the promise and expectation of greater things to come. The device and browser landscape has become so diverse that the main distraction is now dealing with fragmentation and compatibility issues rather than, more importantly, getting on with producing more inspired work. Everything looks and feels generic, has mundanity has become the new web standard?
I really don’t understand the logic of pushing HTML5. JavaScript was never meant to be a language for writing full applications, but hey, why make life easy? JS and the holy browser wars were premium instruments of torture for every developer – companies pushing this as the future of web development must be joking. Still wasting time for browser adaptions like 15 years ago is not progress, the ongoing diversification of the platforms makes it even worse.
Browser vendors are in competition – so they naturally don’t aim at standards but at USPs. Accordingly, we can expect to have a fully working, reliable HTML5 standard when the economic system has changed.. Until then, although closed source, the Flash (platform) has evolved as a de-facto standard for _demanding_ multimedia projects. The huge AS3-library allows easy AND efficient development with all kinds of interacting media (Vector gfx, Bitmaps, 3D, Sound, Video etc.). I dare to say that this consistency and functioning can never be realized across _all_ major Browsers, due to their competition in new features: e.g. Opera will not play sound, IE doesn’t do WebGL and so forth..
Sounds familiar?
And Adobe cannot know to what extent Browsers will comply to standards in the future, so I think it’s going out on a limb to claim the possibilities of Flash can be surpassed.
The idea that Adobe thinks it will have any pull with the W3C or the browser companies is serious joke.
[Whatever, genius. –J.]
JNT: It’s all PR disaster masked as FUD.
CSS3 has been around forever and we still can’t fully utilize them with cross-browser reliability. Let alone the rendering engine is not consistent. JS performance is different.
Creativity has to take a huge step backwards because HTML5 is “cool”.
Until the browser wars end, HTML5 is just a pipe dream in the world of fragmentation
Hooray for HTML5, production costs increased two or three time as much as when it was done in Flex.
Nobody wants to hire a flasher now, but no JS wiz can do half the stuff a flasher can. Feels like a deadlock to me.