According to rumors, which are likely to be confirmed soon, Adobe has stopped development on Flash Player for browsers on mobile.
Easy to guess that it will trigger an avalanche of sarcastic comments from fanboys who have no clue about the technology.
This already happens.
But is it really game changing announcement?
Definitely not!
In fact, nothing has changed, because until now there was no single significant Flash project targeting mobile browsers.
From the very beginning with Flash Lite the whole idea of delivering ANY SWF to mobile browser was weak.
Complex web applications are not suitable for that at all from UI and performance perspective.
Games could be and should be packaged as apps and some companies already do so.
Ads with the flying tagline and pulsating product picture? Well, I do not really care about ads, but this is probably the area where so called HTML5 is already good enough.
That is why I totally support Adobe's move to sharpen focus on:
http://www.beautifycode.com/flash-mobile-died-so-what
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2011/11/flash-player-mobile-a-post-mortem.html
http://www.leebrimelow.com/?p=3151
Easy to guess that it will trigger an avalanche of sarcastic comments from fanboys who have no clue about the technology.
This already happens.
But is it really game changing announcement?
Definitely not!
In fact, nothing has changed, because until now there was no single significant Flash project targeting mobile browsers.
From the very beginning with Flash Lite the whole idea of delivering ANY SWF to mobile browser was weak.
Complex web applications are not suitable for that at all from UI and performance perspective.
Games could be and should be packaged as apps and some companies already do so.
Ads with the flying tagline and pulsating product picture? Well, I do not really care about ads, but this is probably the area where so called HTML5 is already good enough.
That is why I totally support Adobe's move to sharpen focus on:
- Desktop Flash Player. It is crucial to choose the right tool for the right task. Using Flash for simple wizard nowdays is nonsense. At the same time it remains the obvious choice for complex web applications. With Flash Builder and Flex SDK you can build high-quality applications with unbeatable performance which work the same in all browsers on all operation systems. Other than that there are still a lot of important features which are either not supported as such or virtually impossible to implement and maintain with HTML/CSS/JS stack of technologies. When you attach multiple files in GMail - it's Flash. Charts in Google Analytics Flash again. All more or less complex operations with media content from Grooveshark to YouTube are also implemented in Flash.
- Air as a tool to build cross platform apps. Now also for mobile. Although there is huge iOS domination in smartphone and tablet markets, there are some other platforms already present on the market and it is quite possible that new will appear. Companies have to invest a lot to address all of them with native apps. For giants it is not a big issue. For certain performance sensitive applications it will remain inevitable as well. But with latest releases from Adobe and native extensions support Air becomes the best choice for many others. With single code base you address iOS, Android and other platforms and use any platform specific feature when needed.
- HTML5 authoring software. There is too much hype about HTML5 (mostly from people who know this buzzword only from Steve Jobs famous Thoughts on Flash), but until now there are no tools for creative professionals to produce content comparable even to Flash 3 (more than 10 years ago!). Every single HTML5 ad, demo, promo is PROGRAMMED by frontend developers. For sure this must be changed. And there is a big opportunity for Adobe here. Hopefully in future JavaScript, that is probably the worst programming language in the world, will evolve to something like ActionScript 3.0 and we will see HTML5 authoring software not only for designers and animators, but also for developers.
http://www.beautifycode.com/flash-mobile-died-so-what
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2011/11/flash-player-mobile-a-post-mortem.html
http://www.leebrimelow.com/?p=3151
2 comments:
I think you have some good points, but also some bad ones. :)
Gmail's multiple-attach actually uses JavaScript now if you use Chrome or Firefox 3.6+ -- I believe this is also the case for IE9 and certain versions of other browsers too.
I think you are right on the tooling available, but surely you've heard of Adobe Edge? It looks fantastic and very much flash-like! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FnNtX73v8k It does not change the markup of your page but does everything via external JavaScript file.
Also, I can't agree with you at all about JavaScript being the worst language. I'm a fan of Douglas Crockford, who wrote "JavaScript: The Good Parts" and discovered JSON -- and agree with him as he says javascript is the most misunderstood language. JavaScript is actually very powerful and there has been so much investment in it lately.
A long, but excellent talk he gave is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
JavaScript has bad parts, but we can avoid them and enjoy a fantastic, expressive, functional language with all the OOP concepts you want. :)
Hi Sergey, i am a fan of both flash and your take on it. However, you say there is not a single important flash website built. But take the cumulative number of corporate flash sites. And the countless number of sophisticated flash site out there are flawless and incredible. Without the cheap 2.0 feel. The web has become a huge template library with such a standard boring look. Leave the art alone, allow it to function on mobile devices. If it drains the poer and ressources and we cannot overcome it with technological advancement then the users should simply be aware that if you browse flash sites, dont run any apps in the background, don't expect the same battery life... But we need to leave it to the people to choose rather than be imposed this "lighter" website. CPUs are advancing, bandwidth is cheaper. Can't we all just get along? lol, like humour :)
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