My thoughts on HTML5 and Flash’s future

Given the mess that Adobe has put us Flash developers in these days, I want to add to the conversation that I’ve never had a better time as a Flash developer! While Mike and Ben provide some good background on the choices, this does not compensate for how poorly this was communicated. Way to kill a devoted community Shantanu!

This should have been handled in a much different way and it puzzles me that there’s still nobody in Adobe talking about Flash’s unique strengths. It’s all about HTML5 these days and the 750 layoffs is probably just a start. Luckily for Flash as a platform, there’s others doing Adobe’s job in this area.

I should add that I’ve done dynamic HTML sites ever since I started in this business about 15 years ago. The Rock City project (in the previous post) uses ExpressionEngine as a backend and I also do smaller sites based on Wordpress on a regular basis. The new Away3D.com website is EE driven and I’ve written several EE plugins in PHP as I’ve needed them. It’s all about using the right tool for the job at hand.

I enjoy making sites and apps using HTML, but I could never do that every single working day. Flash is what brings fun to my job. Things I do with jQuery, CSS and CMS systems are really just something I do for bread and butter and to stay up to date. I’ll keep doing this as well as play around with other languages like Haxe and Processing (for Arduino and other things)

I still see Flash as a solid part of my future, especially with the new Stage3D and other gaming related features now in Flash Player 11. I’m thoroughly impressed by the performance I can get out of the AIR apps I write for Android and iOS and I love NativeProcess and the possibilities it gives. All the fun things I’ve done this year are thanks to the Flash platform and I don’t see that change in the near future. I’m pretty sure there’s no other tool that is as capable when it comes to multi-platform publishing that can actually utilize hardware features such as cameras, audio, video, p2p, multitouch, hardware 3d and much more on so many platforms - all with the same consistent rendering.

And the best part - the stuff that I made in Flash more than 10-12 years ago still works on 99% of all desktop machines as well as quite a few Android phones and tablets (for now).