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The Future of Flash
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash, and News.com has an article looking at the company's plans for the future of the technology. No longer just a choice for 'innovative' web designers, Adobe is positioning Flash as an application development platform, with special emphasis on video delivery and mobile device applications." From the article: "On Tuesday, the company intends to launch a microsite showing the evolution of Flash over the past 10 years, including video interviews with developers. Those videos will no doubt be played with the Flash Video Player, something many high-profile Web sites, including YouTube, have chosen to use as well. The success of Flash in the next 10 years rides largely on whether leading-edge customers like YouTube will design their Web sites with Flash, Lynch said. Adobe, which gained the Flash technology when it bought Macromedia, is trying to build an 'ecosystem' of developers and partners, he said. "
I've started using Flash inside my development environment, but I use it to capture and annotate onscreen application sessions so I can show the developers what's going wrong. (It avoids a lot of "I can't reproduce it and can't find the time to make it over to a computer where it can be reproduced, so I'm not going to do it" B.S.)
Remember the mid-1990s deluge of shovelware? Every new PC came with a towering stack of bad CD-ROM apps that were "OMG interactive multimedia CD-ROM technology!!!!@#$%" consisting of little more than Quicktime videos and the old crappy Macromedia Projector.
*shudder* Never again!
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I don't think I have ever enjoyed browsing a site that has exclusively used flash. One of the biggest benefits of HTML is a standardization of GUI controls, with flash that goes right out the window. The only flash sites I have seen that are not totally annoying and worthless are from car manufacturers, they have huge budgets to spend on design and development of their sites, even then they are substandard to HTML sites in usability.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/main.html
http://dack.com/web/flash_evil.html
Actually, check out Design is Kinky (it's work safe despite the name) and go through some of the sites they link. Some of the designers do things with flash that are amazing. Another site, Beatport (online store for EDM labels) uses a flash interface which I prefer to use primarily because it's easy to browse and listen to samples without reloading, popups or using external apps like winamp.
Granted there is some pretty hideous uses of flash (advertising) but that's on the downside and with adblock it becomes pretty managable.
A decade of a product they just recently purchased?
Macromedia made flash ubiquitous on the web, like it or not.
Then Adobe-come-lately appears on the scene, and we start getting "flash bugs"; every single site requests local storage; Flash causes more browser crashes than ever...
Sorry, Adobe, but you don't get the credit here. The profits, yes, but no Kudos for you!
That'll only happen when there's an SVG equivalent of Flash MX. There isn't.
> There's a ton of open source libraries out there
Right on, like ActionStep. We've built indi in it and it looks good, it's fast, and the API is continually improving. Good times.
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Most people, even techie ones, have a very limited view of what Flash can do. If you spend the time, most folks are surprised with the depth of the Flash development environment and start to see what you can do when you step beyond the basic animation and moving stuff around. I work on highly technical, interactive simulation for the medical industry. My apps are built mostly in Flash, with .Net backends that are highly interactive exercises that teach cardiologists to analyze the latest medical imagery and improve their real-world skills.
These programs are light-years beyond most people's perception of flash. If you don't close your mind to the possibilities, Flash is an incredible development tool and let's my company do things that would not be possible with any other technology. Perfectly cross platform (and face it, Linux doesn't matter to most people), interactive, pretty easy data transfer, reusable GUIs via XML data storage, etc. Flash is near perfect for alot more than just tweening text.
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things?
CHeck out Google Finance for a cool mix of AJAX and Flash.
Another great advantage for Flash video is that it doesn't throw one's machine into an unresponsive spasm of hard disk activity the first time it is loaded. Even QT is fairly disruptive to one's browsing experience. Like PDF/Acrobat ("Is that PDF file going to be interesting enough to be worth the chugging while Acrobat loads?")
I'm using gnu/linux on amd64. There is no flash for that platform and even if there was, I don't want that proprietary wannabe-internet-standard thing. Nothing is more annoying than not being able to download a video that I can't even stream because Macro... ehrm Adobe doesn't see enough market opportunity in gnu/linux/amd64. I mean - at least offer both - the flash streaming thing AND the download.
Of course, in a ideal world, there'd be no flash at all.
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
Why does it matter what your server runs? How many servers are used for browsing the web?
"I forgot my mantra."
Flash is another thing like IE - to be loathed and hated. It only exists because people are too stupid to use the free and standard options.
Actually, it's a practicality/ease of use issue.
1. The alternative option to Flash is SVG.
2. The best IDE for SVG is Inkscape.
3. Inkscape does not have any animation abilities.
If you can't do animation, you might as well go back to making bitmaps.
And that's aside from the many minor little ways in which Inkscape is inferior to the Flash IDE. Inkscape is not yet Firefox. It's more like Lynx.
I'd rather see SVG and other technologies replace flash. By making it an open standard, it can be implemented on more platform including cell phones, 64bit linux, *BSD, and various other platforms.
Also, there have been some security issues with flash 8 lately. Many sites are forcing users to upgrade to flash 9. The net result is supported platforms can no longer play content. There are a few out there who avoid it intentionally. I understand why you like flash, but I'm just pointing out that its not good for the web. If you must use flash, please provide a downlevel version of any website in html so I can see it in my bsd installs. (not all of which are on x86 where i could use the linux version)
Also, consider any application development won't run on those other platforms either. It doesn't matter to many when they like a mainstream platform. I've seen a bad trend where sites don't work correctly for ignorant reasons. Take for instance msnbc.com which i can't watch video in anything but windows ie/mp. I thought we moved beyond all this crap with HTML + CSS standards adoption? (ok ms is behind but there's some of it there)
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...here
.NET.
Microsoft has Adobe very firmly in it's sight. It is bringing out technology to compete with Adobe. XAML is Microsoft's silver bullet for Flash. Vista and all future releases of Windows will include support for XAML, support for legacy window systems will be facilitated via service packs.
XAML will have all the features of Flash, including tools for graphical designers plus the power and ease of development of Visual Studio
If this doesn't bite hard into Adobe's market over the next 2-3 years I would be very surprised. I think Adobe is currently riding at it's peak right now, I see only a downhill path for them from here.