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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. "
... "just say no".
No Flash for me, It takes way to much bandwidth what I do is make each frame and save it as a bmp and use JavaScript to load each frame by frame, It saves a load on bandwidth! Vs. Piggy Flash
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, since I am on Linux and a 64 bit variant, I guess it will be another 10 years when I get to see the presentation.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
is to be made irrelevant by something else that works on all platforms and is cheaper/free/OSS.
(empty space)
That's right. I have no plans for Flash.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
...right after the blink tag.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
until I realized that it looked shitty on slower computers and only had Flash 7 on x86 Linux. I can't even play FancyPantsAdventure with it. And, it can be incredibly annoying. Worst is when you force flash to use a site at all. With AJAX technologies and dynamically-created sites, is their really a need for Flash sites? I can see it for games or small applets, but for an entire site (like some car websites), do you even need it? More to the point, should you even need it?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
i booed on them right on that article
but ya flash blows
they have terrible or no support for most architectures/OSes out there
and for a 'web application' platform thats just flat out unacceptable
they did release a 32bit only version 7 for linux, but there have been what? 2 other versions and a 3rd coming since then? and none of them work on linux..
also they dont have 64bit support
and as far as i know it ONLY works on x86
so if you write your interactive web application using ajax then it works on nearly every operating system known to man.. or flash and it works only on one
Flash: Gaudy or ostentatious display.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
a-aaaaa! He'll save every one of us!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while. And with something like 95% browser penetration, Flash is a great way to create browser-independent websites.
Flash is far more robust and elegant than the slashdot crowd gives it credit for being. It has a powerful object-oriented language and frameworks enabling ant builds, unit testing, aspect-oriented coding, and almost every other buzzword out there. If you gave up on it 5 years ago, check it out again. It so isn't your daddy's flash these days.
Or better yet, keep insulting Flash while I keep making money off it.
In the past I've always classified flash as a cute toy that web designers play with to get some interactivity that consisted of timelines and hiding little snippets of code in obscure places in the timeline.
However over the past month I've been imersing myself in the Flash world and have been amazed.
Did you know...
- You don't have to use the Flash IDE to create applications, you can use:
Eclipse (My preferred environment for this)
FlashDevelop
Notepad/Emacs/vi + a compiler
A crapton of other environments
Flex Builder (another adobe product)
- You never have to deal with a timeline if you don't want to.
- Real object-orientated programming is possible.
- Actionscript 3 (available in Flash Player 9) is clearly targetted at developers and not designers and removes many of the oddities of AS2 that you may have heard about.
- Real applications, not web toys can be created.
- With the upcomming apollo runtime, native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources.
- There's a ton of open source libraries out there
Want an IoC container like Spring? Sure!
Want a port of the java swing library? Sure!
- The new version of Flex Builder (the environment targetted at developers) is simply an eclipse plugin.
- Adobe is now making tools and libraries available free of charge to developers. (not the whiz-bang IDE's, but compilers, libraries, etc.)
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished. The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all. Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it. This will allow them to do a bunch of things to lock those already developing in Flash into staying there as moving to another environment (like, I don't know, HTML with server-side processing) would take too much effort.
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a website run entirely in Flash.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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
I spent about half an hour looking for a company's site last week. I knew the company name, but couldn't guess the URL. I'd tried a dozen searches till finally I found a forum post that linked to it. Of course, the entire front page and all navigation was in Flash, so it was totally invisible to Google's searchbot. And it didn't do anything that couldn't have been done just as easily in vanilla HTML
I've been doing Flash/AS professionally since the 5.0 days. The plattform has come a long way. For one, it actually has become a plattform, and not just some crappy IDE with a little scripting bolted on. Allthough not percieved as such, it's even closer to open source right now than Java. AS 2&3, MTASC, osflash.org and the GNU Gnash project continue to add OSS credibility and non-slashdot-bullshitting awareness in the developer community. I didn't like the hickup in the release line of the official Linux Flash Player though. If Flash won't reliably support Linux, it's a no-go for me and quite a few other serious Flash developers. The dev-laps of Macromedia where a nice place to get that straight to the devteam of flash and they got the message.
All in all it's clear that if Adope doesn't screw around to much they can't do much wrong. It's still the most widespread plattform ever with nearly zero-fuss cross plattform deployment via the web. You get a high profile independant VM, with a security model and security policy that remains unmatched in RIAs. And a rock-solid ECMA compliant OOP language along with it.
Ajax just isn't in that league. Nice for the one or other drag-and-drop gadget or small-scale data sync but that's about it.
XUL maybe will get there someday, if they get their stuff sorted out and manage to build a hassle-free XUL-Runner plugin for all major browsers. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
I think this is more like remembering Perl Harbor.
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Oh, and try the Flash-Fried Content, and don't forget to tip your web servers. Ba-da-bing!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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!
Somebody should develop a proprietary scripting language embedded inside flash embedded inside dhtml/javascript. Cause as we all know, the more nested layers of closed-architecture, write once, run one-place, functional redundancy a page has the cooler it is.
That's weird because we've been developing an application that uses Flash as a front-end and MySQL/PHP as the server-side and haven't had any issues with "connection points". Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Pardon, but you don't know what you're talking about.
Flashs accessability follows official standards for RIA plattforms by the book. And there's enough ammo that has "Flash is more accessible than HTML" written on it. I'll build a site that's perfect for blind people to navigate in flash - and they won't even need a screenreader.
Since AS 2 it's been an industry strength plattform and VM, with nearly all ties to the official IDE cut. Security is next to paranoid and because it's also monolithic plattform it's considered a reliable and easy to develop for.
Then again, you actually need to be able to develop webapps that don't suck. If used correctly a full-blown flash only site can be the best web experience ever. And, admitted, there are very few people who can do it right. Then again you've got the same thing with websites. 80% crap, 10% so-so, 10% ok and good. Same with flash.
Then again, the flash-bashers are getting less and less and the community of serious flash developers is growing steady, so future isn't that bleak.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here's my link contribution to what I would consider "Quality Flash Work."
http://www.beautifully-webdesign.net/
The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash.
I think it's a little hippocritical of the general slashdot user to complain about the restrictive political climate and it's often infringing acts on the creative rights of their citizens, yet dismiss Flash as a merit-less platform for art, music and other creative ideas. Somehow, I think these slashdot users are also the same people who spend too much time on sites like albinoblacksheep or newgrounds.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
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.
Two of those articles have written 5-6 years back.
As someone coding an large scale application (hint, its part of a project that is costing billions of £) that is using Flex for the presentation layer (or presentation layer + as it is turning out to be), I have to disagree.
Flex (or Flash) is an API and can be made to develop complex applications. Though the question of "complex" is debatable. I think 10s of thousands of concurrent users with 10s of millions of daily transactions will be complex enough.
I've yet to see the Ajax app that performs to a high degree of accuracy to the same extent.
Server side execution of certain things? Sure, how do you want to go about it? RPC, WS, HTTP? These are obviously all wierd Adobe programming techniques that aren't used by millions of people across the planet. We're linked upto massive multiple clusters all running various Java servlets to perform all our server side needs, such as, for example working with that massive centralised DB.
Try looking at it from a security point of view as well. Flash is prone to fewer attacks. It is much harder to spoof a Flash application, you can't simply through up a look-a-like page, you can't use simple cross site scripting attacks, no SQL injection, simply fewer common techniques will stime it.
HTML is no greater universal than Flash, Flash has different players (which can be compensated for by directing the user to get the latest), HTML has all its IE/Firefox/Opera/etc problems.
In the end, Flash CAN be annoying, if simply used to create an annoying moving image... much like a gif can be annoying if used to create an annoying moving image, but it IS powerful and will only get more so.
Flash brought us the two worst words on the Internet:
"Skip Intro"
As more features get added in Flash, there will be more vectors that can be used to potentially infest computers with malicious software. As it is, using Flash as an application development platform is a bad idea because nobody tends to program for security, and decides on programming for performance for media players, webcam broadcasts, video streaming, etc. As more code gets added on, holes will open up, eventually. As is the future of any piece of software - there will be a crack, hack, hole, exploit, whatever for it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
.NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
Right. The ubiquity of the Flash Player does lend itself well to providing a single solution to play/stream video without having to worry about the type of media player the user installed.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished.
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong. If you want to use a AJAX in your javascript you are definitely able to do so with the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit I mentioned above. If you mean you can't do asynchronous XML requests from Flash, then you're mistaken again. You have the ability to load XML either synchronously or asynchronously with the XML object in ActionScript 3.0 and 2.0 (but in 2.0 you can't do it explicitly).
Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it.
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a
Flash should be used where one needs to use Flash, and HTML/JS/CSS (+XML+XSLT) likewise.
Flash behaves consistently cross-browser, cross/platform -- and most features cannot be disabled by the user. (compare that to a user being able to turn off JS, or Java -- something often mandated in a corporate environment.) It's either "all on" or "all off." (w/ a few minor exceptions, eg: local storage and camera/mic access.)
Flash has a large install base. It's arguably the most widely available platform for delivering media-rich "applications" over the web.
Flash does not rely on anywhere near the number of kludges and workarounds necessary to replicate similar features -- where possible -- in different browsers and browser *versions.* (Unlike various browser technologies, supported features are more stable across updates of the Flash Player.)
Not to sound like I work for MM/Adobe, but, here's what the Flash Player can do at *run time*:
...oh wait, it's not. I guess all the rest is pretty moot, then.
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, so that users could chose to turn flash on for one page and off for another (or possibly even more granular if you wished). He told me flat out "because then our customers wouldn't like it because it would be too easy for you to avoid their ads. We want you to have a "one or the other" choice -- either all Flash or none. We think the quality of good/userful/entertaining flash out there is what makes Flash an attractive advertizing platform. If you could pick and choose what you saw, Flash would be just another rich media option on the web."
I found his honesty refreshing. And I see his point -- if you could easily pick and chose flash (as I do with the FF Flashblock extension) you'd probably never see a flash ad. I was surfing on a friends computer (on IE even) and his web experience SUCKS. Flash ads everywhere, they make noise without permission, they are ...ummm...FLASHY. And irritating. I honestly don't know how people get around with flash enabled all the time. For me if the choice is as he put it -- either no flash, or flash with no control over it, I'll take no flash.
It's silly for us to get into the arguement over whether or not content on the web should be free or supported by advertisments, because neither of us will affect the other's opinion. I don't block every ad, but if one annoys me, I do block it. I think the ad companies have the right to try to show me ads, and I have the right to try to block the ones that annoy me. So for me, I'll never consider flash an option until users have the ability to selectively choose what pages are allowed to run flash, and which flash apps are allowed to run on a given page.
Also for everyone in my company, because I block .swf at the router
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
...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.