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How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

snydeq writes "Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'The bigger picture — which I've touched on before — is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That's long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it's starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,' McAllister writes. 'Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"

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  1. Re:Native Apps? by gig · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well, iOS proves you totally and completely wrong. Although your bigoted ignorant tone is somewhat entertaining to other slashdotters, I'm sure.

    There are plenty of apps on iOS that cannot be done as Web apps. There are many apps from the Mac like Keynote and iMovie. There are many music and audio apps that do multitrack audio, send MIDI over Wi-Fi, all kinds of things that Web apps are not even dreaming of yet. There are console games, there are hardware accelerated graphics and animations everywhere. There are limited resources that make it an advantage to code in native C/C++ for speed and responsiveness. There is a massive object-oriented framework that does the work of 10 additional coders for you as you work alone. I worked for a company whose Web app cost 10 times as much to make as their iPhone app.

    An iOS is running on a workstation class core