When Adobe announced that it was stopping development on Flash for mobile devices, we had a chorus of Apple lovers saying what a posthumous victory it was for Steve Jobs. "Oh he beat them Adobe folks down", "You tell 'em Steve! "USA! USA! USA!". It made me fucking sick, but I shut up about it. The fact that Jobs was opposed to Flash because it undermined his walled-garden approach to App profits, rather than hardware concerns was irrelevant. I let them have their bollocks.
So lets step forward a few months. Flash within Chrome keeps crashing on me. Youtube videos can lead me to a full system reboot. It turns out that the problem was with a dodgy GFX driver update, but it's Youtube's Flash player that displays the fault. This is typical of Flash. It's nearly always something else that fucks it up. So that's where HTML5 comes in, right? Wrong. HTML5 is a pipe dream. Sure, I think it's great stuff, but where the fuck is it? Flash is mean't to be "dead" after all. We have reports of developers snubbing it, and websites are still using Flash. Flash works and HTML5 doesn't.
Here's the real problem. Those nasty popup ads and shitty web treasures embedded on sites are still using Flash, but you can thankfully disable them by simply disabling Flash or by means of one of those "Flash blocker" things. What the fuck will you do with HTML5 annoyances? HTML5 is promised to have all the magical features of Flash but be a web standard. So how will you block the crap that's thrown up in front of you? Convoluted script blockers, you say? We all know that bollocks won't work.
Here's a suggestion: roll back Flash. Roll it back to version 8 or so. All that new shit really bloats it out and makes it error prone. Adobe got too big for their pants with Actionscript3. They really thought they could take over the world with all that Flex stuff. Silly Adobe people. No. Go back to basics, what Flash was good at. Continue to develop HTML5, and let that be the backbone of the web, but let Flash do the trivial stuff. Perhaps it could be a replacement for Gif animations or something. You think that's a mighty fall from grace for Adobe? You obviously haven't visited a tumblr, Soup, or Google+ page then, which are usually loaded with 5MB+ gif animations, crapping out your browsers resources. [The fuckers love them gifs!] A Flash swf version of a gif uses a mere fraction of the resources and it allows for all kinds of novel looping possibilities. If Adobe play their cards right, they could be the next CompuServe.... what happens if they play their cards wrong!
But here's another twist. When HTML5 takes over, as promised, it will provide similar functionality that Flash currently possesses. The functionality that troubled Steve Jobs enough to ban it on his iTreasures. So what will Apple do when HTML5 becomes web dominant? Probably nothing, because by the time HTML5 becomes standard, Apple will be well dead by then.
Here's my prediction: when HTML5 is able to do everything Flash can do right now, it will be just as shit as Flash is right now.
Flash is actually a very good platform and if you ask me, it has come on in leaps and bounds with the last few versions. AS3 is a pleasure to develop in, and brings ease of coding and standards to a level that's very close to Java. The errors that you're talking about that plague Flash applications (from what I have found anyway) are down to poor development standards rather than anything inherently wrong with the platform. The problem is because Actionscript gives so much power, it's easy for developers who don't know what they're doing to use that rope to hang themselves with. It's simply far too often that I come across code with no exception handling or code that is unnecessarily creating hundreds of highly intensive graphical objects that are never cleaned and remain lingering in memory until Flash is exited. Try that caper in any other language, you're going to get similar results.
ReplyDeleteIt appears to me that Adobe have given up too soon. Where I work, we spent years complaining about poor integration with Maven/Ant, poor testing tools, poor MVC frameworks, etc. Now that Flash is finally coming up to scratch in these areas, it looks like Adobe are essentially pulling the plug.
The real irony of HTML5 is that it is going to hurt Apple, and not just Adobe. The Apple "App" universe is full of applications that will become obsolete once HTML5 is under widespread adoption (have you checked out the API for integration with mobile phones? - http://www.w3.org/TR/dap-api-reqs/). Not only that, but HTML5 will be much better at delivering cross platform support (potentially, HTML5 could replace seperate Android, Apple, Mobile, Desktop Web applications). The problem is that we still have over 3 years to wait for the first HTML5 specification - http://ishtml5readyyet.com/
If Adobe were smart, they would leverage the 80% of HTML5 that they already have in Flash, and give us something comparable to HTML5 much quicker. I fear that the corporate mandarins in Adobe-land are just too terrified to think out of the box.
Competent comment, with salient points.
DeleteFlash is seldom given the credit it deserves. It's easy to forget that Flash has been around for a long time, stoking the progress-fires of general online (and offline) multimedia. I remember attending the Windows '98 conference, and seeing all the presentation material done with Macromedia Flash. Ironically, Flash was even used on the touchscreen monitors provided for attendees to locate stalls at the event. Perhaps Flash had it's day now, but as you say, it's still a platform which is a pleasure to work with.
Adobe promised to open up the SWF format, with their http://www.openscreenproject.org/, but I haven't heard much about it.
Anyway, the future is COBOL. Born in 1959 and still going strong*
* strong is a relative term.
Wow, the game has changed with the announcement that Adobe is no longer supporting development for FLASH for mobile devices or TV…it is focusing on youtube html5 player and Adobe AIR apps instead….the news got around the game development community quickly. I think the market penetration of mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, and iTouch from Apple being a merket leader who doesn’t support FLASH made a true impression on developers whose clients pages were losing views by this audience. Comsider Apple’s leadership history introducing CD ROM’s fiirst in computers, dropping the beige look of computers, introucing the iMAc, iTunes, Quicktime, and Jobs support of Blu Ray at Disney helped set standards in many industries…
ReplyDeleteI left this spam comment in because it reminded me to mention how much I hate Adobe Air. Burn it with fire!
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