RIP Mobile Flash
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- instrmntl0
This is a great topic and I think it should be discussed. But honestly, when someone like monospaced chimes in who is a designer for a financial company no less and has no real bearing on the discussion, I find it hard to get a real conversation going. Ben you're great, but you have no bearing in this, nor does most of the people discussing this. It would be great if the people in the industry chatted about it and the repercussions, but in a psuedo designer forum, its kind of pointless.
- mikotondria30
Clients want things that look like they have blending modes, motion blurs, 3d, scripted movements and interactions and animations that are frame/keyframe based. Who wouldn't leap at the chance of having AE-style mograph-looking output natively and at low cost running in the browser/app/interface window with high-level scripted interaction/augmented reality ?
We'd love it, our clients would love it. They'd pay us for it.
It would turn and generate billions of dollars, yet we're all stymied by trying to navigate this mountain in the mist and just shouting at each other on other paths. We thought we'd really taken a huge step up with Flash and for a while it was peachy, it was easy to produce impacting sites that clients and customers loved, but time moved on and the technology and the creativeware got out of sync.
Personally, I don't really give a crap about who wins in the deployment layer, I like to code, script, design and animate to interpret my clients' vision and precisely deliver their brand and product - I want to be able to do that with high-level tools that really work and that can produce output that is easily adaptable to the display device, looking spectacular on cinema displays and smoothly functional on a lower-grade Android.
Whoever delivers that will get my money and my loyalty, I don't care who they are. For an industry as a whole to have dropped the ball on not delivering a killer product to as an enormous and sophisticated and wealthy marketplace as the 10s of millions of designers and developers is shocking, I can't think of any other that has performed so badly and become such a mired clusterfuck as this.- hahaha, some good pointsukit2
- There's just so much hot air. Our job is to make great stuff for clients, that their customers love. We're b2b. This is just bs.mikotondria3
- by time do u mean public opinion? take flash out and what do u have for animated web based stuff?deathboy
- As far as best tools still seems like flash takes the cake.deathboy
- or is that what youre saying?deathboy
- well yes and no, I always had trouble with glitches in the editor, and with the performance issues on so many platforms and the fact it was a plugin...mikotondria3
- and the Jobs' opinion has flitered down to clients who want something else. They know that and they want more seo, yeesh.mikotondria3
- clients are idiots.. but youre right. they think somethign is better because there is buzz about itdeathboy
- few realize what it is and how it relates to them. friggen clients. im interested in seeing what adobe does still think it smart to pull resourcesdeathboy
- pull resources since apps the way to go mobile it seems. AS was an advanced js in closed environment w/ gui. Maybe flash will just adapt open environment js stuffdeathboy
- flash will jsut adapt js open environment stuff. I jsut dont want to back track to pre flash daysdeathboy
- Right, that's a great point. AS is just a flavor of JS,..mikotondria3
- deathboy0
Im curious how many people really surf the internet on their mobile devices. More specifically phones. Aren't apps the easier thing to use?
I think it was wise of them to focus on the app market. The percentage of mobile users surfing random shit and needing flash probably doesnt justify the expense to support those few users. Be nice if they did but makes sense. As far as the whole OMG! flash on web is dead i find that hard to swallow. Take for example banners. How much easyier is it to animate a banner or simple tasks in flash than javascript. For the short term i still see flash being fine. If adobe creates GUI that is easy to use without scripting knowledge to animate i think that app would replace flash, but not actionscript and AIR stuff. Unless that app develops overtime and can become better than those technologies. I do like that flash had a contained environment that made things work pretty evenly seemlessly. You think apple would appreciate that fact since that is what they sell. As far as power usages its about how things are built not the tool used. And as far as motion it seemed at a higher level than alot of the html5 stuff, but again could be the builder and not the tools, however a lot of better builders in flash it seems. If flash said fuck u world and stopped who could animate a banner? I think of that when looking at this argument. Remember getting into this field in like 03-04. Saw some cool js animated banners. But it was niche and probably wasnt worth the costs. The flash GUI opened doors for mor epoeple to easily create small animation stuff in a confined environment. Until adobe creates something better for that stuff i think flash is fine. But i am interested in seeing if they can produce something a GUI for this newer stuff that surpasses the old. And hopefully we dont take a step back because a popular icon demonized something for his own gains.
- ukit20
Thought this was interesting, from Adobe's blog post
“We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible...and, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.”
"for a smooth transition to HTML5"
I think people are being short-sighted saying Flash will be around forever and ever. Adobe is talking about desktop Flash here, and making the transition to a standards-based approach. If you read between the lines, Adobe seems to be saying they are eventually leaving Flash behind altogether.
- You could guess a lot of scenarios from that paragraph. I for one, feel somewhat comforted by the tone of it.CyBrainX
- omg0
WHAT?! I can't believe they waited for Jobs to die to finally figure this out. Someone from Apple needs to say something about this.
- monNom0
Knowing absolutely nothing about native app development on mobile devices, it seems to me that writing flash for each and every one of these platforms, with their unique processors and graphics capabilities, would be a nightmare.
A big development team makes sense for x86 on the desktop... maybe it makes sense for a big player like Blackberry with their playbook as it's probably going to be worth the investment, but when you have a company like RIM ditch an entire product line that you just sunk resources into (expecting years of marketshare from that investment)... that's got to sting. Now multiply that by the number of unique hardware/software platforms out there and how comfortable are you going to feel ramping up for yet another new platform?
- SteveJobs0
there's something fishy about all this. sure, it's a runtime and runtime's are, by definition, inferior to native programs, so what? wait another year or so and most any mobile device should be able to run your stuff.
i think there's something else going on. i think adobe wanted to corner the mobile market with a cross-platform sdk - one that would be the go-to technology for newbie developers who'd be otherwise intimidated by the likes of objective c or java. but it didn't happen and now their realizing it's not going to be what they'd hoped and while they *could* let it die quietly (for the mobile platform), they can't just keep investors in the dark about it.
this isn't about flash vs. html 5. i abandoned flash a while back because my specific needs don't require it, but it still has it's place, and probably 'always' will.
you best believe it.
- ernexbcn0
LOL at "few people speak sense (boz)..."
- fadein110
I think this whole site should now be put in the 1st world problems thread. few people speak sense (boz and georgeIII and a few others are exceptions) but the general trend is fools like monospaced (fanboy) not seeing the bigger picture. This site just shows how the web has become branded and powered by capatilism. Happy web $.0 everyone. fuck web 2.0, welcome to the wired controlled web xxx
- fuck these endless team battles... pc vs mac, html5 vs flash, ios vs android - tedious unproductive bullshitfadein11
- get on with ya work and stop wasting ya time talking bullshitfadein11
- I'm not a fanboy, you jerk.monospaced
- chossy0
Also doesn't flash and air export for the mobile platform anyway. So Flash as a tool has adapted quite well to the changing environment so it is quite an up to date technology in that respect just the flash player is no longer going forward. However as a tool to create it is still able to perform as well as it always has done?
- chossy0
comicsans this is a post you made a year or so ago about colour cycling in HTML5.... what am I looking at here?
- deathboy0
yea and get rid of all animated banners and other animation stuff thats flash
- comicsans0
Awesome! the second best thing they could have done. Now they just need the courage of their convictions and cancel Flash outright. Flash was a reaction to the browser wars of times gone past, it is ugly, inefficient, insecure and obsolete (which is probably why Apple so rightly despised it). Now it is a crutch for people who can't be bothered to learn up to date tools.
- "it is ugly, inefficient, insecure and obsolete"
DO YOU WRITE FOR VOGUE???georgesIII - obsolete? what the most ubiqitous plugin there is - are you stupid?fadein11
- "it is ugly, inefficient, insecure and obsolete"
- 3030
I agree with ernexbcn that desktop flash can turn laptops into a frying pans, but some people are overreacting saying that "flash is dead". The mobile version is dead, the desktop one is still around but in the decline. I am sure that desktop flash will be around for a while specially if you consider Adobe's air platform for building apps. What strikes me is the fact that Adobe wasn't able (or willing) to develop proper version mobile devices. For iPhone/iPad we have mobile versions of games like Need for Speed and that proves the fact that if put enough effort, you can develop a decent software.
