future of flash
Out of context: Reply #29
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adobe will add 3D hardware acceleration, but so will every new version of current browsers. That's what that whole Khronos group was about, standards for a new 3D library that will replace OpenGL and be inside browsers and plugins and native apps.
Flash seems to be more and more a replacement for much of the browser, since the browser makers can't implement standards or agree on them. That seems to be less and less necessary, as tools like JQuery or Google Web Toolkit help people support the variations in standards. People will want GUI tools for that, not for Flash.
It seems that what Adobe is focusing on with stuff like Flash Catalyst and Flex Framework is enabling designers to create small RIAs and websites without coding much. But I think by the time that stuff is adopted by designers, Flash and Flex will be less important and Adobe will probably be making WISIWYG tools for JS/HTML5 along with Flex/Flash WISIWYGs.
That's because Google is leading the browser wars now with Chrome, they will push for all kinds of new features that will make Flash unnecessary in most cases. And when it is necessary for displaying timeline animations in banners, no one wants to see that anyway.
But ultimately to do anything fancy, like a game with modern graphics or a big application you'll need a lot of code that will run fast and be deployable on all platforms. That's where Flash with Alchemy, Unity3D or Google's NativeClient will hopefully come in. They might provide support for running C++ code close to native speeds.
Or maybe a tool like Google Web Toolkit will come out for C++, where you write in one language and it gets translated and optimized into the right form for any OS. That would make a lot of Adobe's efforts with Flash Alchemy pointless. And without Alchemy, Flash probably won't be very useful in five years.