Adobe Flash Player
- Started
- Last post
- 48 Responses
- ukit20
I guess it depends on your vantage point, if you are working on Flash sites for a living it might have carried on being a popular niche for longer.
All I'm saying is that looking at the scene as a whole, I could see a clear trend away from Flash in terms of the kinds of sites designers and agencies were making which accelerated during the mid 2000s. It had less to do with Apple and more with the emergence of jQuery and other JS-based solutions for what Flash was trying to do. No it didn't give you the ability to replicate everything Flash could do, but in many cases it was good enough there was increasing adoption of a "standards mindset" within the design community.
Also raf is absolutely right that Adobe shot themselves in the foot by trying to position Flash as a tool for rich internet applications, which was a dead end movement and alienated designers.
- fate0
@formed - Couldn't agree more.
- formed0
Ooph! Go look at First Born's site now. I loved the timeline one they rocked for years. Now we have the mediocre WP-looking grid (which is fine, but after looking to them to be one of the leaders, I wouldn't look twice at the new site). Gotta be kinda sad for some of these pioneers.
I dare not look at Group94's new site, I might cry.
- fate0
Agencies were still doing big, ambitious flash sites as late as 2010.
That year was probably the last big heyday of Flash.
- raf0
Remember those attempts at Flash portals like Roadrunner or that Fantasy Interactive's social network thing? They got redone in html pronto because they made no sense. Same with Ultrashock. And then...Praystation.
Jobs' policy was to remove from iPhone everything that would hinder user experience, given the limitations of the device.
When Flash eats up a whole battery in half an hour people won't say "Adobe is crap", they'll say "iPhone is crap".
This is also why iPhone didn't have multitasking for so long. I had it through jailbreak and it was a battery killer at the time. Apple only introduced it officially when they figured out how to make it play well with the battery — and it's still pretty much an issue today.
- raf0
Also... it was a time of an aesthetic shift. The web was ripe for a reboot, for simplicity, for text-driven stuff... Think what punk did to prog rock in the late 70's — it rebooted the whole aesthetic and resulted in... the 80's, even if they were shit.
I hated that web reboot at first because it was going backwards in a way... but this is how the web evolves: in circles.
We stopped designing for 800px long ago and thought the only way was up and suddenly had to design for 320px again when smartphones were introduced.
--
Also, one overlooked factor: Google search. Effectively, it did more to kill Flash than Apple did, and did it first.
- zaq-2
Google said, Good bye Flash for good
Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy.