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Comment by metamemetics | Hacker News Reader

how many people actually use Flash to edit photos? ~0.

how many people use Flash to play casual web games? Hundreds of millions.

I think your conclusion is misdrawn.

  how many people use Flash to play casual web games? Hundreds of millions.

How many flash games are capable of handling touch interface? Actually I am interested in what touch capabilities does Flash has at all.

In this episode of the online show "Hak5" they demonstrated some home-brew multi-touch interfaces and they used those to interact with demos built in Flash : http://www.hak5.org/episodes/episode-624

Any reason canvas can't win (in the long run) for casual web games?

I'm not sure if your familiar with Flash deployment services like Mochi Media but one of the biggest features they give Flash developers is their encryption which is not currently broken. What this means is that the Flash games you develop cannot be decompiled. Even the regular Flash apps you see out there have just a slight barrier to entry to decompile and come out the other end with working code. This kind of safety is comforting to developers. HTML will never have even a little of that saftey.

You should take a look at the minified/obfuscated source that Google's Closure produces. It really isn't much better than looking at a disassembly of a C# binary, as far as clarity goes. And all that in the name of minifying the source, not obfuscation.

You really think HTML5 adoption will be held back in the minigame market because the source is visible?

I see how it's an advantage, but I think if that's the full extent of why flash will win long-term for minigames, you haven't swayed me very far.

Oh I'm all for HTML5, on the other hand I'm still having to support IE6 for my work and even then IE7 and IE8, it will be many years before I can fully move to HTML5 and by then I'm sure I'll use whatever tool is best for the job of making web applications for use across browsers and platforms.

I don't see why we won't see Flash and HTML5 and Silverlight and Java applets for games still going forward. It isn't a either or situation as I'll still be able to contain Flash/Silverlight/Java inside a HTML5 compliant page.

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