Flash is dead. Long live the internet.
blog.deconcept.com
blog.deconcept.com
First of all let's look at the current state of Adobe and the entire Flash/Flex/Air ecosystem. Around the time that AS3 came out everyone was griping about how hard it was and what a pain in the ass the static typing was. They were used to the forgiving nature of AS2. But eventually pretty much everyone converted and fell in love with AS3. The departure from AS2 to AS3 is like learning a whole new language, like stepping up from JavaScript to a watered down version of Java. I think that everyone's resistance was not based on how much better 3 was than 2, but really because we just didn't want to change. I don't know any Flash devs with CS degrees. They're all artists and designers and musicians who somehow got into development. For us, changing to a new language is difficult because we're self taught and didn't go through years of higher education in C and Python and Java. Once we got comfortable with a flavor of AS we just didn't want to move. But didn't you learn a whole lot going from 2 to 3? Trust me, when you go back and see what people are doing with JavaScript it'll be a little painful at first but then you'll get over the hump and have that same enthusiasm for it that you did for AS3 and the reason will be because the JS community is on fire these days and they're making so much cool shit you'll quickly forget about being forced to live off the junk that Adobe produces.
And let's talk about that junk for a sec. Let's talk about Adobe as a whole and what they've become. Because I feel like at some point they totally lost their way and tried to turn the whole thing into some messed up flavor of Java. Case in point: text. For years we've struggled with getting the right fonts to show up on a page and getting text to flow properly. Their solution, after literally like a decade of us begging for it, was the Text Layout Framework. Rather than just enhancing the embed button they gave us the biggest pile of over engineered shit and to this day I've never seen a project that actually uses it. Adobe spends so much time building dumb features and tools that are totally half baked and then they basically hold a studio's hand to build a demo for MAX and then they waste a shitload of time trying to jam their way into some market and in the end I still can't get my fucking textfields to work and it's 2011. I'm completely over being tied to the whims of that company because for them, it's all one big land grab and they're trying to get into every market possible. They're stretched, their features are watered down, and half the people in there have never done a real world project and are just applying their CS degrees to problems they don't actually understand.
Finally, I just want to say that we need to look forward to our future successes. Because right now each of us probably does not have a sparkling track record of amazing web apps or mobile apps that are not tied directly to the Flash platform. A friend of mine who has been doing Flash way longer than myself just recently launched an app that went to number 1 in the iOS store. He actually wrote it all in C++ but now he's really eager to learn Objective-C. I think this illustrates two points: 1) You don't have to do JavaScript if you don't want to. Learn Ruby or Python or Objective-C. Take this as an opportunity to broaden your horizons. You don't want to slooooowly sunset with a language and end up being the only COBOL guy left in the area code, so consider it a blessing that Flash is getting the rug pulled out from under it. 2) As soon as you start seeing success in a new language you will very quickly forget about Flash. It's kind of like getting into a new relationship. It sucks right now, but it won't always suck, and when it stops sucking it'll be awesome again.
Exactly. And this is why Flash was so awesome.
Standards are the opposite side of the spectrum, full of the most pedantic and hyper-technical people, and it's why I hate standards. Just standardize everything in Flash and I'd be happy.
As an artist, you're right, I hated going from AS2 to AS3 but once I got past the challenge (rather quickly) I loved it. I'd like to have your enthusiasm, but going from Flash to standards doesn't look the same: I hated going from AS2 to AS3 because it made some things more strict, but it paid off because the resulting product was better. Going from Flash to HTML, however, is the opposite -- things are incredibly messy in JS, and as a result, stuff breaks and is inconsistent and buggy all over the place. This, to an artist, is soul crushing. I want to make cool stuff, and I will climb any mountain to do so, but once I do I don't want to see my work just crumble to bits because I switched to a different machine/device/screen.
The first was the realization that Adobe wasn't going to make any more cool fun stuff for me. I feel like they've just lost their way with all that and now that I look back on it, it seems like Macromedia actually made all the aspects of Flash that I enjoy. The most recent thing Adobe has done for me is Stage3D but even that is so technical that they're relying on 3rd parties like Away3D to build the friendly API on top of it.
The second was doing a project that was as close to an art piece as I've ever come doing ad agency work that was entirely in HTML/CSS3 and JS. It was actually this project if you want to see some pictures: http://inchwormstudio.com/?portfolio=samsung-coast-to-coast-... What I found while I was doing that project was that the web has changed a lot while I've been doing Flash and I didn't realize how much annoying obtuse boilerplate I had to write in AS3 that just becomes total cake when you're using HTML for markup, CSS for style and JS for slick transitions and communication. My main love affair is with HTML and JS, I still think CSS is...CSS. With HTML I'm getting all the great structural stuff that Flex devs love, without the mind numblingly elaborate class structures they have to deal with. With good JS libraries like jQuery I'm getting the cross browser DOM support that I need because I just don't have those sea legs yet. And when you combine it all you can work really, really fast. I spent the whole first half of that project cursing JavaScript up and down the office. I would make little examples showing how setInterval loses scope and demo it for my team and be like "look! this stuff is retarded! I want AS3 back!" Then one day I had to build this twitter widget, and I sat down and I just cranked it out in no time. And I thought, 'You know, if I had been doing this in Flash I would have spent so much time dealing with URLLoaders and cross policy files and coreLib for JSON parsing...' It just felt like things had gone smoother because I wasn't fighting against the web to make it fit inside my Flash app. And that was about the time that I felt like I got over the hump, and from there it was all downhill.
It totally had warts and I got stung by IE transparency bugs but in the end we sorted it all out and now I know how to deal with those issues. And to be honest, they were pretty minimal. The Facebook API was far worse than the cross browser stuff.
If you're making the transition then read this: http://jqfundamentals.com/ I read it start to finish and it made things so much easier for me. Then once you're comfortable with jQuery, leave it behind and try the other stuff. It feels like there is SO much more to experiment with in the JS world than the AS world and I think that's largely because the community is exponentially larger. Hope that's helpful.
Take some responsibility. If you "artists" hadn't all ran after the shiny toys Adobe offered but taken those "pedantic" standards people seriously, you wouldn't be in this position.
The success and dominance of Flash held open standards back for over a decade. An you were not an innocent bystander in that.
I just wish you could do your thing, and I could do mine. Well, congrats, you win.
Even today, compare flash games to games done with web standards, and that's after everyone has put considerable effort into making their JavaScript engines faster!
With apologies to Carl Sagan, not everyone wants to create a universe to make an apple pie.
And the thing that amazes me is the fact that when it comes to longevity, Flash has nothing to apologize for. I can view Flash 3 SWFs and they look exactly how I made them. HTML sites break and blow up in spectacular fashion within months sometimes. A new browser comes out and now your beautiful website looks like trash because something isn't rendered the same. Not always, but more often than I want to deal with (which would be never), and I never once had that problem with Flash.
Nice to meet you. Even if Flash is not my main language, i do enjoy it (AS3/Flex), and i am the proud owner of a CS degree.
The problem is actually related to this, the problem is very simple: 99% of the articles, blog posts, etc that talk about "Flash is dead" are written by people with either no clue of the Adobe ecosystem and its spread in enterprise, or by Flash dev who are not dev but glorified banner maker. Flash is not dead, never will be, how long internet will take to understand this, it is not going away, HTML5 is not on level on key features, its a fact, not an opinion, end. of. story.
As for the enterprise...wake up dude. They're shelving Flex as well. 4.6 is it. http://jessefreeman.com/articles/game-over-how-adobe-killed-...
This is more important than it may seem at a first glance. Non-techies already tend to genuinely confuse the two. Those people have no problem buying a crippled data plans that will let them query web servers and nothing else, because they will believe they "have the internet" on their phones. But when you're behind a big NAT, with no public IP and most ports filtered, you don't have an internet connection. (Even according the big French carriers themselves. Thank goodness, They since stopped calling their data plans "internet" in their ads.)
The obvious effect is that the web is taking over the internet. As it does, it becomes increasingly acceptable to block nearly everything else (for home connections at least).
That would surely "tame the internet".
Fixed.
This is what's depressing, though. I want to make awesome things, but HTML is simply an inferior and more restrictive platform than Flash. The thought of programming in Javascript instead of ActionScript 3 is soul-crushing. Javascript is basically ActionScript 1.0 (which I thought I migrated from years ago) without the cross browser consistency and more advanced graphical APIs.
Long live the internet, but losing Flash is a bad thing for the internet. It's not Flash that needs to die, it's the entire archaic and poor sighted standards stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript and the horrible plain file HTTP delivery system) in favor of a new standard stack that can actually do something close to the Flash Player.
What would really be cool is if you could target VM's using whatever language you want (including statically typed languages like Java and AS3. The JVM and AVM did it, so I don't see why V8/etc can't). Javascript should not have a monopoly on the VM.
Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax.
More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language.
Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?
That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement?
Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.
I'm not just hoping I'm counting on Adobe or someone delivering a good Javascript IDE that mimics OOP design, and I'm keeping an eye on Google's Dart project, but even after that I'm not expecting the experience to be nearly as smooth or creatively liberating as Flash.
Plus not having the structure as part of the standard will make iterative development a nightmare. Instead of being reliant on a proprietary runtime (like Flash Player) we are reliant on proprietary compilers and libraries. How is that better?
This meant that even somebody using IE6 can have a good experience with a flash app, assuming their flash is upto date.
What annoys me with HTML5/JS apps is I constantly see people showing off demos of something cool they did with the "open" HTML5/JS tools. Then I load their demo and it's all like "hey, sorry your not using the latest version of Chrome come back when you've installed it"
Hopefully this will get better over time , but you've still got IE dragging it's feet and doing things a bit differently + Microsoft's habit of dropping support for new versions in older OSes.
Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation otherwise I can see this becoming a nightmare and everyone having to keep multiple versions of multiple browsers installed just to run all the apps they need.
Heh, this would be an ideal situation, but good luck trying to get them to agree on that. The browser wars are not over yet, who knows if they ever will be.
We thought that the Web would be that final platform that would give us the ability to write our app once, and then make it available instantly on all operating systems. Well, technically, we got that. Except now we have to worry about browser incompatibilities. We didn't solve the problem of cross-platform compatibility. We just have a different set of platforms today.
What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers. But seeing that this magical language would probably also need to support arcane versions of various browsers I don't see that happening any time soon.
I thought we did have that and it was called gasp Java!
I agree though that it would be awesome if adobe created a suite of Javascript products that focused on developing creative content in a similar way to what flash did.
I think the reasons most people hate flash are that the platform itself works poorly on anything other than windows , this could be fixed in part by Adobe simply open sourcing the flash VM.
The other reason is that lots of flash developers used the platform to create crap like flash intros and obnoxious advertising , that won't exactly go away with HTML5/JS.
Adobe has been focusing on html5, as have the rest of the web, and imho, Adobe has some great tools to author content in html5 already.
and yeah, this announcement is about mobile flash, as used on android phones, not about flash lite. that's been dead for years.
They're going to follow the money and where is the money going?
The argument is that users won't want to install a separate app for all the various things they do on their phones (especially not the things that they don't do often) and would perhaps favor a mobile website instead.
The argument that users don't/won't install lots of apps on their phones is simply wishful thinking. The reality is exactly the opposite of that. Users that have traditionally struggled with various features of the internet in browsers are able to do what they've always wanted in apps with far more ease. Even despite the a lot of the Mozilla community being dead-set against using a native UI, they've pushed on and will eat more market share as a result due to the instantly recognisable interact they'll get as they launch the app rather than waiting for the interface to load on XUL/HTML/JS/XML that just aren't as quick.
You also have to take into account that with a website, you have no one to run to. Users generally feel ignored, where as with the social aspect of any app market users feel like they're patt of a community.
Anything that currently states users prefer websites over apps is incredibly ignorant of the facts. A prime example is with Twitter. Tweetdeck on desktop and mobile shows far more usage than that of the website. As does Ubersocial and in fact their own apps. There's a firm desire on the parts of many to see people use the web over apps but those are merely desires of a small percentage.
with flash's workflow you: 1) create a flash file with the mature tools, test, release 2) create an animated gif as fallback
yes its buggy, and the video is slower than decent native support, but it works the same across all browsers (90%)
Advertisements should be text or images. Even animated GIFs are pushing it.
Even non-Flash online video has made huge strides in the past year, so I expect that to eventually erode away Flash's grip on that as well. The only real question there is how long it will take to sort out all of the codec issues that are holding it back at the moment.
NOW ONTO FLASH.....as you can see we are all 'skilled' and have deep roots in microprocessing love and many of you might even have more history than I but not very many of you trust me... I used to run BBS's back in the early 80's with my PORTABLE Commodore 64-SX computer with an IEEE 8 bit bus HBA jacked into my cartidge port so that I could hook up my SPIFFY SET OF 2 1001's SUPER HIGH DENSITY 1MB 5.25" floppy disk drives... so if you used to log onto COCONET and remember COMPUSERVE and the infamous ARMOR PLATED CARTRIDGE PORTS (one left and one right) of an Atari 800 that you played your first game of 'ULTIMA' wasting hours and days and weeks and months doing Lord British's laundry then you might be worthy of understanding the big picture here... we'll see though...
APPLE PURCHASED ADOBE FOR ONE REASON ABOUT 6 or 7 years ago...THEY WANTED TO DISALLOW, PUT THE KABOSH(sp?), PURPOSELY NOT GIVE SUPPORT TO ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT WERE GOING TO BUY THEIR CRAPPY iDevices and future iPhones they had in their plans of releasing with all of the other crappy iCrapple gear like iPudz and whatever other rotten crAlpples that have yet to fall from the crApple tree of nightmare lipstick on a pig devices that we TRUE and LONG TERM (thus the big into on my credz) SUPER USERz have NEVER BEEN INTERESTED IN FOR ONE REASON AND ONE REASON ONLY!!! WE HAVE NEVER HAD THE DESIRE OR NEED TO PLAY WITH OVERPRICED YUPPIE TOYZ THAT WERE PROPRIETARY AND CREATED OUT OF PURE GREED AND DECEPTIVE MARKETING IDEAS TO TRY TO FINALLY TURN A PROFIT FOR A COMPANY THAT NEVER MADE A DIME ON THEIR BOTTOM LINE IN OVER 30 YEARS OF EXISTANCE UNTIL THEY STARTED SELLING A STOLEN PATENT BASED DEVICE CALLED AN iPud! Then they gave this iPud thingy the ability to make phone calls and started calling it a SmartPhone...You new people (last ten years) that think you know what the phuk is up....just shut the phuk up on this one because you have no phuking clue and you never will... Ya see new people... crApple Inc. has never invented a god damn thing ever...they have either borrowed (stolen), aquired, or just plain copied everything they have ever done and put a dress on it and then tripled the retail price of anything like it and the crApple subculture continued to bite like a school of freshly hatched guppies (but they were actually old school hipped turned yuppie so now I like to refer to them as YIPPIEz!) the whole time being snobs because they think that unless they didn't overpay and basically get ripped the phuk off that they weren't buying the BEST of the BEST gear. Well sorry to burst all you crApple wanna be's bubblez but any old school and still way ahead of the curve today geeks out there because of just plain common sense and not because we're wanting to tweak everything all the time would tell you today that they have never owned a crApple product, never had the desire to own or spend a dime on a crApple product and will never purchase a crApple product until the day they die or they can finally afford to buy that $HIT lying company and burn the phuker to the ground and build a memorial in its place in memory of the MAC LISA....(Don't know what that is???? then stop reading this ya jackazz!)
So you've gotten this far in my lovely little tale of two worlds...one being the alien lifeform that has recently gained momentum but really has no sustainability because even you recent morons that are calling themselves techie'z are starting to realize that crApple SUX! always did, always will, and you got taken! So you made it this far? Well there is not that far to go for you to read why I am writing all of this first... so here it is!!! crApple Inc. purchased ADOBE so that they could purposely NOT GIVE TO THEIR IGNORANT DEVICE OWNERz the ability to watch the majority of VIDz out there on the internet but especially from YOUTUBE!!! Guess why or already know why? BECAUSE DUMMY, simple deal...it's owned by GOOGLE and GOOGLE is going to take over the entire planet...and this phuking geek is okay with it. Okay with it because Micro$oft is almost as bad as crApple in their bull$hit deceptive everything and GOOGLE and I have been in bed with each other for over 8 years of smartphone love. I have been using their PHREEEEEE everything even before my same day it was released to the public aquisition of the G1. THE VERY FIRST GOOGLE PHONE...keep it safe if you still have one people because some day it's going to be worth a fortune when it's inducted into the Smithsonian Institute of Science as the VERY 1ST GOOGLE HARDWARE DEVICE EVER!!! GOOGLE preys on the companies and advertisers that prey on you...Micro$oft Inc. and crApple Inc. PERY ON YOU! The device or product owner themself! I have never directly (read that again...DIRECTLY) given GOOGLE one thin dime of money and yet I use all of their products and services for PHREEEEEEE 20 times a day...however...when I first set up my PHREEEEEE GOOGLE VOICE account appx three years ago when it was still INVITATION ONLY! I also set up my GOOGLE CHECKOUT and when they verified my debit card account that day they gave me the dime...YEP...and I STILL HAVE ALL .10 CENTS BITCHEz! When I look at my GOOGLE VOICE VOICEMAIL TO TEXT TRANSCRIPTS using their widget (Don't worry about what a widget is crApple people because you don't have them) I always see my account balance at the bottom and it still says ".10" and its even colored in GREEEEEEEEEEN! awwwww....a nice touch.... so crApple Inc. valuable...?? NOPE, nothing about them adds anything valuable to your life...just more debt, deceptive advertising and marketing, half truths, only one part of the REAL story, and most important YOU the crApple device owner is now imprisoned into your little crApple trendy fad driven world and will be left with your little crApple dikz out when this bull$hit is over!
FLASH IS DEAD!??? Yeah, FLASH is being put-down, murdered, snuffed out...wtf ever... but the REAL reason is because the whole $hit backfired on crApple when people that bought their crAp and complained about not being able to use a product that crApple themselves actually owned...and most of you still don't even know that ADOBE was owned by them and more of you have never even bothered to think about why even if you did... THEY DID IT JUST LIKE THEY ARE NOW KILLING IT SO THAT THEY COULD REMOVE even GOOGLE ANDROID and every other SmartDevice player on the planet would no longer be able to have support for this either because they are all gaining marketshare over crApple and with the late and NOT AS SO PHUKING GREAT AS YOU THOUGHT HE WAS, STEVE JOBLESS having now succumbed (all over his gay boyfriends butt in the afterlife) to his lifestyle of living like a YIPPIE PHREAK and is NOW DEAD!!! crApple is running scared and in a desperate attempt to thward the inevitable overtaking of the planets main portable device users because people started taking their 'anti-rip-van-winkle brainwashing pills' and even the A.A.P.P.L.E. (Against Apple Product Purchasing Lame Endusers) <-----<<< MY GROUP of PhAnAtIcZ!!! people out there are asking me...what kind of phone should I get. The answer is always the same when I say these simple and non-biased words to a lost soul who I don't want to jolt with this type of explaination because they just went through a rough period in their lives and need to be nurtured into the REAL world of technology like carefully training a new puppy as to not make any permanent imprints onto their already completely manipulateable minds because of pure innocent ignorance... I say to them... "Anything but a crApple product braddah!... anything but something with a little 'i' in front of it...and I will help support you on it...)
.............END OF LINE..............
This was brought to you by the very opened minded because it was written in the open sourece coded putity of intelligence and not the glutteness sphincterness of stupidity and dumb@$$ ignorance of listening to their friends who doesn't know jack about krakin a code let alone what kind of nightmare they would be getting themselves into let alone their family and friends by telling them to buy what they already have and have only has in their entire 2 minute career of 'SMART' technology.
My name is KiRbYdOoO...and I just pooped all over you! I'll leave you with one of my favorite SmartPhone email signatures that I wrote...
"You can't polish a turd, yet I see people rubbing their iPudz and iPhoneyz everyday trying..." -KiRbYdOoO (Sure...you can use it).
Thanks for comin' in and playin' ... have a nice day... or as we used to say when we were done chattin' it up via our PAGE SYSOP button with with one of our logged on users typing away on our 40 column, 16 color, composite video attached monitors... L8r!
youtube, rdio, pandora, hulu, kongregate, flickr, imgur, github, googledocs, every site that has ads...
There's a ton of money made off flash these days. No one's saying you have to use it, but lets be a little realistic with ourselves.
3D graphics directly in the browser has been talked about for well over 15 years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML for example Java for another.
Once, this trouble is sorted, WebRTC looks goody.
Partly works now if you don't need much control over it, or if you do work on the server to split the media into chunks. Full streaming support in progress, see WebRTC and other ongoing work.
> socket connections
See WebSocket, which has gone through some initial hiccups but otherwise works fine.
> fast 3d
WebGL provides 3D which runs as fast as the user's system can handle.
> advertising
Don't care. "The web still has ads?" But for the sake of argument: iframe, javascript, arbitrary web content just as capable as any other webpage.
> webcam support, mic support
In progress. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
https://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/enabling-real-time-...
And on a related note, https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/input#Image_ca...
> clipboard manipulation
Already exists in JavaScript, just blocked in modern browsers for privacy reasons. Needs to become another grantable permission, like geolocation, but I suspect it just hasn't become prominent enough on the radar yet compared to other features.
> install base
By definition smaller than the install base of web browsers. The proportion continues to decrease as mobile devices become more widespread.
> youtube, rdio, pandora, hulu, kongregate, flickr, imgur, github, googledocs, every site that has ads...
https://www.youtube.com/html5, http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/16/pandora-radios-html5-rede..., github only uses it for the clipboard, never seen flash on flickr, imgur, or google docs, the web still has ads?
uploader piece with progress bar and other small components. just cos you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
imgur, for instance, seems to have an excellent HTML5 image uploader and editor.
"Partly works, recent hiccups, runs on good hardware only, in progress (aka not here yet), blocked, smaller install base..."
I am all set for Flash to die, but I am not sure the web is QUITE ready for it to die yet. Replacements are coming quick... but the operative word is "coming". I look forward to the day it's all really here and ubiquitous as Flash is/was.
I intended my post to summarize the ongoing work on the replacements for the various things people cared about in Flash, specifically to make it clear that HTML does have all the same use cases in mind. As each new technology becomes available, more bits can migrate off of Flash.
Flash needs to start dying now, so everybody on the sinking ship can start figuring out what they need and solidifying the replacements. It'll have a lingering death scene, so the sooner it starts, the sooner it finishes. If the replacements don't work, they need fixing, without people thinking "oh, I'll just use Flash instead". People need to think "no, it needs to work now, I need to migrate off of Flash as soon as possible".
Ideally, in the next couple of years, we'll get Flash to the point that Java has reached now: an oddity that the occasional legacy site uses.
I realise WebSockets does what it does for security reasons, but i do prefer Flash's method of getting around that (remote server hosts an XML policy file on a separate port) since it doesn't interfere with the connection in any way.
Geoff's article and the comments here seem to reenforce that. The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is.
What Flash does offend is my sense of design, specifically UX design. Standard platform widgets? Nope. Standard platform behavior? Nope. Stealing keyboard focus? Yep. Bad scrolling? Yep. Back button? Nope.
The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is.
Design happens in your head, but it's a feed back loop between your tools and your imagination. Different tools _do_ influence the outcome.
Standards do not. If you think it does, I would predict you aren't a designer, because there's a big difference between technical parity and realistic results.
I can concede that as a designer, I really don't care if HTML is technically better for some reason, I just want to have the freedom to do cool stuff, and that this is the tension between those are "Flash fanboys" and those who are Standards fanboys.
- one of course is that as HTML5 get stronger flash loses interest for some scenarios (even if it's still the best choice for many like games right now)
- the other is that for mobile web, it was never the right choice. If you want to target mobile right now, you either do a really simple site in HTML or you target a deeper experience with an app, but there was no space in between for a plugin. Adobe try to embrace both of these cases with their HTML5 tools for the web and Air for the apps. I think that what Stave Jobs understood early on and a reason why he never allowed plugins on mobile browsers.
1) Games 2) Mobile apps 3) Video
#1 I agree that flash is better for making games, but how big of a market are games on the internet? It's a 'big' market, to be sure, but how big compared to the number of Flash websites a few years ago? Surely it's a low percentage (anyone have actual stats? I don't know of any). Is the amount of Flash games being made enough to keep Adobe interested in continuing to improve Flash? As the desktop market recedes and mobile devices become more popular with users (and I truly do believe that it will) what will happen to the Flash games?
As for #2 - mobile apps. This could be the answer to the above, but why use AIR when you can get better performance writing native code for whatever platform you are working on? I'm sure it will work out for companies that want to save a few dollars and be able to launch a simple game on many platforms while writing it once, but that kind of development has rarely succeeded in the world. Look at Java apps on windows/osx - they often feel klunky and look ugly and don't support the native UI elements of the host OS (does AIR do this on mobile phones? I'm admittedly not that familiar with it). Because of the history of this area of technology, I'm highly skeptical.
#3 I agree with, and covered this in a comment below. I believe Flash will be useful for desktop video delivery for a few years to come, but will eventually lose to native support.
Adobe's not really killing Flash, what's happening is it's transitioning to a development platform rather than development + consumption platform and that's not a horrible thing - Flash is a great platform to develop in, being able to export mobile apps from it is far more important than being able to play the SWF files on mobile.
Flash on mobile could have worked but there's two reasons it doesn't ... one is purely technical that time and improved hardware would erode, the killer one is consumption - games on websites are just a plain inferior way to play them vs apps, and ads + video + applications are all solved problems. There is no must-have use case as a consumption platform on mobile.
They made the right choice - let Flash become just a development platform and let the output be whatever provides the optimal user experience - on desktops it is (or can be) the Flash Player, on mobile it's apps and HTML5.
If Flash is in decline on the mobile web then it's also in decline on the web.
Couple that with basic workflow and 'publish to site' and you have a product with very wide appeal and usefulness.
So in the end it will come down to using the right tool/tech for the right job. More choice to you, more power to you and works out for adobe as well. Don't forget that flash still enjoys an excellent penetration rate on the desktop and there will always be a market for it.
Perhaps one day when the pc is dead too and the indefinite, perfectly working apps written in flash are rewritten in html5 because we've now replaced the pc with tablets and mobile devices.
My last application that I rolled out using canvas and excanvas is still quirky. Unfortunately, IE6-8 still lives on. Until there is a feasible way to do custom control creation, and have it work properly, there will still be a purpose for Flash/Flash Builder.
now tell me that flash is dead.
Flash is dead.
On a 2010 macbook that runs at 15fps, which is a great step forward in speed for moving 8 sprites. Have you actually tried to animate anything other than a solid body, in just code?
http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml is a walk cycle, and as you can see they are animating the control points, so the body smoothly deforms. As far as I'm aware you can control individual control points of an SVG with javascript. Even if you could without a decent interface you couldn't do more than move a ball about.
HTML/JS is shit at animation.
Flash is rubbish, and can be much more efficient, however HTML/JS is 10 times worse.
1) The url would suggest this is done using the canvas element. On my browser, though, it's implemented using SVG. Is anyone else seeing this?
2) SVG is a really terrible medium for this use case. What should be used instead, and would probably give better performance, is... canvas.
And i think they made a zombie as an excuse for their bad implementation of a walking cicle.
Sencha is aiming their animator product at replacing flash animations with html5. They have a long way to go, but it's not an impossible thing.