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Comment by moneypenny | Hacker News Reader

Flash Player not withstanding, the rest of the product line is very good IMHO. ActionScript 3 is a decent language with great compiler support, three good IDEs (FlashDevelop, FDT and Flex Builder) and libraries galore. Desktop support with AIR (i.e. iPlayer) is right there too.

But the runtime, Flash Player, sucks. It pains me to see Adobe throw away everything else just because the runtime is horrible. I would LOVE to see ActionScript shift towards browser-native or HTML5 runtimes. Seriously. Flex can go walk the plank along with the Flash VM, but please, Adobe, take the maturity of that platform and make it do something useful. You managed to compile to iOS, Android and Blackberry, so we know you are capable of really good work, it just needs to be web right now.

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I like where you're going with this. Adobe has shown that they can make great tools for designers and developers. They're already big proponents of modern web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, see:

http://html.adobe.com/mission/

I would be very happy to see Adobe release a competitor to Unity3D Editor that can target all major platforms, including HTML5 (including WebGL and maybe asm.js).

That's exactly why I thought Flash would be repurposed - especially as they have a track record in making tools for creating (D)HTML and JS - anyone remember GoLive? Maybe they're still working on it, it can't be an easy task.

Actionscript 4 -> Web, anyone?

AS3 is awesome and is what javascript should have been.

The flash IDE is great for vector graphics , animation ,and game assets.

AIR is great , but there is a lot of untaped potential , and Adobe doesnt seem to be interested in making that product grow.

Adobe could run it's player on a js vm, but does Adobe want to now ?

Adobe is relaunching a new version of Director , that would make it a unity competitor.(i'm one a beta tester of the next director).

The thing I never understood was why Flash Player continues to be a binary blob. They don't even sell it for money. Just BSD license the damn thing and inside of a few months it will be on the standards track and people will have incorporated the code into all the major browsers and be fixing all the bugs for you.

Popular image file formats are open standards and people still buy Photoshop. Popular video codecs are open standards and people still buy Premier. Why they decided to go with a binary blob for ActionScript and in so doing make everyone hate them is a mystery.

I dont know why, they are just stupid.

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