While a lot of tech-savvy people think that apple’s decision of locking flash out of its idevices might have been the biggest blow on the head flash has ever received, I tend to disagree and I think the biggest trouble Flash is facing is Adobe’s wrong decisions and strategies for the flash platform.
yes folks, Steve Jobs is not the Flash killer everyone thought he was, in fact Flash outlived Steve and outlived all other presumed Flash killers starting from Live motion and Live motion 2 and other similar self-claiming flash killers and not probably ending with JQuery or html5.
The biggest damage anyone has ever done to Flash came from Adobe itself, Adobe is killing flash by killing its reputation in the eyes of Flash most dedicated lovers:the flash community of developers.
– Here’s a couple of things to try, visit theflashblog.com what to do you see? Well you see this in the address bar http://www.leebrimelow.com/
Now why would Lee dump such a nice name as theflashblog while he’s a so called Flash Evangelist? The answer is obvious…
– Visit activeden what do you see? Unity 3D stuff alongside with Flash stuff which are btw not as merchantable as before.
How’s that I hear you say? Well let me give you the timeline of this programmed-flash-death:
Adobe acquired Macromedia while flash was in early stages of version 9, later on called Flash CS3 since it was incorporated in the so called Adobe Creative suit. ActionScript 3 was introduced in Flash 9 and it still is the latest version of ActionScript many years after its conception so basically ActionScript 3 is Macromedia’s last gigantic step in developing and pushing the flash platform forward.
The help files and documentation in Flash 9 were excellent, nicely integrated with the product and well written for beginners and pros alike.
Where are the documentation for Flash CS5.5 now? well its an Air application now called the Adobe Community Help and what a failure it is, I can’t even start telling you how much I hate it, and for a very good reason: it doesn’t work! it always nags for updates, never give you relevant search results not to mention the times it just refuses to launch or ask you to quit to perform an Air runtime update.
The stability and backward compatibility of the IDE was excellent too, I never had any unexpected crash while working with Flash 9 as opposed to tens of them every month while working with Flash CS5.5 which is the latest version of Flash at this time. Try saving a complex Flash CS5.5 as Flash CS4 file for a change and see the crap you get!
Then came Flex and then Flash builder but that’s a totally different story, the damage Flex and Flash builder made to the community is that it alienated the majority of Flash users and made them feel inferior in terms of data driven applications and connectors and all the cool stuff only available through Flash Builder, why would Adobe do such a thing and introduce fragmentation into the toolset of flash coders? Well mostly because they want to feed on Flash’s reputation by selling as many Flash related product as they can! Isn’t that what they did to Photoshop with the so called Lightroom that could be easily made as a feature or plugin to PS?
Flash used to have a very good reputation of being a cross-OS and cross browser platform, not very much now as Adobe announced that Linux will not get the much anticipated stage3D hardware acceleration everyone else get to experience and play with.
But nothing hurt Flash more than this last step, its repurposing into a gaming platform instead of RIA:
Adobe figured out that “the future of flash is 3D gaming and 3D gaming only” so that’s where Adobe is throwing the money and resources, a good example is the obvious re-purposing of Flash by having people like Lee Brimelow sent to the gaming land to advertise flash there, the message is clear : “the money lays there waiting for you Flash developers to develop your killer flash game and have it sold on the app store and Android Marketplace!” and “Flash is sexy because you can make games with it and have them running on iOS and Android”
well I am not into making games or playing games so what’s in it for me as a flash developer for the last 12 years or so? Well the answer is simple: nothing! Go learn Javascript and jQuery or CSS3 if you want to do the usual stuff of building web apps with transitions and smooth animations, Flash is not for that anymore!