The problem I have is with claims that because Flash is not available on what is admittedly a marginal audience compared to the total number of internet-enabled devices (including desktops), that everyone is losing their minds trying to justify how HTML5 can, today, right now (if only it were widely available), replace Flash.

I agree that eventually HTML5 may be a good candidate for replacing much of what the Flash Player does now. But Flash is not only about interactive animations and web video. You say it’s also about tooling. And in that I entirely agree.

The tooling for ActionScript is becoming comparable to tooling that before was only available for hard core enterprise Java and C development. The languages and protocols upon which HTML5 and JavaScript are based cannot hope to parallel what I can do with a strongly typed, JIT-powered, OOP language with a variety of communications protocols that is simply not available to browsers without a dedicated runtime.

Some of that capability may become available, through new web technologies, new browsers. And some of what HTML5 can theoretically do looks promising, as in the case of Google Wave.

But Flash has this working, now, today, and it’s practically everywhere. Until HTML5 proves that it can do the same things, with the same kinds of tooling, for me it’ll remain a pie-in-the-sky specification, and certainly not a worthy contender for delivering the kinds of rich experiences currently offered by the Flash Player.

Silverlight stands a much better chance of cutting into Flash’s market share than does HTML5. But I don’t hear anyone delusional enough to proclaim Silverlight as “the death of Flash.” ‘Splain me that, Lucy?

Personally, if there’s any adoption of technology to improve the transparency of rich web experience, I would be for Adobe licensing Flash to be embedded into Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, so ActionScript and MXML code runs natively in the browser, and we’re not hampered by a plugin architecture.

#flashbrowserftw !!! :)

The biggest remaining advantage of Flash over HTML5/CSS3/JS/Canvas, is tooling. It’s much easier to create animations in a flash app than hand coding whatever.

But John Nack mentioned that Adobe is already working on letting you export the contents of a flash file to html5/canvas instead of an SWF.

Let’s not forget what’s important here. Content. We can get our nickers in a bind about the SWF format and the Flash Player, but the important thing is, as soon as Adobe allows Flash to be exported to HTML5/Canvas, and Youtube already supports native h.264 (and others are following), SWF will become less useful.

SWF/Flash Player is just a means to an end. In this case, it’s the end that matters, not the means.

I bewildered on why you would liove to get one even if it has Flash…

- no multi-tasking
- no camera
- not able to install my own software
- apple adapters required to plug anything external in
- seperate data plan required
- no HDMI output

… there’s already better options out there, and were going to see much better products to come.

“Apple has effectively managed to convince a significant proportion of its users that anything Apple is good,”

It would seem to me that ever you have bought into the above statement a little.

As a full time flash developer I really felt upset over the weekend when suddenly everyone on the web, including some frens around me, started to criticize the performance of flash and thinks it is a good idea that ipad doesnt include it.

Your blog post is so entertaining - the Lego part is the classic. Lol!!
It really kept me lauhing!

Lets hope together that Adobe can prove that flash just work well in all other devices in the open screen project…

Thanks for the colorful and entertaining post. Second only to Brimelow’s Bang Bro’s post ;)

So, I am afraid that the develop-once argument is no longer valid. And this is a big mistake from Adobe’s part because it was a great selling point for Flash. Instead of rushing new versions of the player, Adobe should make sure some of the core attributes of the Flash player remain intact.