I’m not going to cry over Flash. That’s been covered from every angle already. I’ll try not to waffle either, but it’s early and I’m only on my first coffee so forgive me for rambling if I do. Let’s go back to 2010 and get on with it.
Back in April 2010, Steve Jobs announced the death of Flash. How presumptuous, I don’t recall him being given a fancy hat and receiving the title of grand ruler of the internet. But there it was, a rather spiteful article, containing half truths and hard sells on how the future for interactive web developers lay in creating Apple apps for Apple’s platform (this must never happen, the internet is ours!). It also cried about Adobe for the most part and blamed them for pretty much every atrocity that’s been committed in the past century. I remember finding it a bit infantile that Jobs was picking a fight in public with Adobe. But more importantly, on a personal level, I remember thinking ‘oh Jesus, this is really going to make clients panic’.
You see, no one wants to invest in a dying format, even if that format’s not actually dying, or ill..well maybe a little ill, but certainly not life threatening. Overall, Flash is pretty solid (if used correctly) and there’s currently no other language that can produce rich media websites that run X-Browser and deliver both audio/visual content with the ease that Flash does. You can publish a file from Flash and know that it will run on pretty much every system, just the way you made it. But regardless, Jobs had thrown a monumentally large gob of shit at Flash and unfortunately it stuck.
The Flash community then sat it out while Adobe and Apple drew up war plans. Apple pushed forward with iOS and announced that HTML5 was the future. At the time they did this by showing us half a dozen really crap demonstrations of how you could make a font grow bigger on the fly, or re colour a div. Amazing. What a revelation. Adobe on the other hand, put a big white flag on the end of a stick and waved it from their trenches. Flash went into limbo while more and more people bought into mobile.
The iPad. I hated the iPad from day one, I hated it mainly because of Jobs’s article, he’d dropped his pants and crapped all over anyone that had a career in Flash. I hated that it looked to be a giant stupid iPhone, a dumbed down halfarsed computer aimed at morons. It would never sell.
Unfortunately it did, and I had become the sad old stubborn turd that refused to change..which if you work in technology, isn’t a good trait to build your career around. But I’d still hate iPad today if I hadn’t been stuck on a train this Summer with access to a friend’s one. I’d already dabbled a little with jQuery and left a testbed on our server. It worked, it was messy, the scale was out, it ran like shite, but it was there, and it felt pretty great to touch the screen and then see the code fire and move around. I had to admit that it was marvelous and had massive potential for building animated websites without Flash.
There followed a murky period of relearning syntax and how each element of jQuery/CSS/HTML related to the others. But really, if you’ve spent anytime walking through layers of MovieClips and ActionScript then you already know how this goes. There was also the fact that webkit ran GPU acceleration on 2D animation, this changed everything when run on iPad. Gone were the clunky transitions, to be replaced with smooth graphics card enabled movement. Something Flash had fallen behind on. While Flash Player had focused on 3D acceleration, Chrome and Safari had incorporated a system that would run 2D (as well as basic 3D) HTML animation, and run it really well.
Anyway, enough of my nerd talk. What it came down to was this. You can’t tie yourself down to just one tool. As a Flash developer it’s easy to bury your head in the sand and keep on limiting yourself to the one language. Meanwhile the more astute Studios will be picking up jQuery and leaving you behind. You’ll eventually find yourself stuck in the disco period while everyone else is, well, dancing to whatever it is those crazy kids dance to nowadays (I dont know, I very rarely dance). Someone said to me earlier this year, ‘Adapt or Die’..I thought it a very cruel thing to say to a Flash dinosaur, but it’s true.
Your ideas come first, the language comes second. If your keytar is taken away from you and you’re given a tuba in its place, make the best tuba disco track you possibly can. Having said that, I still think the keytar has a lot of life left in it yet, but Les Enfants is all about the tuba.
http://www.enfantsterrible.com/
