Adobe halting development of Flash Mobile

[zeal5050]

Adobe halting development of Flash Mobile. What do other developers think of this? Is the desktop version going the way of the Dodo as well? Personally I agree with this decision, it was far from perfect on most mobile devices. The fact that it was never succesfully ported to the iPhone turned out to be the dagger in the heart, I think.

Source

[Correction]

Something else will replace it. Sucks for people currently developing their mobile shit on Flash. No tears shed.

[Kerberoz]

...and it only took 5 full hardware generations after Apple predicted it!!!

Gonna go remove my car's gas tank since fusion is the future.

[Ddz]

It's the right decision. Flash is so unstable and buggy. Hi2u HTML5!

[Moosey]

It's the right decision. Flash is so unstable and buggy. Hi2u HTML5!

This. Many, many times this.

[Yugl]

As an individual dissociated from the programming, what does this mean for me?

[quannum]

streaming audio/video ... do you remember when real player went away? it means whatever that meant. developers will move away from flash, to the standard html5.

the great thing about flash to web devs is that its a consistent platform that you can write your program too, without it you're stuck dealing with browser idiosyncrasies which was a huge problem back when netscape 6 and ie 6 varied wildly.

a casual observer will probably just notice that web pages load faster w/o flash, your browser may be more responsive w/o the cpu/mem overhead of flash.

[Zilong]

...and it only took 5 full hardware generations after Apple predicted it!!!

Gonna go remove my car's gas tank since fusion is the future.

I doubt Steve Jobs predicted Flash outliving him though.

[archibaldcrane]

I feel a great disturbance in the web, as if millions of restaurant website developers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

[Pirian]

I doubt Steve Jobs predicted Flash outliving him though.

Obligatory?

[miokomioko]

It's not that he just predicted the death of flash, it's that he did everything he could to kill it himself. He at least contributed heavily to it. I was just laughing about going to the flash download site on my iPad where there's a message something like: "The device you are using is not capable of running flash due to the restrictions put in place by Apple. To see a list of many other devices that support flash, please click here."

I even got some user-study people from Adobe to recently voice how they felt about Apple and their blatent attempts to snuff out Flash... they felt pretty strongly about it, to say the least.

I hate flash, I hated working in flash, and worst of all, I hated working on something someone else made in flash. However, it was incredibly douchey of Apple/Jobs.

[Salodin]

So they stopped developing for mobiles, but I don't see it stopping things on desktops for quite awhile; let alone moving out of the way to let html5 become the new standard.

[miokomioko]

It's on its way out for sure, in my opinion. As more and more people pay actual competent web developers to make/remake their shit, the less flash sites will be out there. Very few new flash sites are being made these days. Especially considering how much more of a pain in the ass it is compared to html5.

[Elvis]

So when can I watch megavideo on my Ipad 2?

[orinthia]

I signed up once for a free flex3 dev software package+key from them (long time ago on a student license, never ended up trying it out lol) and have been getting emails from them ever since about some interesting things. Usually conferences/events (like adobe MAX) but one email sent me a link to something really pretty cool: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presen...erry-playbook/

This could be what's going on now, as it doesn't seem to be using flash if it can run in ios, android, and blackberry devices at the same time without much or any recoding. Interesting tech for deploying to multiple platforms, and it actually being able to adapt to different screen sizes, orientations and such. I haven't looked much further into it other than just watching their little demo video there though, so grain of salt/etc.

[zeal5050]

Just read this post by my old Actionscript professor...

Spoiler: show

The news that Adobe is killing Flash Player Mobile and adding an HTML 5 output capability to Flash has been greeted with the usual outrage , screaming and yelling. For me, as a teacher, it means rethinking a few courses I teach and learning a few new skills which is sort of my job anyway. Comes with the turf… so to speak.

What surprises me is many of the people reacting negatively to this “move” should have seen it coming. It is not like it was any great secret sprung upon an unsuspecting community. It was quietly gathering steam when Steve delivered his message from on high and his pronouncement just brought it into clearer focus and started a rather messy and public debate.

I saw the debate as useful because, as a teacher, I couldn’t rationalize teaching my students multiple approaches, players and platforms to essentially do the same thing: get something running on a device. In fact my Adobe Education Leader colleagues still rib me about my response to being asked about mobile and teaching when asked about it at Adobe HQ a couple of years ago. My response? “I would rather drive chopsticks into my eyeballs.”

My first clue that something was up with Flash was the introduction of Wallaby. Here was an app on Labs that converted a Flash timeline animation to HTML 5 code. Many of the Flash guys I talked to about it regarded it as some sort of wind-up toy. That struck me as rather odd because Wallaby was a path into the HTML 5 universe for Flash. In fact, Wallaby seems to have become the engine for the new HTML export feature of Flash CS6 and Flash can be now used as an animation technology for HTML 5. This is a bad thing?

How can ubiquity- the ability to reliably play across multiple platforms, screens and devices – be seen as a negative? As many of you know I have been working with Edge for most of this year and am becoming a rather strong supporter of this app. I just like it and one of the first things I learned when I got to play with it was my Flash skills were easily transferable to Edge animation and projects. In fact one of the first things I did was run a simple Flash animation through Wallaby and then play with it in Edge.It was rather neat and showed me there was straight line from Flash to the HTML5 universe. I am also exploring how that line passes through apps such as Fireworks, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and others and exploring and researching where they fit into the process and where what I teach fits as well.

As a teacher, I don’t see any of this as a threat. It just means I am going to have to start developing a new skill set … something I do every couple of years anyway. It also means I am going to have to revisit my courses, now, and ask: Do the Learning Outcomes and Objectives match the skill set required of our grads when they graduate? Based on what is going on, obviously not but I have a good 10 months to think this through and rejig what is being taught in my classes.

Of course walking into this whole mess in today’s Flash class was a treat. The first thing I saw was a student holding up his iPhone and showing me a “Flash is dead” Tweet as I was going through the door. “So why are we here?”, he asks.

I waited for all of the students to get settled and it was an eerie experience. The room was silent and the students just stared at me .“Why the f@#k are we taking this Flash course if Flash is dead” was sort of the question being beamed at me. It was not what I was expecting.

Rather than become an Adobe apologist – which they sort of expected – I told them . “Welcome to your new careers. If you can’t deal with this sort of change on a regular basis … there’s the door. Go get a refund and go drive a beer truck.” It was a great opportunity for me to review all that had been going on, what happened,and what it means for them.

The thrust was technology changes and you either embrace change or get out of the way. Change is a fact of life in our business and, as a teacher, it is a fact of life for me.

I explained how we, as a faculty group, are constantly changing the program to keep skill levels and knowledge current with the market but our job was not easy because not only do we have to plan for this crew’s graduation but for the one coming in next September. I knew they were starting to get it when I explained to them that attempting to teach mobile in a short time frame with such turmoil around platforms and so on would be doing them a disservice. Instead, I made it quite clear that Adobe’s decision to embrace HTML 5 now made our teaching path clearer in the mobile space because there now is a common denominator, regardless of platform.

Whether or not I agree with Adobe is irrelevant. I have no influence over their policies and decisions. Who they kept and who they let go is their call. Though I think they made a few bone-headed decisions around the layoffs the plain fact of the matter is … these people are still laid off and getting on with their lives. A few of them were my friends and they know that I will support them in their next endeavors.

Which is sort of where I left it with my students. They can worry about change or simply ask, “ Here’s what happened. How do I adapt?” The key is how we each answer that question.

Spoilered for long.

While I agree with his stance on adapting to new technology, I can't help but feel bad for the students in his class. I would find it extremely discouraging if I hadn't even learned the platform yet and it was already obsolete.

[Correction]

This happens in any trade where people attempt to shortcut a career path dependent on specific, high-level technologies. Unless you first lay down that software engineering, concept-heavy foundation before becoming a programmer, you're doomed the second the world decides to upgrade. Same thing happened to people who rode the PHP bubble through the '00 dot-com bubble. Evolve or die with the other dinosaurs, you're going to make a shitton money for much longer if you can in general solve problems in software engineer terms rather than 'oh if it's not in Language X I'm useless' plaguing your resume.

[Shuvo]

uhhh I was under the impression it wasn't a prediction by Steve Jobs as much of a willful attempt to destroy flash by not building support for it. He didn't like how people could technically get free apps by having embedded apps inside of a browser. HTML5 does not have the same level of functionality as flash by far yet.

[wyrmtung]

uhhh I was under the impression it wasn't a prediction by Steve Jobs as much of a willful attempt to destroy flash by not building support for it. He didn't like how people could technically get free apps by having embedded apps inside of a browser. HTML5 does not have the same level of functionality as flash by far yet.

Yes, I'm sure that was it. Buggy, crash-prone, security risk, resource hog had nothing to do with it. It was because he didn't like people getting free apps. Go slap yourself.

[Correction]

Yes, I'm sure that was it. Buggy, crash-prone, security risk, resource hog had nothing to do with it. It was because he didn't like people getting free apps. Go slap yourself.

Maybe not free apps, but he definitely hated cross-platform apps. They explicitly tried to kill off all cross-platform development on mobile devices, a move aimed directly at both Flash and Android.. They backed off a little but the intent was crystalfuckingclear to anybody with half a brain and a desire to sell on Apple's platform.