Flash Future

[AAmitabh23]

Hi All,

I am working on flash platform from last 12 years by now. Know lots other languages but some how, Flash platform is my primary technology. I have done 100s of projects in this. Small to big, simple to complex. My CV is full of flash platform projects .

There are 100 of thousands of developers out there like me. Steve made a silly statement and ruined all their lives. And Adobe is trying hard to save it, I can feel it. But that's not enough.

So, I am requesting Adobe few developments to help all those developer and Adobe as a Company.

> Develop a flash player for device, please. A standard one, not specific to a device but a Flash player with some standard hardware and software specifications. So, if a browser or a device company like to add flash player at their device they could. And might be make that open source.

> Extends Flash media server to allow to write the secure web applications using actionscript. Media management and web application server, instead of only media server. Http based and socket based web applications.

> Or may be Develop AIR for linux, so that flash can build servers, start adding feature and services to support web technology, so that flash can be used to write small web servers, or it's technologies.

Thanks for your time, Please support this if you thing that it could be future for flash. Or Suggest some of your ideas, Adobe might hear that.

Thanks,

[AAmitabh23]

What is this? auto reply on a forum...  really

[C_F_McBlob]

Flash is an outdated and dying technology in web use except for games, and developers are working on replacements for it there too. HTML5 video will replace Flash within two years in all but the most obscure of websites.. By the time more than half of all web users are "mobile users" (and it's nearing that now) Flash video will be practically non existent. All the requests, demands and protests in the world can't and won't change that. I was late in learning Flash development and I was just about to enroll in some expensive Flash courses to perfect my skills with A/S when a web guru of mine stopped me. I'm glad she did because it saved me considerable expense learning something that I'll likely never use again.

[chris.campbell]

I'm going to have to disagree with McBlob here.  I think Flash is still very relevant today regardless of what the press, blogs and other companies say. 

It has graphics and video functionality that is cutting edge and beats the offerings that current browsers deliver.  It's cross platform, cross browser, and in many cases ports to mobile with minimal friction from developers.  It's also ubiquitous, being installed on over 1.3 billion systems. 

It's true that browser technology with both html5, video and webgl are improving, but the problem will be getting standards and similar implementations across all platforms and browsers.  Given that there is still a significant portion of the globe on Win XP, IE 6 - 8, I expect it'll be *many* years before browser penetration will equal the capabilities of the current Flash Player.

But even then, the Flash runtime team is not staying still.  Flash and AIR are still being actively worked on and developed.  We appreciate your suggestions and I'd like to recommend you add these as feature requests over at bugbase.adobe.com.  Once added, make sure you post back with the bug numbers and spread them around to other communities so that like minded individuals can add their comments and votes.

Thanks,
Chris

[C_F_McBlob]

Chris,

You know more and better than I do, but I come from a web design background and Flash is diminishing in its use among designers looking to reach the mobile market, because it renders pages useless if not inaccessible to phone users. HTML5, OGG, MP3, MP4 and MOV don't. I have about half a dozen clients whose sites I've updated to HTML5 and have either updated or removed Flash content as I've transitioned to Fluid Grid (adaptive) layouts so that anyone can access the content there.
I understand that there are a lot of game sites out there that use Flash and will continue for some time, but as we saw with Android last year, developers are moving away from Flash, expecially in mobile formats because of the processor use and battery consumption. If someone comes up with a battery technology that will allow it, perhaps they'll migrate back, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Meantime, I'll continue to develop my HTML5 content sans Flash, but I'll still use it as long as it's out there.

[AAmitabh23]

We understand CF, what you are saying and not even denying it. It's good that the god mother saved you and your money. But we should not forget people, those are still trusting Adobe and flash for their products and as technology for their future. And other hundreds of thousands developers those already invested their money and life developing flash applications. It's not easy curve for them. We have competed all of our lives and now when we reached at the top of our careers. We can't just become expert of some other technology.

So, here we are trying to make a request to Adobe that we have used given technology, we trusted, fought, competed and proved flash platform as a good technology all our lives. Now expecting Adobe to save our future.

Action script is a language and can do things what other languages do.

Thanks for your reply Chris, I will add this in buglist and update the number in this post.

Amitabh Arya

[AAmitabh23]

HI Chris,

               I have added in feature list at bugbase.adobe.com. and The number is

Adobe Flash Player 11.8  -  Feature 3637432

Please let me know, if there is anything- anything else I can do to improve the future of flash.

Thanks a ton for all your help. Loved to see your fast response on this.

Thanks buddy.

[AAmitabh23]

Any update on this.

It's a request to all the viewers: keep adding your review about this topic.

[x6432G]

Hello,

I'm using flash to develow websites since 1997.In that time it was not even AS1:)) In that time I was Mac/PC user in same time. Since 2007 I get in love with Linux. For such a long experience I can tell you that flash was newer truly cross platform.In 2000 I was creating my camll objects (movie clips which could load data from remote  server and mimic object oriented)  When Flex framework come out I was really happy. When I see that Flex 2 and Flash IDE interprets variable scope differently I was devistated.

Now I'm company owner and try to avoid using flash in our projects. I cant say anything about banner creator which I thing are still bound to flash. If you need to create WebAps (RIA) you can make it easyl and more robust just with JQuery and pluggins.

[AAmitabh23]

What about the web video conferencing apps, 3d games.

Amitabh Arya

[x6432G]

You are right. But throu my entire professional life it was one time that customer ask for white board and one we were suppous to make aplication to stream video "live like" which now can be done by other technologies.

So flash is becoming niche market. I'm agree that onece it was really good. Now it becomes obselute. I think in next 3 years adobe will imigrate everything to HTML5. Actually they have good ground about it.

Does anyone remembers before Adobe aquire Macromedia they had some product which was flash competitor. It was able to animate svg images with actions.

About Media servers. They all already on java. you can commect them with java socket connection. Which is comming in html5. So it is just mater of time.

Sorry that all of us spend time to learn some thecnologie which will vanish. but you can use your skils in javascript coding.

[bestanimaster]

We're not talking about Video. There are a dozen ways to deliver video. What most of us are referring to is Actionscript and the object oriented programming functions behind it. It doesn't have much to do with video and animation. it is the programming ability we are worried about.

[phantosmagoria]

not only a job loose issue, also web designs are getting bored with silly jquerry animation like behaviors. We were creating very creative web sites with full interactivity in it. But now Mr.Google, and some of it's close friends ( one of them is Apple) rules the whole web. People anymore not very interested in designing web sites but they are interested in to be top of the google's rank. So you should use google+, plenty of social media, adwords, youtube ads etc. Your web site's design, who cares if i won a lot of money from an ugly designed, bad coded web sites.

As all dictatorship regimes goes like that, business and governments has no differences. If big companies agree the other's demands without any rejection, accept all terms, then these dictators will be bigger and bigger.

Today we have internet dictators like Google, Apple, Adobe.....etc. What they tell, millions of people should obey. As RIP Steve does... they decided together this Flash issue, with google, with everybody in their league. Then make a statement that Flash has performance issues. (What flash can do, try with Java if your browser can handle it), then google told that flash sites are not search engine friendly .. and now a lot of people who invest to learn so called Adobe Flash has to learn how make  games. Community doesn't allow to make web sites with FLASH but allows making games with it. I shot you but didn't kill you.

It was a mistake to Adobe's takeover Macromedia as it's mistake Autodesk's dictatorship in 3D design perspective and there are a lot of big company covers these successful companies all around the word. I think there should be law like " if a company goes well in finance, development etc. then it's big rival can't BUY it."

And this is unfortunately system that we couldn't resist.

Nova

butikisleratolyesi.com

[AshishKummar]

Moral of the story is 'Flash is dead..'!

But the question is ... In which technology Flash Developer should rely and can transform their self ?

[Junior_Haxe]

I am just going to chime in and drop my two cents. Recent security developments and emerging technologies would appear to have killed Flash. But, appearances can be misleading and maybe the future could reveal something different. First, we need to draw a distinction between Adobe Air, the Flash Platform, and the Flash Player. The Flash Player, in its current incarnation on the web, would appear to be dying and better off depreciated. However, we can say the same for all browser plugins (e.g. Java, Silverlight, and even countless others), especially on mobile. It's just not performant. The future is virtual machines, cross-platform developer productivity, and GPU acceleration --- all something Adobe Air as a platform could offer. If the Flash Platform extended across the spectrum from Adobe Air on mobiles and desktops, to include touch optimization and native extensions, Apache Flex for web user interfaces, backend service endpoints, and even compile ActionScript into JavaScript and optimized HTML5 animations, it would be a serious contender for client side Java and an augmenting technology to HTML5 workflows, and even an extension where pure JavaScript workflows falls short. The web really offers cloud connected application opportunities. This is the core business value. Even the browser may be depreciated soon, strangely. 

I can't help but conclude this is what Adobe has in mind.

[AshishKummar]

Adobe should improve his flash player other wise it will disappear soon. Please have started making it dead ..  Occupy Flash - The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin

[curtish11651034]

Here's a crazy idea for Adobe Flash -- Make it Open Source.

Since Flash is a "Walking Dead" product that many of us still love to use to develop... Make it open source, many would give it a serious reconsideration although for the web it may be too late, its still a great environment for niche application development. 

hate to see it die a slow death.  Just make it OpenSource Adobe.

[milalilmouse]

i hope someone can help me i have been trying to stop getting emails from this post for 3 weeks and it will NOT stop. I have gone up to the top left and clicked unfollow and yet i still keep getting TONS of email PLEASE SOMEONE HELP.

[yingyingc30407377]

I haven't found a programming language that can be compared with ActionScript. Nor any IDE to Flash.

[jeromiec83223024]

Flash technology still has a very relevant role in game development and the delivery of premium video.  I don't think there's an either-or conversation here.  HTML and JavaScript are great technologies for most things.  Flash paved the way when those expressive capabilities weren't natively available in the browsers.

Developers with expertise in Flash technologies can deliver native applications using the mobile packaging facilities available with Adobe AIR.  For reasons which have been discussed to death over the last ~5 years, bringing legacy keyboard/mouse content to the mobile browser without requiring that content to be tailored to the form factor and input mechanisms unique to the device wasn't realistic, and our focus shifted to allowing developer build tailored experiences using the preferred distribution mechanisms (the appstores) for the relevant supported devices.

You can read more about those decisions and the rationale behind them here:

Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5

The following blog post from this week talks about the impetus behind renaming Flash Professional to Animate CC, the continued support and focus for Flash Player and where we're investing at the moment:  Flash, HTML5 and Open Web Standards

[bestanimaster]

I have looked at the articles linked to in this email. I am all for learning new technology to move forward. But there isn’t anything out there that works across so many different platforms and browsers as flash. I am well beyond using flash and the timeline for animation. I am using Actionscript to provide some of the most comprehensive learning tools to date. To think that you let Apple walk all over you like this. Everything will have to be delivered as an app? When you are building training for large corporations imagine how quickly the mobile devices will be maxed out on memory having to load a new app to reach the training.

I don’t use Actionscript because it is all that I know how to use. I use it because it is the best product for what I deliver. HTML, javascript, and jQuery don’t hold a candle to the abilities of Actionscript. Unless you have something in the wings that will allow for advanced programming, interactive 3D modeling with animation, and object Oriented Programming using something else other than Actionscript then I can only conclude one thing. You have some really stupid people in charge of development at your company.

Open flash up to the development community by making it open source code so we can continue to move forward with this great platform without you.

This decision is just beyond ignorant on Adobe’s part.