

Flash Player a Declining Asset - jconley
http://blog.bengarney.com/2011/11/21/flash-player-a-declining-asset/

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callmeed
My company makes 7 figures in revenue selling and hosting Flash-based websites
(portfolios for photographers).

Our attrition rate is not that high but when people leave, it's now _always_
to go to an html site (usually WordPress-based). Before it was usually to a
Flash-based competitor.

Our HTML5 service is in beta and appears to be promising (for us).

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vosper
Flash is transitioning from a platform for websites to a platform for high-
performance code, such as gaming, graphical simulations, etc... Whatever
strides WebGL might be making at the moment it's a long way from the kind of
things Flash 11 is capable of. If Adobe can keep the barrier to entry lower on
Flash than WebGL then they ought to have a viable product.

Unfortunately for many Flash developers the bread-and-butter site stuff is
going away; if you're not skilled enough to transition into gaming and other
such computationally intensive work then best to familiarise yourself with the
HTML5 suite, and quickly.

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yuhong
Don't forget cryptography. Flash 11 have a secure random number generator.

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cryptoz
Are you being sarcastic? Flash is the worst possible place to do cryptography.
You should never do closed-source crypto, especially not when a company like
Adobe is involved. That would be a security disaster.

~~~
yuhong
Except that JavaScript crypto is even worse.

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forrestthewoods
Sounds reasonable. Flash as a player seems on the way out in a lot of ways.
Flash as a content creation tool could have a much longer lifespan if Adobe
plays it right. The tools are quite powerful and the number of artists that
can use it and use it well is large. As mentioned quite a few games use flash
to create assets but have their own custom export and playback. Castle
Crashers and Shank spring to mind but there are quite a few others.

Unreal Engine 3 announced support for exporting to flash. Given that they also
support Scaleform it would be possible to write a mini-game in flash running
inside UE3 running in a flash player. And if you throw Unity into the mix...

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DanielRibeiro
Adobe has been adapting its tools to HTML5/CSS3[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Which is great
for HTML5, designers/developers who are used to such tools and Adobe.

In the end, if Adobe pulls this off, it can focus on what it does best:
productivity tools. No longer needing to maintain Actionscript, language
tools, or an entire platform in multiple OS.

[1] <http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css3-regions.html>

[2] <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/>

[3] [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/exclusive-adobe-ceases-
deve...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/exclusive-adobe-ceases-development-
on-mobile-browser-flash-refocuses-efforts-on-html5-updated/19226)

[4] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214454>

[5] [http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/10/adobe-html5-animation-
ide-...](http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/10/adobe-html5-animation-ide-edge)

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melling
The big problem with Flash is that we're going to have a billion mobile
Internet devices in a few years and none of them will display Flash in a
mobile browser. iOS and Android alone should hit a billion devices. The iPad
and Kindle are probably going to be two of the hottest gifts during the
holiday season.

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tsotha
Flash may be a declining asset, but it seems like nearly every web page I
visit still uses flash. It has a ways to decline before developers can just
ignore it.

~~~
bengarney
Definitely. The article actually tries to make that exact point - measuring
the lifespan in years at minimum.

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zobzu
Or how to remove a subtle "?" to get your point across.

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101001010111
The video is the asset.

Many ways to serve it. Many ways to retrieve it. And many ways to convert and
play it.

The skills to do those things are perhaps assets.

But the software is all open source and free.

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est
Flashing is declinning, but there is no vector animation engine for the Web
yet.

SVG? A bunch of xml is not exactly what vector graphics animation needed.

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simonw
I don't really understand your argument here. SVG is supported by every modern
browser, has strong tool support (Illustrator, Inkscape and any programming
language with an XML package) and has very powerful animation capabilities, eg
<http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/>

~~~
est
> has very powerful animation capabilities

OK, please do a simple key frame transformation from a circle to a rectangle.

svg is only suitable for simple animations like move or rotate some nodes.

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gosub
<http://raphaeljs.com/animation.html>

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donteflon
Not keyframe animation. Not SVG.

