Tami Weiss

Hello,

I am a web designer and sometimes developer in the Milwaukee area. I created beautiful, standards compliant webpages that are not only usable, but deliciously delightful. Check out my portfolio.

• Flash is Dead, Long Live Flash!

  April 12th, 2010

  With the announcement of the iPad, Apple turned the web development world on its ear. Refusing to support Flash, and instead advocating HTML5, everyone sat up and took notice of the potential power of HTML5. Youtube added HTML5 video support. Articles declaring the end of flash started popping up all over the place. Cool canvas sites to rival Flash such as http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ and http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/ball_pool/ started showing up everywhere.

  Meanwhile, Flash proponents declared that html5 could never take its place, that Flash was a mature application while HTML5 was new and untested. HTML5 performance lacked and most browsers don’t support it yet. HTML5 hasn’t even settled on a video standard.

  Until today, I fell somewhere in the middle. I thought that HTML5 has some awesome new features and native support can’t be beaten. Add to rapidly growing mobile market which generally doesn’t support Flash, and you have a recipe for Flash’s decline. But, somethings, I was sure would always* be in Flash. Cartoon animations, for one. Sure, we could do some cool particle type effects in canvas, or some cool “apps” but timeline animation would remain the realm of Flash.

  And then I saw this http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/ilmarihe/canvas_animation_demo/mozcampeu09_go_faster.html (via smashing magazine).

  And that’s when I realized that there was no more point to Flash. Or, there wouldn’t be once there was widespread adoption of HTML5 in browsers. I even declared it loudly in a meeting at work, much to my coworkers’ bemusement.

  This at once saddened and excited me. Finally we’re moving to a standards based web. But, Flash is a beautiful tool for creating fun, exciting animations without needing to be a scripting expert. I know enough actionscript to eek by, and I’m happy using a simple javascript framework, but the idea of heaving to learn Javascript to make a complex animation really turns me off.  I’m sure it does many designers.

  That’s when the second revelation hit. Flash isn’t going anywhere. Adobe, being the smart company they are, will most likely change Flash so that it can output HTML5 canvas and Javascript. They’ve already got a great authoring platform that many developers and designers know intimately. And ActionScript 3 is similar in a lot of ways to Javascript. My personal prediction is by CS6 we’ll see this as a feature. CS5 is almost here, so its too late, but rapid adoption will keep Adobe in the game.

  So Flash, the platform is dead. But Flash, the authoring tool, I think we’ll see for many years to come.

  Update 04/15/2010

  I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Adobe already announced flash will be exporting to html5 canvas.

  | Tags: adobe, canvas, Flash, html5, javascript
  Posted In: Coding and Markup, Flash | No Comments »