Flashageddon

I don’t usually post comments on the state of the industry, people way more eloquent and learned than I am do a much better job at it than I could ever do. Also, since stopping blogging back in 2005, I rarely blog and this website is pretty much a dumping ground for things I want to remember.

I’ve been reading and listening to quite a few things about their recent Adobe announcements namely the layoffs, the discontinuation of Flash Mobile and Flex going open-source. Also after listening to Seb Lee-Delisle & Ian Lobb‘s Creative Coding Postcast on the current #flashageddon situation, I decided I might as well chuck my 2-pence into the pot.

A bit of history (apologise if this bit sounds like a C.V) : I started with flash back in 2001 in university making fun animations and messing around with Director. I loved it as a creative medium, it was fun and exiting. During university I focused a lot on game and mobile development, doing quite a lot of work in Java, J2ME and Open GL. Since then I’ve been a bit of multi-tooler and have worked in heaps of technologies. Around about 2005 I discovered AS3, and re-kindled my love of Flash, I loved the language, it was grown up, proper, useful, nearly fully object-orientated, and with the original creative medium still intact I found an amazing tool to work with.

I got my first Flash developer job at digital agency R/GA London and worked there for two years as a flash developer, got into the community, attended Flash on the Beach regularly and through my colleague (and friend) Jolyon Russ met some of the people in the community. In this time, I did some pretty big flash projects, and some even larger Flex projects and got the opportunity to work with Mike Jones who taught me Flex 3. Times were good.

I left R/GA and went freelance around the time JQuery was starting to rear it’s head, and libraries like MooTools and Prototype were the talk of the town, I continued to work in Flash on one last project, a Christmas site for Nintendo.

After that project I moved back into technologies like PHP, MySQL, HTML & Javascript and started developing and architecting native iPhone and Android applications. I’m now a Technical Director at Candyspace (a mobile digital agency) and very rarely touch Flash, I architected and managed an Air for Android project as part of the wider ITV Player mobile project, and regularly help team members with smaller Flash projects, but as far as working on big Flash projects, especially outside of the context of Air this has almost all but dried up. The reduced popularity of Flash does make me sad, I miss the sense of community, the one-size fits all nature, the ease of asset management, creatives and developers working together in a workflow that I haven’t seen since.

It all happend in what seemed a rather short timeline, but ever since Steve Jobs infamous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter, I see the requirements from clients for Flash or ‘Flash-Like’ projects severely reduced. Clients and developers are now buzzing with terms like HTML5. Javascript somehow seems to be thought of as new technology and is considered ‘innovative’ again.

The deal has been done, credit has been lost, and the flash-platform ever since has been waining. I remember attending the heart wrenching Flash on the Beach in 2010 where almost all conversations I had were either in defence or attack of Flash (and by proxy Adobe) and most of the talks dealt with this complex story and general environment that came out of Apple’s public destruction of what was left of Flash’s reputation.

Of course the demise of Flash (or more the demise it it’s reputation) wasn’t just at the hands of a carefully crafted letter from Apple’s CEO, but also the making of many factors, namely browser compatibility, the html spec finally being updated, app-culture, terrible banners and frankly bizarre endeavours undertaken by Adobe (Catalyst anyone..?).

So now to the present, after Max 2011 which was basically a conference about how Adobe had finally noticed HTML5 actually existed. I was reminded of how Cornelius Fudge announces “He’s Back” with reference to the dark lord, at the end of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and everyone gives a resounded no-shit-sherlock kind of look. This keynote and the general tone was jarringly juxtaposed against lots of buzz around Flex 4.5 and Air 3, specifically about the Mobile Components and how these were going to revolutionise cross-platform development.

The last few weeks announcements, the lay-offs, the shut down of the mobile flash player, the open-sourcing of the flex framework, doesn’t leave many people with confidence in Adobe, and sends a general message that the Flash platform is dying, or at least not getting the attention it deserves (or arguably deserves).

Anyway, before I ramble on anymore I should probably get to the point (and there is a point!) or two points. The reason I wrote the article was firstly to outline my understanding of the history of the last few years, as I find writing it down helps me keep a record my thought at a given time whether people read it or not, but also to put forward two arguments.

Firstly, the management of the flash platform. I personally think Adobe have missed a massive trick with the positioning of the Flash Platform. I agree with many people who say it’s lost it’s creative routes, but I think since AS3 it’s become exactly what it’s meant to be: a platform.

I believe Adobe should have given up on Mobile web years ago, and concentrated on building the new Java (stay with me). Java is a cross-platform development plugin and runtime that can be run in web-browsers and be used to build native applications, it can interface with native process and augment native code. Read the last line over and replace Java with Flash and you’ll see what I mean. Flash is a platform, and thus should be treated as such, the platform shouldn’t be dying, it’s has much more potential than Java especially in enterprise and application solutions, anyone who’s tried to use Swing to developer user-interfaces will testify to the fact that Flex is practically a godsend.

The biggest annoyance and problem with the Flash ‘platform’ at present is the massive amount of fragmentation that currently exists. Flash Professional, Flash Builder, Flex SDK, Flash SDK and Air SDK (all with umpteen variations) these are too complex and create problems. Manually combining the Flex and Air SDK before you can start development is borderline absurd.

Flash should be a singular SDK regardless of authoring tool, programming IDE or feature set. Android there is one SDK, Java there’s two, iOS there’s one. If Adobe simplify the platform, and unify the SDK across all of the tools and technologies utilising, managing, and explaining the technologies will be easier in the long run. I should just go to Adobe.com download the latest SDK and hook all my tools to it, and that’s it, if I want to support an older version I download an older SDK.

Flash is a multi-platform runtime nothing else, hopefully it’ll become just that, a singular unified platform, and occupy the space is deserves as the defacto standard of multi-platform runtimes, instead of flailing around trying to be everything to nobody.

The second point is one of community, and the anger people have towards the demise of Flash. I’ve always been well in the school of thought that developers who don’t diversify, or move on with their skills get left behind, and because of this people get annoyed or frustrated. However I’ve been thinking about why Flash developers get so angry about the demise, and whether it’s merely a reluctance to move on to new technologies that’s the reason. I get the arguments that people enjoy technologies they are used to and feel comfortable with, and when you get good at something it’s natural to be protective over it.

However, there is one more important factor at play here, the community. I can’t think of another technology that occupies a space in the industry like Flash does (or did). What other technology fuses the worlds of corporate finance, indie-game developers, creative agencies, animators and designers. Also, what other technology has conferences like Flash on the Beach or well known developer ‘celebraties’ like the aforementioned podcasters?

The short answer is there isn’t, so as we move away from Flash and start to look into other technologies, and embrace HTML5, creative Javascript and the like, spare a thought for the Flash user, because without Flash, there is no Flash community. This is something (unlike a mangled platform) that’s worth getting emotional about.