Blog Entry

It Isn’t About Video.

The most recent generation of Flash video is just a standard M4V file with AAC audio. That’s right, it’s QuickTime, which QuickTime and Windows Media 11 play natively. All Flash brings to the experience is a superimposed, superfluous controller UI that can only degrade the experience by complicating rendering (your GPU has to composite the video image with the UI imagery).

It Isn’t About Animation.

We’re now at a place where a developer armed with CSS and JavaScript can deliver richer, more flexible, more responsive, more stable, more deliverable interfaces for web applications to any desktop and mobile browser. Even the Homestar Runner guys export their Flash cartoons to podcast-friendly video files.

It Isn’t About Interactivity.

Once you throw mobile (Flash Lite) into the mix you’ve got to produce adapted versions for a spectrum of Lite players out there. That funky front end you built for the car company isn’t what the Nokia or Blackberry user will be loading, they’ll need a special cut, which might mean backpedaling to ActionScript 1, or even removing ActionScript entirely. It’s called Lite for a reason.

It Isn’t About Conferencing.

You can build a pretty robust conferencing system using Flash and a set of services provided by Adobe. It’s a lot like Skype or GoToMeeting or SameTime, except that Adobe brokers the deal and everything runs on top of your browser so you have throttled back access to any of the native multimedia capabilities of your computer or phone. Even a desktop AIR application inserts Flash intermediary processes that add processor, battery, and UI overhead to the experience. That’s why I say you can build a pretty robust conferencing system using Flash.

It Isn’t about Rapid Development.

Flash and the Flash ecosystem provide a whole jungle of ready-to-use components you can gather and snap together into your very own web application right now. It’s like Lego® for the Internet! Each component was built using a different methodology so your team will spend a small fortune in time and energy making the finished product fit your branding, tie in to your uniquely-tuned back-end systems, and comply with the feedback you got from UAT. It’s like Lego® for the Internet.

So, What’s It About?

I’m going to make 6,732,105 enemies and see my license of Flash CS4 mysteriously deactivate itself sometime tonight, but some things have to be said: it’s about laziness. Designers like me love Flash because we can produce great looking content that does cool-enough stuff that’ll get us through most projects and postpone career development judgement day. We don’t need to be up to speed when we can make a shiny, spinny case for sticking with the tools we know."It doesn’t need to [insert your dashed expectation here], it’s got animated growing grass and lens flares!"

Don’t Listen to The Mumbling Hobo at the Back of the Donut Shop.

The internet is abuzz with grumbling about the lack of Flash on the iPhone or the other devices making up the bulk of mobile web access like... the iPhone. Ignore it. Most of the grumbling is about not being able to run this or that browser game, Facebook widget or web cartoon in Mobile Safari. These aren’t your consumers. They haven’t bought the $0.99 Tower Defense game for their iPhone, or subscribed to the MP4 podcast of the web cartoon. They aren’t in the market for a portal or a logistics system or a GIS or a mobile deployment of that customer self-service website. They want their favorite free widgets and they want them now. In the broader enterprise-sized discussion about putting interfaces on software, they’re the mumbling hobo at the back of the donut shop. You’ve never had him sit in with a focus group, and this isn’t the time to start.

Why Flash Laziness is Bad For Everyone, Especially Adobe.

Flash is artificially successful, and because of it, Flash hasn’t evolved. Given its age Flash should be at a state of tech maturity where you could build games like Halo 3 and apps like Final Cut Pro in it. Instead we have some token 3D, some limited access to the GPU, and a desktop deployment engine that breaks your OS’ native UI rules and tells you you’ll like it that way. Flash is where it is because designers like me lean on it for a sort of stay of execution. Our lack of urgency became Flash’s lack of urgency. But as mobile users start to enjoy gorgeous native applications and the line between our expectations of native apps and those of browser apps blurs and vanishes, the "behindness" of Flash and the Flash Army will really start to show. When it does, other people with real audiences and real influence over the folks who hire and fire us will make much more noise about laziness as a force behind Flash, and that can only hurt the whole platform and the broader design scene too.

It’s Not All Bad.

Honestly, I haven’t really dug into CS4 yet, I’ve had a lot of work on my plate, and I’ve been getting my head around Javascript, the mob of great JS frameworks like Prototype, and the finer points of CSS. I’m guessing Adobe knows what Flash is up against and wants the Flash community to start pushing themselves and the platform. I’m willing to stick with Flash (I’ve sunk some good money into keeping my Adobe software current). What I’d like to see is some heavy duty effort by Adobe to make Flash matter to those of us who don’t really need it anymore. Don’t give me more me-too feature sets sweetened with simplicity but soured with black-box inflexibility. Give me a whole new version of the Flash IDE that puts the best front end on the frameworks that power the types of apps and websites my customers are going to expect. Make Flash the best IDE for native Blackberry and iPhone development, the best IDE for building OpenGL-powered games, the best IDE for rapidly building sites with Scriptaculous or YUI, the best IDE for editing MP4 videos, and the best IDE for orchestrating it all and keeping it on brand. Then yell at me for not having built the skill set I’ll need to really enjoy this fabulous new Flash toolbox, and offer me courseware from Adobe to get me back up to speed as a modern designer in a cutthroat marketplace.