I don't think Flash is at all threatened by the iPhone and iPad not supporting it. The owners of those devices are a tiny but vocal minority who may never be able to use Flash on those devices, but that's the choice they make by buying a device they have artificial control over. Flash itself is absolutely entrenched in the internet and unlikely to disappear because however many millions, out of a billion, can't use it.
You only have to browse down as far as the #2 website in the world, Facebook, to see a site that has extraordinary use for Flash and revenue and businesses built around it - Zynga is practically printing money.
Go down to #4 and you're at YouTube, who are going to be using Flash for the next decade while HTML5 trickles down to an audience that doesn't care and won't even notice when it stops being Flash.
Further down the list you see MySpace at #15, a site which has ties to musicians (generous use of the word) and many millions of users who embed their own or others' music on their profiles in .. Flash.
#29 is a live cam streaming porn site, unlikely to be replaced anytime soon by a non-Flash technology.
Flash isn't "just" video, it's a richer platform than HTML/CSS/JS, both now and next-generation versions, and it's used prominently by some of the most-trafficked sites on the net and less prominently by most of them.
HTML/CSS/JS is an insanely slow moving set of standards. Everybody's holding their breath for HTML5 to "be everything they need" ... and it's going to do a lot and it will be, for a while.
But it's also going to be a standard for a very, very long time and technology isn't going to stand still just because the W3C can't keep up.
As the ratio of Flash-having to non-Flash-having devices decreases, more and more sites will have to consider how much money they're leaving on the table by not supporting them.
For some this will be "easy" -- if you're a video site, serve up your vids in HTML5 <video> in addition to Flash. We've already seen YouTube and Vimeo take their first steps in this direction; Hulu appears to be going this way too.
If you're Farmville, it's harder. But would it really cost Farmville more to have a team rewrite their app in HTML than it would to not support all the people on non-Flash devices that want to play their game and will instead play something else? Perhaps today... 2 years from now, I strongly doubt it. Keep in mind, Apple's devices aren't the only devices that don't have Flash: Flash availability is actually decreasing on the web. And you know Farmville's CEO's non-techy spouse is gonna get an iPad. If Farmville's CTO hasn't already priced out what a move to HTML would cost, they're negligent.
For something as dynamic as farm ville, what is more likely is just porting a farm ville client to iPhone/iPad vs. painfully recreating it in HTML so it can work badly on a smartphone screen. Most facebook apps in the beginning were HTML based. One of zynga's early, successful apps was mafia wars, a purely html game. The decision to create farmville in flash was completely intentional.
This trend is going to be massively increased by Adobe's addition of an iPhone compiler to Flash CS5 (barring capricious behavior on Apple's part to exclude these non-XCode-compiled binaries from the App Store, in which case, war).
Ironically, this will likely go further to decrease the use of the Flash player than anything Adobe has ever done.
I don't like Flash being used for ads, I don't like it being used for informational sites, I'd just as soon see Flash video replaced with HTML5, but I really hope Flash doesn't die. It's fun to develop for, and when it's actually used for appropriate situations (accounting for about 5% of actual usage, I know), it's pretty effective.
Why should Adobe save Flash? They make money be selling developer tools. They don't necessarily need to save the Flash format. Their main dilemma is ensuring that sales of their tools does not drop, and instead continues to increase. One tactic I think they should pursue, is to make sure their developer tools can export to formats that consumer devices do support. If I were Adobe I would aggressively be pursuing a single checkbox build option for Flash projects to be exported to HTML5/JS/CSS not unlike how Apple implemented universal binaries. That would leapfrog them so far ahead of the competition that are stuck with more primitive tools to accomplish the same job that there would still be value in buying their tools.
The iphone development target is the first step of many. I predict they'll be investing in OSS developers to support their eventual CSS/HTML 5 target they make the flash toolkit spit out as well after the iphone thing is working.
>Could Nokia help Adobe out? No. The web elite don’t have Nokia phones and don’t care about Nokia.
I assume by 'web elite', he means 'people that he knows in the United States'.
Nokia is incredibly popular in Asia and Europe.
FWIW, Youtube has a mobile flash version that runs in my Nokia browser and it works great - better than the default video viewer that ships with the handset.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 37.3 ms ] threadYou only have to browse down as far as the #2 website in the world, Facebook, to see a site that has extraordinary use for Flash and revenue and businesses built around it - Zynga is practically printing money.
Go down to #4 and you're at YouTube, who are going to be using Flash for the next decade while HTML5 trickles down to an audience that doesn't care and won't even notice when it stops being Flash.
Further down the list you see MySpace at #15, a site which has ties to musicians (generous use of the word) and many millions of users who embed their own or others' music on their profiles in .. Flash.
#29 is a live cam streaming porn site, unlikely to be replaced anytime soon by a non-Flash technology.
Flash isn't "just" video, it's a richer platform than HTML/CSS/JS, both now and next-generation versions, and it's used prominently by some of the most-trafficked sites on the net and less prominently by most of them.
HTML/CSS/JS is an insanely slow moving set of standards. Everybody's holding their breath for HTML5 to "be everything they need" ... and it's going to do a lot and it will be, for a while.
But it's also going to be a standard for a very, very long time and technology isn't going to stand still just because the W3C can't keep up.
For some this will be "easy" -- if you're a video site, serve up your vids in HTML5 <video> in addition to Flash. We've already seen YouTube and Vimeo take their first steps in this direction; Hulu appears to be going this way too.
If you're Farmville, it's harder. But would it really cost Farmville more to have a team rewrite their app in HTML than it would to not support all the people on non-Flash devices that want to play their game and will instead play something else? Perhaps today... 2 years from now, I strongly doubt it. Keep in mind, Apple's devices aren't the only devices that don't have Flash: Flash availability is actually decreasing on the web. And you know Farmville's CEO's non-techy spouse is gonna get an iPad. If Farmville's CTO hasn't already priced out what a move to HTML would cost, they're negligent.
Ironically, this will likely go further to decrease the use of the Flash player than anything Adobe has ever done.
The iphone development target is the first step of many. I predict they'll be investing in OSS developers to support their eventual CSS/HTML 5 target they make the flash toolkit spit out as well after the iphone thing is working.
I assume by 'web elite', he means 'people that he knows in the United States'.
Nokia is incredibly popular in Asia and Europe.
FWIW, Youtube has a mobile flash version that runs in my Nokia browser and it works great - better than the default video viewer that ships with the handset.