dangerousmeta!, the original new mexican miscellany, offering eclectic linkage since 1999.

As an audiovisual guy, I don’t give a damn about the technology, as long as I get the results I want.  Flash is an outgrowth of Macromedia Director, something I used extensively after TVL gave up the ghost. I have a certain amount of ‘brain investment’ in the technology, that I don’t want to see wasted.  So I’m not completely objective over this one.

To drop Flash - there is *nothing else out there* for me. HTML5 does little for my needs at the present time, and there are no tools such as Adobe Flash to allow me to *gesturally* choreograph elements onscreen.  It’s not just about video! 

It’s about animation and physics and inverse kinematics and delivery and copyright protection and rich internet applications and a host of other things. 

Not to mention TIME. 

I have a bottom line. If I can’t create things in a reasonable amount of time, I can’t make them profitable.  The JS frameworks are nice, but they’re still much more time-intensive than Adobe Flash ... not to mention the cross-browser compatibility debug time.

If Flash is ‘20th century technology’, HTML5 is even more so, being based on even older HTML.  I don’t think anyone will brag that HTML5 is the best that the 21st century can offer.

Jobs - did you read the article about his dustup with Sun?  Here. His penchant to open his mouth without fully thinking things out gets him in trouble.  The number of articles that are skewering Apple over the closed nature of iPhone/iPad, the poor performance of the App Store, the restrictive developer program policies ... these are all outgrowths from his tirade over Flash.  His own fault.  I’d call it a backfire.  If I were Apple, I’d keep him the hell away from microphones.

If ESPN used HTML5 for all those ads and things, you’d still be just as slow, because you’re fighting bandwidth speeds and negotiating streaming netconnections - moreso than CPU cycles or any Flash Player ‘problems’. HTML5 as being tested by Youtube is terribly slow and flaky on my cable connection. When it runs, it’s great.  When it doesn’t, it’s awful. When HTML5 starts being regularly used for streaming video advertisements, the screaming will be just as loud over how HTML5 is being used, as Flash is today.  Does being used for ads make HTML5 ‘bad’?  Of course not.  Neither is Flash bad because it’s used for advertisements.

Javascript used to be a scapegoat for this, in the past. I still have readers who insist on turning off Javascript, and I’ve done my best to accommodate them over the years.  Why do they turn off Javascript?  Mostly because of perceived security risks, but also because of badly programmed scripts (auto-play music, DHTML advertisements that crash browsers, etc. etc.), the ability to program nonstandard UI, etc. etc.

I so wanted to use DHTML more, but my audience wouldn’t hear of it.  Of course now we have Ajax and JQuery and Mootools and Dojo, and noone cares about Javascript or its ‘security issues’ anymore.

As I mentioned the other week, I’ve been running the debugger version of Flash 10, and it’s surprised me how many Flash creations out there on the ‘net are throwing errors.  I don’t blame Flash for all this; I blame the difficulties of climbing the learning curve to use it effectively.  There are lots of beginning articles, lots of advanced articles, but few in the ‘middle ground’ that help bridge the gap utilizing ‘best practices’ (IMHO).  The switch from gestural animation to actionscript programming is not an easy one, and needs a lot more support and guidance.  Many times, I wanted an ‘Answer Guy’ to just give me the freaking solution to my programming problem.  [Endlessly trolling Google for solutions makes you want to chew through a stucco wall.]

A better solution for Adobe, would be to set up an “Adobe Certified Flash” program, where developers can go to get their creations checked over (for a price) and ‘certified’.  Perhaps the community can run it, rather than hired employees, but it would go far to making Flash a better experience for everyone.  Even if you’re an ‘expert’, having another objective set of eyes on a particular creation can only be a good thing.

Overall, this whole dustup has had a very positive effect on my Flash programming (I don’t do a great deal here in the slow-to-adopt Southwest).  More people have updated to version 10 of the player, and I’ve had no significant reduction in the number of people using the Flash Player (in my stats).  In the past, we had to program to a mishmash of versions, because the rate of Player updates was slow.  Nowadays, people want the latest and greatest, and that makes all our lives much easier.  I was shocked to see the Version 10 adoption rates in my stats.  Means we can use the latest tech, reduce errors, and increase our profit margins.

In reality, I owe Jobs a big “THANK YOU.”