quiet in here at the moment...
Flash has been losing steam for a long time.
The base of noobies got away from Adobe. The tools are too expensive and
complicated.
The players and platform too disjointed with: PC Flash, phone Flashlite, Linux
Flash and no Apple Flash.
Buyers want their content/app investments to work on the high end mobile
tools and that means Apple.
Apple's decision to ban Flash makes sense - Firefox crawls sometimes with
multiple browser windows hogging resources for several Flash ads on most pages.
Flash's ease of use went horribley wrong somewhere in the last few years. It
requires at least twice as much code to do the same stuff compared to earlier
iterations of the language - and twice as long to learn the nuances too. Not
to mention abandoning the former language knowledge base that was trashed along
the way.
Then there was the bone headed move of charging manufacturers for OEM player
installs on devices until last year. Adobe could have owned the mobile
interface market by continuing to give the player away for free, but... they
outsmarted themselves by being greedy. Then there's the decision to skip
working with Apple first for Photoshop releases Apple, who made Adobe
successful in the first place.
Adobe didn't do the existing Flash authors any favors by leaning into
non-time-line Flash with Flex as the preferred authoring environment either.
They could have brought all those time-line guys into the fold by offering
time-line to straight code conversion as a feature of the formerly main
authoring tool and taught all those folks what a correct straight to code
translation should look like... they didn't, unless i missed something.
Then there was the brilliant move of not killing off movie clips that were no
longer in/on the time-line for several iterations of the player - how did that
happen?!
Fact of the matter is, there were cooler inventions/apps when the coding
environment and player were simpler. The older apps ran more smoothly on
lesser equipment and were more compact and quicker to deliver.
Feature creep overwhelmed what used to be a stimulating and rewarding
creative experience.
Can Flash be fixed? Maybe. I tried an old app in the newest player the
other day and it ran better than it has in years, must be the new hardware
acceleration - that's a good sign.
Dave
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