On 5/8/13 1:16 PM, Micky Hulse wrote:
Personally, I still love Flash. I miss that I don't use it as often these days.
A few thoughts:
1. Correct me if I'm wrong, as it's not my industry, but isn't Flash
still one of the popular tools to use for video animation?
It was popular for certain types of cartoon animation and motion
graphics. But these days there are a lot of alternatives, especially
After Affects, but also toon boom, etc.
2. I love AS3! I'd take AS3 and the Flash GUI over HTML5 any day.
AS3 is great. But we have alternatives. For apps, I've been looking at
Xamarin which is mostly through C#. If you like AS3, you'll love C#. You
can also use PlayScript or AS3 (and even Stage3D) on top of Xamarin if
you like. I've been playing with it for a couple of weeks, and I have to
say, it feels like going home again. I don't miss mobile AIR - Xamarin
is what Adobe should have done for Flash/AIR devs years ago. HTML5 has a
place in apps, but it's place is not to BE the app.
3. We do a lot of ad work at my company ... HTML5 animation is a
LOOOOONG way off. Even if we did do HTML5 anims, then the ad serving
software and ad networks would have to be on board too; I'm not
holding my breath on this one (have you seen the JS these people use?
Hell, they can't even get away from using multi-nested document.writes
which kills it if you're trying to do responsive loading of ads).
You could always use the various SWF -> HTML5 converters, including
Google's Swiffy, which is just fantastic (again, Adobe could have done
that, but they farmed out CreateJS - wtf).
https://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/
4. This is maybe tangentially related, but several months ago,
Facebook decided to go native app vs. using CSS3/HTML5 technology (as
an example of HTML5 getting mud in its eye).
Don't get me wrong, I think HTML5 is pretty cool stuff (compared to
its predecessor) but I think there's room to grow for both
technologies.
Then again, I'd hate to see Flash go the way of Director. Man, it's
been years since I last coded in Lingo script! :D
It's too late - Adobe has already pulled a large portion of their
developers off of both Flash Pro and the Flash runtime, and cancelled
FlashNext/AVMNext. It's over. Time to move on.
I like Xamarin so far. It's cross platform, and provides access to
native GUI toolkits, which is all most people need when they say they
want a "native app". The AS3/PlayScript front end that Zynga's employees
threw together is icing on the cake. I hope this one gains some
traction, cause it's pretty slick. I'm a little surprised more Flash/AS3
developers haven't picked up on it yet, because I think it's a natural
fit. Maybe PlayScript will prompt more of us to take another look at the
technology.
In the web world, there's some great stuff happening, from AngularJS,
Backbone.js, Node.js, jQuery, and the transpilers - TypeScript (very AS2
like, only better) and CoffeeScript. Even Apache Flex is working rapidly
on an HTML5 compile target and set of components.
These are increasingly two different worlds - two worlds Flash could
have bridged, but Adobe didn't chose to move in that direction. But
that's ok, cause these two worlds are pretty fun if you embrace them (or
just one or the other).
Kevin N.
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