I'm sorry you feel let down. I can understand that. All I can say is that when I wrote the reply to your email back in July of last year, it was the truth, and we did our best to follow through. We did ship a maintenance release, followed by Styled Maps, and also Elevation and the MaxZoom service. We worked with Adobe on driving awareness, such as adding the API to Tour de Flex, and we waited to see whether Flash would gain traction as a developer platform in the mobile space, where we know maps are important.
Unfortunately we saw no impact on adoption. While the JS APIs and Static Maps API continue to grow in use, Flash use has remained low and relatively flat. Consequently it's usage as a fraction of our overall traffic has continued to decline. We try to allocate resources where they will benefit the most developers, and there is a minimum amount of resourcing needed to develop, maintain, test, document, and launch API releases. The usage of the Flash API had declined in percentage terms to the point where we just can not justify continuing to allocate the resources it needs to be developed further. We could have left it undeprecated but unresourced, but I was not comfortable with that. Once we had decided that no further development would occur, I believed it was important to let developers know, just as I said we would in that email last July. We don't take deprecations lightly. It was considered at great length, and a lot of time was invested in considering other options. I've always been a big fan of the API for Flash, and think it offers a great developer experience. But for all my personal attachment to it, the usage just isn't there, and this shows no sign of changing. I understand that many developers have one bug fix or additional feature that they believe would make the difference, but sadly I don't believe any one change (or even five or ten changes) would have turned the tide, and brought the API the adoption that it needed to compete with its sibling APIs for the limited resources that we have. Many thanks, Thor. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API For Flash" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-maps-api-for-flash/-/qMzh2V_vDBQJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api-for-flash?hl=en.
