Yesterday we saw the new Adobe roadmap for Flash runtimes and, of course, today all of us developers are talking about that.
Well, the main thing in this roadmap is the one that is the most visible in the very first look. GAMES. Adobe its focusing in games. If you do ctrl+f on text you will find about 18 times the word GAME.
I heard some friends and colleagues saying that this roadmap its good for game developers but not so good for interactive developers (advertising/agencies developers). I don't agree. So let's see why.
Past year almost everybody says what every year everybody says: "Flash is dead!", because HTML5 finally start to do stuffs that HTML always needed to do and I started to be happy because finally, in Flash development, we were going to stop developing the dirty side of things. Beautiful forms, fade-animations, translation animations, even some poor 3D animations... oh come on! Need a plugin only for this things? Of course not!
Why not in future say this same "of couse not!" for things that only Flash can do now?
Flash has always been ahead in rich interactive possibilities. What GAME is besides a very rich interactive application? (a good game, of course)
So, saying the word GAME or not, I think this roadmap follows the natural path of Flash evolution and we have no developers being harmed... it's good for all of us.
Below is a summary (made by Rafael Cordoba) of improvements in Flash:
Adobe is fully focused on creating a robust business around gaming.
Formalized game developer program
Fully productized support that enables developers to leverage C and C++ code and libraries in their Flash based games
Support for content protection (single DRM), which enables premium video content to be licensed for online distribution
Hardware-accelerated graphics/Stage 3D support for Apple iOS and Android via Adobe AIR
New Throttle event API (dispatches event when Flash Player throttles, pauses, or resumes content)
Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content
ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)
Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006)
Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS
Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine
Updates to the ActionScript language
Demand for high performance increases
Demand for hardware utilization increases
Hardware-oriented numeric types