The Future of Flash
Last Thursday I attended Tink's monthly Lufpugs (London Flash Platform Usergroup, AKA, LFPUG). The topic was the Future of Flash with Adobe's Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow - http://www.lfpug.com/23rd-february-2012-23022012/
Some of my Flash friends couldn't attend, so I gave them a little wrap up via email, and they advised I share it publicly.
Here it is:
They released a whitepaper on this with complete coverage (one for Flex too) - get it here. -
As we all expected, Flash is going to have a change of direction and it's not all bad .. unless you're a Linux user. -
The underlying message that I felt is, Adobe isn't making as much money from Flash anymore so they're tightening their belts and cutting corners.
- They said it's a big job getting the Flash player to work across all OS's, so they're only going to reduce the implementations to Mac, Windows and Chrome's Pepper API. This leaves Linux users in the dark, unless they use Google Chrome. Non-Chrome Linux users are a small market share to them, and feel that this move was justified.
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Flash will be alive and kicking in the Gaming and Premium Video domains. Even though the things they will be doing for these 2 areas will be great for other areas of Flash, they're not going to publicly represent it - clients, users and management will need to work it out themselves. At the meeting there were many from the Enterprise / Flex industry that were pretty upset by it, as Flex is the stronger more mature tool for application development, but only Flash dev's only know that. -
Premium video isn't the video playback improvements I expected. Flash will be getting improvements to benefit online TV and videos in terms of better streams and copyright enforcement. -
Ian and I asked the question of better playback controls and they said some of the advancements are already out and on it's way, but nothing that's going to make us go WOW. We're going to still going to have to resort to our hacks and tricks.