Boy, do you have some catching up to do, if you just found RDM. Go back and read some of Dan’ articles from the 2004-2007 timeframe, and you’ll begin to understand (if you don’t already) why the rest of us are so taken with his writing.

Cheers, and welcome,
SiSo

It would make sense for Adobe to cover their own backsides and create Flash to HTML5 converter.

I suppose they could still call the application Flash to save face and marketing dollars. It’s unclear which is more important to Adobe’s management at this point.

Clearly there is a major shift going on and Apple’s vigorous support of open standards probably makes it easier for some of the weaker and smaller players to follow.

I’d be curious to see how general real-world performance of Flash-supporting mobile devices (battery life, browsing speed, etc.) are affected accessing Flash content vs. those same devices accessing those same sites’ iPad/iPhone optimized content pages.

There’s an idea for an article, Daniel! Maybe not you, but someone, somewhere.

One of the comments on the mentioned articles made me spit my tea all over the room.

“What a dumb article. Hmm, I know, let’s ask a bunch of mid-level managers whose bread-and-butter is Flash whether or not they think Flash is geigh.

What these bozos quoted in the article fail to recognize is that many internet users install Flash-blocking browser elements to hide their lovingly crafted monkey-punching ads.”

:-D

Maybe they already have with the iPhone web app kit they put out. Maybe they’re relying on the FOSS community to sort it out. Maybe they can’t be arsed with the inevitable support hell they’ll have to bear. Currently Apple, Google and to a lesser extent Mozilla are the main drivers of the finalisation of HTML5. Why aren’t they on top of this golden opportunity?

Though I still use and love those Adobe software tools as they exist today in Creative Suite 4, I have to honestly take exception with Flash.

I’ve always held the view–or at least the hope–that Apple and Adobe, despite all gossip to the contrary, have always been fast friends, having effectively partnered in bringing us into and through the desktop publishing era. I’ve even excused them for the various gaps in platform parities where they exist across their extensive catalog of apps, as I could understand the likely pragmatic strategies which had to be adopted for reasons of economics and efficiencies.

I think Steve Jobs continues to show true brilliance and courage in his stance on Flash, as I think Apple’s broader embracing of open standards has been and will continue to be an ever increasingly positive factor fueling its prosperity and expansion.

I hope Adobe management has enough integrity at this stage to eat some crow and put Flash either on the shelf or in file 13 and get serious about getting onto the Apple bandwagon, as there is indeed a lot of money to be made there if they play their card right.

The Flash joyride is over.

Many people have likened the takeover of NeXT by Apple as a takeunder, with NeXT ideologically taking over Apple. But how good these NeXT people were, to present it purely like that is unfair. There must have been a lot of brilliant people inside Apple whose ideas were not heard/used. What the NeXT ideological takeover at the top also did was to liberate these people from seriously misguided upper management.

With respect to content of the article. The situation remains that for rich internet application Flash (and its brethren like Silverlight) is the only available option. For video play and advertisement, there are other options, but not for RIA. Ajax and stuff are not that rich. For iPhone and iPad, the option is to go native (app store) and create a Cocoa app for iPhone OS.

So, while most of Flash is ads and video, the small number of sites using it for a rich user experience cannot go open standard yet. Think of many sites directed at small children with small games and stuff. As long as there is no practical open standard for that, Flash will be with us, I think.

It is especially this kind of functionality that Apple wants to keep from iPhone OS. This forces apps to take the Cocoa-route and that means that apps will less easily be available on competing mobile platforms. If Apple (and Microsoft) would support Flash on iPad/iPhone (WinMo7), a lot of developers would use it just to be able to target multiple platforms. That makes business sense. But now that Microsoft also has said it will not support Flash, it looks dire for Adobe.

In case of Microsoft, that seems a stupid move. They need all the apps they can get, even if those same apps would be available on other platforms (Android) as well. But it seems Microsoft is worried about Android and takes (for now) Apple’s market position for granted.