The random utterances of David Arno

At the beginning of October, I spent four days at Nottingham Center Parcs at an unusual conference organised by Stray (Lindsey Fallow.) The conference was called “Try { harder }” and involved just 16 participants and one guest speaker. As I opted to attend this conference instead of Flash on the Beach (FOTB) this year, I was hoping to come away with a similar level of inspiration as FOTB has provided in the past, plus I hoped to learn new, useful things too. Try { harder } delivered both in bucket-loads. Read more

As you’ll likely know, if such things interest you, Adobe pretty much succeeded in killing off Flash last week. They made nearly 10% of their staff redundant. They abandoned the Flash player for mobile browsers. They possibly made most of the Flash Pro “IDE” team redundant (though what has really happened to that team remains unclear.) And late Friday, they announced that they were pulling out of future Flex development and handing Flex over to the community.

The timing of these announcements by Adobe is regrettable. They have spooked the community and left many of us who build on Flash technologies as part of our business unsure of the short to medium term future of Flash. Yet there is currently no alternative RIA solution that can equal Flex. What other solutions there are use very different technologies. making migration difficult at best.

This set me thinking: could the community create a way of migrating existing Flex solutions away from the Flash player? Read more

Just under two years ago, I wrote an article questioning the wisdom of demands for Flash on mobile devices. At the time, everyone seemed to want Flash everywhere and were demanding it for the iPhone. Also at the time, HTML5 was languishing in unpopular backwaters of the internet. When the news broke today that Adobe were scrapping future development of Flash on mobile devices, I immediately thought of that article and felt happy that Adobe had finally seen sense on the subject. That happiness has ebbed during the day though, to be replaced by a degree of concern. Read more