Flash (Mobile) is Dead
by Michael
Adobe has announced that it is abandoning development for the Flash Mobile plugin. This startling announcement affirms the stance that Steve Jobs and Apple took against supporting Flash on iOS devices. Unfortunately, 750 Adobe employees are paying the price for Adobe's adherence to a dated concept.
Flash was always misused on the web. A plugin that was meant to enhance the user experience quickly became the user experience. But Flash interfaces have never been very accessible to those with disabilities. Macromedia and then Adobe, made some effort to support accessibility, but they always came up short to providing full and equivalent access to disabled users.
Flash interfaces were also practically useless for touchscreen devices. The primary reason for this has more to do with the design of many Flash UI's. In many cases the UI designers relied on feedback based on mouse over events to let a user know that some graphical element was clickable. This allowed designers to create non-conventional interfaces that were not intuitive on the surface, but became more useful as a user explored. But there are no hover or mouse over events for a touch device. So a touchscreen user trying to decipher what they had to do to complete an action have to just tap around until something happened, or give up and maybe try the next time they were using a conventional PC and mouse.
As a web designer, I have done my share of Flash projects. My own philosophy when it came to using Flash, was that of enhancement, not critical content. Flash is not SEO friendly. Flash is not easily accessible. Flash is not a native web technology. It's that last point that indicates that the future of Flash may be dim (pun intended).
Simple animations, dynamic slide shows and carousels are all things that Flash excelled at, and are all easily replicated with HTML, Javascript and CSS. The only things that can't be easily done with HTML5 techniques are highly interactive games. It's unlikely that game makers will ever use open technologies for games because they can't protect their intellectual property. Since Flash obscures the programmatical code, game developers will probably still rely on Flash for interactive game creation. But gaming companies are not a big enough customer base to justify continuing development of a dead-end technology.
I think Adobe has come to the same conclusion Apple and Steve Jobs did, Flash has become expendable. It doesn't make sense to spend money and resources to improve a product for a dwindling customer base. Better to develop new tools for designers that adhere to open standards and are supported by (nearly) all the modern browsers.
Posted under Caught in the Web on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 16:29
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