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Flash vs HTML vs iOS
I honestly don’t know where Flash as a technology is going to be in a few years. Yes, we’ve seen the technology roadmap provided by Adobe, but I don’t honestly get the feeling that Flash is long for this world, which is sad.
I started out with Director and moved to Flash a million years ago. Building interface elements and widgets, moving into entire sites and then serious applications. The tools got better with time, the language when graduated to AS3 made a whole lot more sense to everyone, and things were humming along. And then change blew in from the side fills and now it seems that Flash is choking on it’s own vomit in the back of the van.
The one thing remaining cool in my quick take on e landscape is notion of author once and run on iOS and Android. So you’ve got AIR for Android doing it’s thing and some magic compiler doing it’s thing for iOS. You’re not authoring to the languages yourself which always left me feeling a little weird as a developer. Always releases behind without direct access to powerful features that you might need to subclass, etc.
I haven’t touched Flash in well over a year. I’ve been straight Objective-C, iOS, with a smattering of HTML/PHP/JavaScript. If you spend a little time with iOS and Objective-C, I think you pick it up quickly and love it. Personally I love Xcode. I’ve struggled with signing things in the past, but as a tool it’s freaking amazing.
Anyway, sorry to witness the decline of Flash. Happy I was part of it’s pinnacle.
Popularity: 1%
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Not adding fuel to the Flash fire
I’m not going to add any flames or speculation for what the recent choices Adobe has made in regards to mobile Flash, Flex, AIR, or JavaScript/HTML5. There is already plenty of that out there and it’s hard to know what is FUD, what the Adobe FAQ answers truly mean moving forward, or if some people just like taking shots at Flash because they think it sucks. Go read that at your leisure and make of it what you will.
If you’re at all concerned with Flash falling by the wayside, you have a few options that I can think of
- Hope that nothing changes for you and you can keep putting Flash-assisted cash in your bank account. Assume that nothing is changing or that it won’t affect you.
- Start to learn some JavaScript techniques and general HTML5 approaches to make up for any Flash application drop off. Start branching your toolbox just a little bit in case a client starts harping about HTML5 because it’s in the news more lately.
- Start jamming on AIR for Android and iOS so you can offer something up to those platforms in a round-about way without committing to hunkering down and learning totally new stuff.
- Start jamming on Android Java and iOS Objective-C so you can offer up some native goodness to those platforms. Leave the optimization headaches and late-adopter OS-version capabilities to other developers.
I am always in favor of rounding out your capabilities as broadly as you can. Push yourself a bit more. Flash has been a mainstay technology for a great many of us for quite a long time. Some of us got our start and remain profitable (employable) being one-trick Flash ponies. Some of us have branched out and used Flash as a springboard to other languages and platforms.
Things change in this technology field, and you have to be open to that change if you want to stay on top of the game. And remain in high demand. It’s my personal belief that if you haven’t started to branch out yet because you’ve got AS3 nailed and you love it, I’d suggest you start branching now. It will only help you as a developer anyway… when you pick up bits of other languages you’ll improve all around in how you approach coding projects in any language. You’ll start to think more broadly about what you’re doing.
I’ve been tooling with Android and iOS (both natively) for some time now and I can almost pump out apps in the same amount of time that they took in AS3/Flex. So now I can offer native Android, native iOS, Mac OS X, Flex, AS3, and AIR as options. I haven’t done the AIR for mobile yet because I don’t like having some magic sauce do magic things underneath me. I do value the superior portability of platform it can bring though.
Once you branch you’ll see how similar many languages are to one another. Same ideas just different syntax and approaches – so having AS3 under your belt will get you a jump start on other languages.
Branch out… it’s a ton of fun!
Popularity: 2%
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Remember the promise of Saffron UML? Look to Crocus Modeler
A few years ago something pretty awesome looking was much talked about. It was an AS3 UML modeler given the name of Saffron. Many a developer drooled over this tool vaporware. I was among them.
People rumored that it was purchased by Microsoft before being released. Rumored to still be in development, etc. To be honest, I don’t know what happened to the project, but as far as I am aware, it never saw the light of day.
If you work on smaller AS3 projects, you probably didn’t care very much, but for those of use working on larger applications, it would have been a very useful tool. Well, there is now something called Crocus Modeler (I fixed the spelling). It looks to provide similar technology, it’s just not as slick in it’s UI. But guess what… this is a UI that you can actually use.
Give the tool a spin & comment on what you think of it. I have played a little bit with it and it’s pretty cool so far!!
Popularity: 2%