Tumble, coil & fumble

Flash is the new Real Media. I was a Flash designer a few years ago (up till late 2003) before I started learning about the web in a way that’s actually useful. Not making people wait minutes before they could start interacting with a web site was a huge benefit.

Now I can do 90% of what I used to do with Flash by simply using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It’s very lightweight and doesn’t crash browsers with CPU overloads, loads quickly and the user is in the experience way before they waited 30 seconds and went “screw this, I got stuff to do”.

Today my only interaction with Flash is making Wordpress driven ghost sites that are presented to search engines so opaque Flash sites can be indexed properly. It’s a good part of my income but not a task that I’ll miss doing.

With HTML5 video becoming more prevalent and Flash video merely will be a fallback option for IE6, it’s time for companies to re-assess how they web dev budgets are spent.

Nothing stops Adobe from making the Flash authoring app an HTML5 authoring app (and clean up the interface in the progess) with a really good SVG implementation and Canvas support. The JavaScripts would be huge, since it’s Adobe (huge code has tradition) but can be compiled to both make it smaller and also put paranoid clients at ease.

And as usual people who zoned in on the status quo of their knowledge will always be angry at change and learning different skills. That’s nothing new, it’s just digital darwinism.