Monday, November 14, 2011

No Flash for Mobile Web Signals New Era


Software developer Adobe announced last week they will cease production on mobile versions of Flash…so what’s the big deal?

Essentially, this move signals the end of an era. Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. For nearly 15 years, it has been one of the mainstays of web-based animation. Now, tech-savvy insiders are saying Flash will be deemed irrelevant and that the influence of the late Steve Jobs of Apple cut mobile Flash’s chances of success very short. 

According to CMA Interactive Designer, Matt Kulcsar, designers stopped using Flash for full site development about 3-4 years ago because of technologies like jQuery. In the past year, it was widely believed Flash would not survive the transition to mobile platforms simply because of its unstable nature and intense battery drain.

“When I heard the news, I thought ‘happy days are here!’ From a designer’s standpoint, Flash was just a resource hog and was becoming more and more cumbersome to use,” said Kulcsar.

“Opting to use Flash would be like saying you don’t care if any Apple users can see your content. After a certain point, no one was willing to exclude that audience,” he added.

Kulcsar says HTML5 is the emerging Web language that many developers are using, even Adobe is leaning this way for its non-mobile software development. There’s no doubt Flash will continue on in some form or fashion but designers say it will not be branded in the same way that Flash used to be, or carry as much weight as it used to.

“It’s an exciting time of transition where within the span of just about a year, we are seeing tablet usage skyrocket—not just the iPad, but the Samsung Galaxy and the Kindle Fire have gained traction in the marketplace. We’ll start to see the stripped-down net book laptops also really takeover in the next two years or so,” said Kulcsar.

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