Not so Flash after all? What does the future hold for Flash?
StumbleUponApple’s iPad, following in the footsteps of the iPhone, does not support the multimedia platform Flash. With Apple wielding so much influence in the new media scene, what future does Flash have? New Media Knowledge’s Chris Lee asked around.
By Chris Lee
The multimedia platform Flash, from Adobe Systems, is a popular addition to websites to enable animation, advertisements and other interactivity. Yet Flash has proven to be unpopular with the Apple stable, with Flash support absent from both the iPhone and the newly launched iPad, which in turn has prompted some to claim that Apple’s lack of support could lead to the downfall of Flash. Apple argued that Flash slows the iPhone’s performance and saps battery life.
While Flash on the mobile does not produce great yields for Adobe, a greater threat might be lurking in the near future with the anticipated release of the HTML5 Web protocol. So, does Flash have a future?
No Flash Harry“Flash is fine if you're doing simple banners and dynamic areas on a site, but for complex builds and interactivity the shortfalls are becoming more and more apparent,” argued Rob Walker, managing director of digital marketing agency Xcite Digital.
Walker believes that with the coming of HTML 5 - which will use enhanced versions of JavaScript programmes such as iQuery and Ajax, which in turn come with much better support with browsers in terms of loading speed, accessibility, usability and search engine optimisation (SEO) - Flash is essentially flawed.
“This may not happen overnight, but in the long run Flash needs to take on a new meaning if it is to provide full cross browser compatibility that is widely used,” Walker added.
Flash BackWhen it comes to making an impression, looking flashy does not necessarily mean the website will operate more effectively, especially if it’s at the expense of good content, Roger Warner of social agency Content and Motion told NMK.
“Flash sucks when used in excess,” he said. “It can help for adding interactive functionality or a design flourish, but it's rarely combined to good effect with content.”
Warner believes that brands need to understand that a “build it and they will come” mentality is flawed.
“Just because it looks great doesn't buy you your audience,” he concluded. “Brand planning needs to encompass acquisition and budgets need to make room for properties that major on content and social media to help engage and drive awareness and interactions. If that service can then be made to look better with Flash then great - but don't put Flash first.”
Comments
JFlash said:
As a Flash/Web Applicaton Developer since v2 I find the general perception of Flash to be incredibly naive and biased. Admittedly AS2 was a nightmare, there were lots of monkey patches designed to attract more serious development, by implementing a bizarre OOP paradigm in which you could break all the rules. I wont expand on that just google it. However AS3 is a completely different animal. As in any programming language bad developers will produce bad code and I don't dispute these applications could well have memory leaks and hog system resources leading to a crash. The one technology I hardly ever see mentioned in these flash bashing articles is "Flex" (completely written in AS3 and very robust) and is being widely adopted by the financial sector as the presentation tier for extremely complex systems such as real time trading and risk management. These guys also tend to use Java for their non-trivial server applications. Another supposedly dying technology according to cult leader Jobs. Flash is so much more than what the rookie developer, designer and ad agency pump out onto the the web, of course it's annoying, I'll be the first to admit I want that stuff out of my face. All I'm saying look at the technolgy first before having a rant. Both Java and Flash offer full portability and excellent JIT compilers that bring them within only twice as slow as native apps and the latest Air Desktop runtime even allows you to create your own c/c++ native processes and access them directly, Flash is here for a long time, period. I mean the banks are adopting Flex for enterprise projects, I doubt they are about to dump or indeed choose a technology that is on it's knee's, n'est ce pas? Finally a word on HTML 5. Sounds great but it is so under developed, it's going to be a while before it becomes a serious contender in Web Application Development what with the standards still undecided and the tooling and required API's for serious stuff just don't exist as yet. And I can see whole can of worms opening up with browser compatibility issues also. I am very much behind multiplatform runtimes as is MS (Silverlight, .Net) after all you may get a processor and memory hit for running under a VM, but then you need to consider the costs for developing software on multiple platforms and devices versus the cost of hardware. These days servers are so fast you just don't need native machine code, mobile devices will catch up. And in case you didn't know Flash Player 10.1 imminent a on whole range of of moble devices has the JIT that compiles to the native processor instruction for a given chipset as well as passing off virtually all of the heavy duty rendering to the device GPU. Yours Pete (Java and Flash Bod) P.S. I honestly think Steve Jobs is losing is grip on reality, I think the lady doth protest too much..
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