Flash is ten years old, as the BBC reports, and for any Internet technology still around after a decade that’s a considerable achievement.
When I started out in web design, it was almost the only medium I worked in, reflecting the tastes of the time. That was before the Flash backlash, led by the arch-headline-grabber himself Jakob Nielsen’s vociferous take on the matter.
Since then, the paths of Flash and I have diverged considerably. I rarely work with it nowadays.
Inappropriate Flash harms user experience
I haven’t seen developers breaking new ground lately, in the way every week used to bring extensions of Flash’s seemingly limitless capabilities in two dimensions.
Just at the time when Flash was in the corner licking its wounds, good old HTML enjoyed a renaissance with the adoption of web standards and increased accessibility. Today, JavaScript has taken markup into orbit and in a curious irony, it has also saved Flash from a further beating from the Eolas patent mess.
A few major successes have been brought to us by Flash in recent times. Yahoo has finally done the obvious and released a Flash mapping interface and YouTube’s video relies totally upon Flash’s video capabilities, of course.
Indeed, it’s the video stuff that ensures Adobe’s trusty plug-in is still relevant today, since the tech corporate’s vision of an all-purpose application delivery medium still looks years away, with a muted response to Flex and Microsoft’s competing Avalon (now imaginatively retitled WPF) technology tied to the long-delayed Vista.
“It’s a bit chaotic. There’s lots of noise, lots of activity. That’s great; there’s a huge amount of innovation” said Adobe’s Kevin Lynch [1] when asked about the future of Flash. Not a straight (or strong) answer.
In times past, Macromedia always managed to brave the storms, so perhaps Adobe can keep the tide in its favour.
