As someone who has pretty much exclusively developed for Flash over the past 6 years in both AS2 and AS3 I think it's important for the more resistant members of my community to try and look at this change with some optimism.
First of all let's look at the current state of Adobe and the entire Flash/Flex/Air ecosystem. Around the time that AS3 came out everyone was griping about how hard it was and what a pain in the ass the static typing was. They were used to the forgiving nature of AS2. But eventually pretty much everyone converted and fell in love with AS3. The departure from AS2 to AS3 is like learning a whole new language, like stepping up from JavaScript to a watered down version of Java. I think that everyone's resistance was not based on how much better 3 was than 2, but really because we just didn't want to change. I don't know any Flash devs with CS degrees. They're all artists and designers and musicians who somehow got into development. For us, changing to a new language is difficult because we're self taught and didn't go through years of higher education in C and Python and Java. Once we got comfortable with a flavor of AS we just didn't want to move. But didn't you learn a whole lot going from 2 to 3? Trust me, when you go back and see what people are doing with JavaScript it'll be a little painful at first but then you'll get over the hump and have that same enthusiasm for it that you did for AS3 and the reason will be because the JS community is on fire these days and they're making so much cool shit you'll quickly forget about being forced to live off the junk that Adobe produces.
And let's talk about that junk for a sec. Let's talk about Adobe as a whole and what they've become. Because I feel like at some point they totally lost their way and tried to turn the whole thing into some messed up flavor of Java. Case in point: text. For years we've struggled with getting the right fonts to show up on a page and getting text to flow properly. Their solution, after literally like a decade of us begging for it, was the Text Layout Framework. Rather than just enhancing the embed button they gave us the biggest pile of over engineered shit and to this day I've never seen a project that actually uses it. Adobe spends so much time building dumb features and tools that are totally half baked and then they basically hold a studio's hand to build a demo for MAX and then they waste a shitload of time trying to jam their way into some market and in the end I still can't get my fucking textfields to work and it's 2011. I'm completely over being tied to the whims of that company because for them, it's all one big land grab and they're trying to get into every market possible. They're stretched, their features are watered down, and half the people in there have never done a real world project and are just applying their CS degrees to problems they don't actually understand.
Finally, I just want to say that we need to look forward to our future successes. Because right now each of us probably does not have a sparkling track record of amazing web apps or mobile apps that are not tied directly to the Flash platform. A friend of mine who has been doing Flash way longer than myself just recently launched an app that went to number 1 in the iOS store. He actually wrote it all in C++ but now he's really eager to learn Objective-C. I think this illustrates two points: 1) You don't have to do JavaScript if you don't want to. Learn Ruby or Python or Objective-C. Take this as an opportunity to broaden your horizons. You don't want to slooooowly sunset with a language and end up being the only COBOL guy left in the area code, so consider it a blessing that Flash is getting the rug pulled out from under it. 2) As soon as you start seeing success in a new language you will very quickly forget about Flash. It's kind of like getting into a new relationship. It sucks right now, but it won't always suck, and when it stops sucking it'll be awesome again.
"I don't know any Flash devs with CS degrees. They're all artists and designers and musicians who somehow got into development."
Exactly. And this is why Flash was so awesome.
Standards are the opposite side of the spectrum, full of the most pedantic and hyper-technical people, and it's why I hate standards. Just standardize everything in Flash and I'd be happy.
As an artist, you're right, I hated going from AS2 to AS3 but once I got past the challenge (rather quickly) I loved it. I'd like to have your enthusiasm, but going from Flash to standards doesn't look the same: I hated going from AS2 to AS3 because it made some things more strict, but it paid off because the resulting product was better. Going from Flash to HTML, however, is the opposite -- things are incredibly messy in JS, and as a result, stuff breaks and is inconsistent and buggy all over the place. This, to an artist, is soul crushing. I want to make cool stuff, and I will climb any mountain to do so, but once I do I don't want to see my work just crumble to bits because I switched to a different machine/device/screen.
I'm sorry, but you don't seem to realize that going with Flash instead of the "pedantic and hyper-technical people" was a deal with the devil. In the short term, you got to do some cool stuff, but in the long term, only open standards will ever truly make progress.
I knew exactly what I was doing with Flash, it was not a deal with anyone. I desperately want to do cool stuff with standards, believe me I'm in some ways I want good standards more than self-proclaimed standards advocates (I've even drafted my own additions and changes to standards technology, and always worked to make my SWFs as well integrated with the standard as possible.)
And the thing that amazes me is the fact that when it comes to longevity, Flash has nothing to apologize for. I can view Flash 3 SWFs and they look exactly how I made them. HTML sites break and blow up in spectacular fashion within months sometimes. A new browser comes out and now your beautiful website looks like trash because something isn't rendered the same. Not always, but more often than I want to deal with (which would be never), and I never once had that problem with Flash.
To me this just sounds like "somebody else should make me my shiny toys so I can be an 'artist'".
Take some responsibility. If you "artists" hadn't all ran after the shiny toys Adobe offered but taken those "pedantic" standards people seriously, you wouldn't be in this position.
The success and dominance of Flash held open standards back for over a decade. An you were not an innocent bystander in that.
Wow. Certainly a different perspective. I thought Flash really changed the way we view the web for the better (video, audio, animation, interaction) pushed by artists who wanted these things for their own creative fulfillment, and standards should be grateful. I remember being told by pedantic standards advocates that all those things were not the purpose of the web and had no business, yet we did it any way out of "irresponsible" desire for "shiny toy" (I do find those descriptions slightly offensive, btw -- "pedantic" and "hyper-technical" are both terms I've heard such people use as words of praise for themself, but I don't mean them as compliments so I suppose I deserve the offense.)
I just wish you could do your thing, and I could do mine. Well, congrats, you win.
How so? Open standards have held open standards back. Usually, competition is what drives things forward. Flash won for a long time because it was better.
Even today, compare flash games to games done with web standards, and that's after everyone has put considerable effort into making their JavaScript engines faster!
With apologies to Carl Sagan, not everyone wants to create a universe to make an apple pie.
W3C held open standards back, everything web related was more or less moribund for 10 years while they wanked off about xhtml and the semantic web. What people wanted was to build applications with web technologies, thats why flash won.
I felt the exact same way for a very, very long time. A few things changed my mind.
The first was the realization that Adobe wasn't going to make any more cool fun stuff for me. I feel like they've just lost their way with all that and now that I look back on it, it seems like Macromedia actually made all the aspects of Flash that I enjoy. The most recent thing Adobe has done for me is Stage3D but even that is so technical that they're relying on 3rd parties like Away3D to build the friendly API on top of it.
The second was doing a project that was as close to an art piece as I've ever come doing ad agency work that was entirely in HTML/CSS3 and JS. It was actually this project if you want to see some pictures: http://inchwormstudio.com/?portfolio=samsung-coast-to-coast-...
What I found while I was doing that project was that the web has changed a lot while I've been doing Flash and I didn't realize how much annoying obtuse boilerplate I had to write in AS3 that just becomes total cake when you're using HTML for markup, CSS for style and JS for slick transitions and communication. My main love affair is with HTML and JS, I still think CSS is...CSS. With HTML I'm getting all the great structural stuff that Flex devs love, without the mind numblingly elaborate class structures they have to deal with. With good JS libraries like jQuery I'm getting the cross browser DOM support that I need because I just don't have those sea legs yet. And when you combine it all you can work really, really fast. I spent the whole first half of that project cursing JavaScript up and down the office. I would make little examples showing how setInterval loses scope and demo it for my team and be like "look! this stuff is retarded! I want AS3 back!" Then one day I had to build this twitter widget, and I sat down and I just cranked it out in no time. And I thought, 'You know, if I had been doing this in Flash I would have spent so much time dealing with URLLoaders and cross policy files and coreLib for JSON parsing...' It just felt like things had gone smoother because I wasn't fighting against the web to make it fit inside my Flash app. And that was about the time that I felt like I got over the hump, and from there it was all downhill.
It totally had warts and I got stung by IE transparency bugs but in the end we sorted it all out and now I know how to deal with those issues. And to be honest, they were pretty minimal. The Facebook API was far worse than the cross browser stuff.
If you're making the transition then read this: http://jqfundamentals.com/
I read it start to finish and it made things so much easier for me. Then once you're comfortable with jQuery, leave it behind and try the other stuff. It feels like there is SO much more to experiment with in the JS world than the AS world and I think that's largely because the community is exponentially larger. Hope that's helpful.
Thanks for your story, it's good to hear some success from someone who felt the same as I do now. I certainly hope I get past that hump, but after 2 years of using jQuery I haven't yet. I can see there being a turning point in 4-5 years, but that's in itself still rather depressing. Here's to hoping it's sooner.
Thanks a lot for the jqfundamentals link! I'm a front-end developer who knows nothing about JavaScript and hasn't ever found a good place to start. This looks like it might be really useful.
"I don't know any Flash devs with CS degrees. They're all artists and designers and musicians who somehow got into development"
Nice to meet you. Even if Flash is not my main language, i do enjoy it (AS3/Flex), and i am the proud owner of a CS degree.
The problem is actually related to this, the problem is very simple: 99% of the articles, blog posts, etc that talk about "Flash is dead" are written by people with either no clue of the Adobe ecosystem and its spread in enterprise, or by Flash dev who are not dev but glorified banner maker. Flash is not dead, never will be, how long internet will take to understand this, it is not going away, HTML5 is not on level on key features, its a fact, not an opinion, end. of. story.
Well this article was written by the author of SwfObject which is, last I checked, the default way of embedding a Flash object on the page so I presume he actually does know a thing or two about the Flash ecosystem.
First of all let's look at the current state of Adobe and the entire Flash/Flex/Air ecosystem. Around the time that AS3 came out everyone was griping about how hard it was and what a pain in the ass the static typing was. They were used to the forgiving nature of AS2. But eventually pretty much everyone converted and fell in love with AS3. The departure from AS2 to AS3 is like learning a whole new language, like stepping up from JavaScript to a watered down version of Java. I think that everyone's resistance was not based on how much better 3 was than 2, but really because we just didn't want to change. I don't know any Flash devs with CS degrees. They're all artists and designers and musicians who somehow got into development. For us, changing to a new language is difficult because we're self taught and didn't go through years of higher education in C and Python and Java. Once we got comfortable with a flavor of AS we just didn't want to move. But didn't you learn a whole lot going from 2 to 3? Trust me, when you go back and see what people are doing with JavaScript it'll be a little painful at first but then you'll get over the hump and have that same enthusiasm for it that you did for AS3 and the reason will be because the JS community is on fire these days and they're making so much cool shit you'll quickly forget about being forced to live off the junk that Adobe produces.
And let's talk about that junk for a sec. Let's talk about Adobe as a whole and what they've become. Because I feel like at some point they totally lost their way and tried to turn the whole thing into some messed up flavor of Java. Case in point: text. For years we've struggled with getting the right fonts to show up on a page and getting text to flow properly. Their solution, after literally like a decade of us begging for it, was the Text Layout Framework. Rather than just enhancing the embed button they gave us the biggest pile of over engineered shit and to this day I've never seen a project that actually uses it. Adobe spends so much time building dumb features and tools that are totally half baked and then they basically hold a studio's hand to build a demo for MAX and then they waste a shitload of time trying to jam their way into some market and in the end I still can't get my fucking textfields to work and it's 2011. I'm completely over being tied to the whims of that company because for them, it's all one big land grab and they're trying to get into every market possible. They're stretched, their features are watered down, and half the people in there have never done a real world project and are just applying their CS degrees to problems they don't actually understand.
Finally, I just want to say that we need to look forward to our future successes. Because right now each of us probably does not have a sparkling track record of amazing web apps or mobile apps that are not tied directly to the Flash platform. A friend of mine who has been doing Flash way longer than myself just recently launched an app that went to number 1 in the iOS store. He actually wrote it all in C++ but now he's really eager to learn Objective-C. I think this illustrates two points: 1) You don't have to do JavaScript if you don't want to. Learn Ruby or Python or Objective-C. Take this as an opportunity to broaden your horizons. You don't want to slooooowly sunset with a language and end up being the only COBOL guy left in the area code, so consider it a blessing that Flash is getting the rug pulled out from under it. 2) As soon as you start seeing success in a new language you will very quickly forget about Flash. It's kind of like getting into a new relationship. It sucks right now, but it won't always suck, and when it stops sucking it'll be awesome again.