Continued from Part 1
So there, I said it, any animation or heavily interactive work that I am going to do in the next few years will be done with Flash. Here's why:
Inertia is a Hard Thing to Overcome
I made a point earlier about IE6 still being commonly used, and corporate environments are notorious for being dragged into updates, mostly for security purposes. Legacy systems are hard to abandon, and that is as true for Flash as any technology. There are so many web sites and web applications that would be broken without FlashPlayer (ask any iPhone user) that adoption of the plugin will enjoy its high level of browser penetration for the forseeable future. This ensures a clear road ahead for new Flash content, even long term projects.
The driving force for change is hard for me to see, beyond the open standards push and certain corporate interests. Most people I know don't care how the video is displayed, they just want it to work, and only change when things stop working or something better comes along. No matter how hard I try, I just can't picture my wife saying, "I am so glad that this video is using an open standard for playback and embedding."
HTML 5 Won't Change my Tools
Cool stuff comes from designers and interactive developers and animators, let's call them creatives, and for the most part, Adobe owns this market. The creatives going to school right now are cutting their teeth on Adobe tools, and those tools make working creatives more productive and efficient. If HTML 5 becomes the standard for all vector and raster animation, video playback and interactivity, I will be at the forefront of the mainstream adoption wave, and I will more than likely be using an Adobe tool to create that content, along with most of my peers. How many web sites are still created and mainted through Dreamweaver? Sure, you can edit JavaScript and HTML and CSS with text editors, but does anyone really want to?
I guess as an Adobe shareholder, that should be the takeaway. Even if FlashPlayer isn't the long term choice for video or even rich media playback, people are still going to use the tools to create and animate the content in the first place. Content is still king, and Adobe arguably has the best content creation tools. It should also be noted that Adobe has made Flash very much a moving target, making good choices on what new functionality to add as well as aggressively implementing those features into FlashPlayer when ready. I foresee amazing design options for creatives as Flash adds hardware accelerated 3D at some point in the future, and as Adobe finds ways to make these complex workflows easier, faster, and more designer-friendly.
Get Back to Me in 2012
If you are still reading this, then you probably think that new tools and technologies are as exciting as I do. From my viewpoint, creating content for deployment on the web today, HTML 5 is going to be fun to watch develop, but that is as far as it goes for now. There is nothing to currently consider implementing into production projects, especially as there are many battles to be fought over the next few years by the Googles and the Microsofts and the Adobes of the world. I fully expect to see some major shakeouts and breakdowns as things progress, but in the end, we all benefit from better content, better tools, and better experiences online.
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