The future of Flash?
Tonight I relaunch my website as a HTML wordpress template for the first time. For the last 5 years or so I have always run a Flash based website. I even sold the flash wordpress template to lots of other enthusiastic people (note: still for sale).
So why have I gone HTML? Several reasons;
1) Mac performance. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, Flash’s performance on OSX sucks. Infact I haven’t seen it this bad since I ran Flash 7 back in 2005. The truth is Flash had come a long was, versions 8 and 9 made huge performance improvements. However these gains have been lost and it makes it difficult, if not impossible to create large scale flash sites for the Mac.
It’s not impossible though! I also develop Adobe Flex applications and they are ok. Whilst it might take 80% CPU to run a YouTube clip, a Flex application I developed (Lifetick) runs at about 13% CPU and performs quite well.
If Adobe want to keep Flash as a viable development platform, they have to address this issue quickly.
2) The Flash IDE sucks. It’s too clunky, slow and just painful to use. The transition to AS3 was a nightmare (and I was familiar with AS3 already from working with Flex… go figure). I was able to put together this new template in just 2 nights (there is still more work I want to do to refine it) but all the work I did was done in TextMate, a fantastic powerful lightweight text editor which does heaps with out all the pain.
3) CSS3 and transparent PNGS. Advanced CSS and using transparent PNG graphics allowed me to create this template faster. In particular the Navigation bar owes a lot to this. None of this might be terribly new, but my eyes are opening up to the possibilities.
It really pained me to write this, I get really annoyed when I read people putting Flash down, they mention stuff like no deep-linking (solved, check out SWFAddress), and terrible user experience (Flash doesn’t create bad websites, people do!). Whilst my love of flash websites has taken a hit, my love of Flex is only stronger. I still consider it the best way to create a rich web based application. My day job revolves around developing a HTML base application, but my spare time is spent working on a Flex based application. And I fell like I work faster in Flex, and deliver far better results.
So I don’t want to see Flash die, I want it to get stronger, I want Flex to get more acceptance in the Web-apps developer sphere. But most of all I want Adobe to work on the Flash player’s performance. Seriously guys, you are running out of time before too much damage has been done and your technology is worthless.
bob said @ November 12th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
It’s sad man…
But it’s true that Adobe Flash IDE is a shit. (I prefer use flash 8 for as2 project. it’s safer and faster).
Let’s warm your heart with this fresh flash / worpdress-based website that you perhaps not noticed: http://www.designersunited.gr
Cheers,
Patrick Wall said @ November 12th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
It runs fine for me on 10.5.7. Snow Leopard is the operating system not the tool. If our most important suite of digital graphic design tools don’t work on Snow Leopard, don’t upgrade.
tarkin said @ November 13th, 2009 at 1:52 am
“your technology [will be] worthless.”
I would say all the evidence is that flash is going from strength to strength – new platforms, AS3, better video etc.
is there something about mac users that means that they are a bit self-centered. They represent a minority of users and a small one at that.
Also, I’m just not sure that your decision not to use flash will resonate through the industry in the way that you imagine.
iongion said @ November 13th, 2009 at 3:13 am
“It’s not impossible though! I also develop Adobe Flex applications and they are ok. Whilst it might take 80% CPU to run a YouTube clip, a Flex application I developed (Lifetick) runs at about 13% CPU and performs quite well.”
So you say flex works better than flash ?
- this depends on the programmer, if one does shit code, expect shit performance no matter what happens to the player.
Flash and Flex ared both the same thing, by using the very same flash player, in the end, both flash and flex create swf, the executable bytecode of the flash player vm.
In my experience, flash apps that i create are far faster than flex apps as the level of generalization on my specific domain is way smaller than that of a general purpose ui framework as flex is.
John Dowdell said @ November 13th, 2009 at 5:34 am
I had always wondered about whole weblogs in SWF….
On the Apple stuff, cooperation is slow, but it’s coming. Using 10.6.2 fixes more Snow Leopard issues. The Mac browsers vary in how they gate plugins, so switching among them can help. But access to APIs is still more difficult than on other OS.
jd/adobe
Marlon said @ November 13th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
I’ve found that FF 3.5 and Camino seem to have addressed the flash CPU issue pretty well especially in last week. I hope you have another go at the Flash WP template.
Does anyone know if the flash template works in the latest version of WP?
Tim Wilson said @ November 13th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
@marlon The flash template should work with the latest wordpress version.
I have noticed Flash runs better in Camino, I think it is because it is running as a 32bit application where as Safari is running as a 64bit.
@iongion Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply Flex was faster than Flash, but I wanted to point out that even a complete Flex based application can run ok with out major CPU usage. I find the more animation or video there is, the worse performance is. Which is what most flash animations contain.
@tarkin My concerns is that there is a percetion growing in the market place that Flash is a CPU hog and and growing number of people who would like to see a “click to activate flash” option built into the HTML5 spec. This is damaging to the flash player as it might result in less people running it on their computers, or leaving disabled.
Chad Campbell said @ November 14th, 2009 at 1:27 am
Hi Tim,
Thank you for this post. Just out of curiosity, have you considered Silverlight? Silverlight addresses cases 1 and 2 in your post quite nicely. In addition, the developer story in Silverlight is second to none.
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Evans said @ November 15th, 2009 at 3:08 am
AS3.0 kicks as flash is he best…who ever wrote this..sucks
Tim Wilson said @ November 15th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
@evens AS3 is awesome, I love using it in Flex, however even though I like to think I know AS3 really really well, it still seemed very difficult to use in Flash CS4.
Darren said @ November 16th, 2009 at 9:06 am
@chad, Tim has already said he’s using a Mac. The “developer story” for Silverlight on a Mac is not “second to none”, it’s “none”.
jah said @ December 9th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
hmm. By reading your article, it seems to me like the problem is comming from Mac… Isn’t it?
Perception said @ December 16th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
the way you have tried to line out the future of flash is indeed great.
DJ NightLife said @ January 14th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Great move. Flash is really bad for Search Engine Optimization unlike xhtml.