7 ms·

Flash is dead. Long live the internet.

152 points by tensafefrogs 15y ago

sabret00the 15y ago
It's far from dead, it's just fighting battles it has a chance to actually win. Practically every company out there has finite resources and as such can only fight so many battles if it has a will to win the war. It's not Adobe's fault that Flash has been overused and as such they've made strides to compensate. The AIR platform was a huge step in dissuading webmasters from Flash based websites instead it's incubating the desktop app culture. The work that has gone into the platform has been a huge win for them from a PR perspective. Again with their recent concession in regards to video with HTML5 (webm). We're likely to see Flash reborn in order to take advantage of things that it can do well, rather than being the stop gap it accidentally found itself as. I suspect they'll still be a major player in the web video market, but rather than fight against the tide, they'll embrace it. They'll work to be a lower cost alternative for webmasters by exploiting P2P technologies that vanilla HTML5 doesn't have. It'll be an interesting few years.
- melling 15y ago
  No, it's dead. It's about to enter a death spiral. If you want to write anything for the web that appears on any mobile device then you can't use the Flash browser plugin. We're going to have a billion mobile internet devices within 5 years, if not double that. Now, since this greatly diminishes the market, Adobe will invest less in it and more in their HTML5 tools because they want that market too. They're going to follow the money and where is the money going?
  - sabret00the 15y ago
    The money right now is in apps. It's why ideas like Mozilla's B2G will struggle. It's why Adobe has thrown so many resources at AIR. To reiterate; If you ask a user if they prefer an app on their smartphone or a website, you'll be told an app. Flash really isn't a player in that regard. In truth it should've never been and hasn't wanted to be for a while. HTML sites will be and rightfully so, the standard for a long time. But we're living in the age of the app now. It's far more social and measurable than a website can hope to be. It's kinda like "there's web presence and there's PRESENCE" the app provides that in a way where by a website remains simply functional.
    - tensafefrogs 15y ago
      I'm curious what you think about the issue of mobile apps and scalability (in terms of having a distinct app for everything you do on your phone). The argument is that users won't want to install a separate app for all the various things they do on their phones (especially not the things that they don't do often) and would perhaps favor a mobile website instead.
      - sabret00the 15y ago
        You have some users who hate the idea of installing loads of things and those are generally users who have the phone for having the phone sake. They're users that have been forced to migrate to smartphones from featurephones. You also have the social users who like being able to talk about their apps with their friends and share via the different services available. For those users, which often overlap the more 'ignorant' users, what they simply want is a reachable recognisable service they can use anywhere. The argument that users don't/won't install lots of apps on their phones is simply wishful thinking. The reality is exactly the opposite of that. Users that have traditionally struggled with various features of the internet in browsers are able to do what they've always wanted in apps with far more ease. Even despite the a lot of the Mozilla community being dead-set against using a native UI, they've pushed on and will eat more market share as a result due to the instantly recognisable interact they'll get as they launch the app rather than waiting for the interface to load on XUL/HTML/JS/XML that just aren't as quick. You also have to take into account that with a website, you have no one to run to. Users generally feel ignored, where as with the social aspect of any app market users feel like they're patt of a community. Anything that currently states users prefer websites over apps is incredibly ignorant of the facts. A prime example is with Twitter. Tweetdeck on desktop and mobile shows far more usage than that of the website. As does Ubersocial and in fact their own apps. There's a firm desire on the parts of many to see people use the web over apps but those are merely desires of a small percentage.
    - secretbatcave 15y ago
      Where are the HTML5 web adverts? They don't exsist because: 1)you have to code things 4 times (once for all the browsers + fallback) 2) There are no artist friendly tools (google's flash translator only works for chrome, see above) 3) Everything looks different in each browser 4) JS animation is Sllllloooooowww 5) Animation primitives are missing, those that exsist are from the 1960s 6) there are no mature standard/implementations (in widescale use) with flash's workflow you: 1) create a flash file with the mature tools, test, release 2) create an animated gif as fallback yes its buggy, and the video is slower than decent native support, but it works the same across all browsers (90%)
- tensafefrogs 15y ago
  I agree that Flash will remain a major player in online video for a few more years (I also worked at YouTube on the video player team for 4 years). But for everything else it has fallen very much out of favor, hence the strong post title. Even non-Flash online video has made huge strides in the past year, so I expect that to eventually erode away Flash's grip on that as well. The only real question there is how long it will take to sort out all of the codec issues that are holding it back at the moment.
nascentone 15y ago
"Just keep making awesome things with whatever tools you have at your disposal." This is what's depressing, though. I want to make awesome things, but HTML is simply an inferior and more restrictive platform than Flash. The thought of programming in Javascript instead of ActionScript 3 is soul-crushing. Javascript is basically ActionScript 1.0 (which I thought I migrated from years ago) without the cross browser consistency and more advanced graphical APIs. Long live the internet, but losing Flash is a bad thing for the internet. It's not Flash that needs to die, it's the entire archaic and poor sighted standards stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript and the horrible plain file HTTP delivery system) in favor of a new standard stack that can actually do something close to the Flash Player.
- tensafefrogs 15y ago
  I agree that Javascript isn't as mature as Actionscript 3 feels, but would you really choose to build a website or web application in Flash over Javascript even if it meant a poorer user experience for your users? Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax. More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language. Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?
  - joeyespo 15y ago
    > Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor? That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement? Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    Well, I have been using Adobe Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor for coding Javascript, but I hesitate to call it a great one. I suspect what you are looking for is a great jQuery/jQuery UI editor (i.e. a rich interface framework) that also happens to support javascript.
zabar 15y ago
It's not dead yet. Actually there is two things : - one of course is that as HTML5 get stronger flash loses interest for some scenarios (even if it's still the best choice for many like games right now) - the other is that for mobile web, it was never the right choice. If you want to target mobile right now, you either do a really simple site in HTML or you target a deeper experience with an app, but there was no space in between for a plugin. Adobe try to embrace both of these cases with their HTML5 tools for the web and Air for the apps. I think that what Stave Jobs understood early on and a reason why he never allowed plugins on mobile browsers.
- tensafefrogs 15y ago
  Most of the arguments against Flash being dead seem to be one of these: 1) Games 2) Mobile apps 3) Video #1 I agree that flash is better for making games, but how big of a market are games on the internet? It's a 'big' market, to be sure, but how big compared to the number of Flash websites a few years ago? Surely it's a low percentage (anyone have actual stats? I don't know of any). Is the amount of Flash games being made enough to keep Adobe interested in continuing to improve Flash? As the desktop market recedes and mobile devices become more popular with users (and I truly do believe that it will) what will happen to the Flash games? As for #2 - mobile apps. This could be the answer to the above, but why use AIR when you can get better performance writing native code for whatever platform you are working on? I'm sure it will work out for companies that want to save a few dollars and be able to launch a simple game on many platforms while writing it once, but that kind of development has rarely succeeded in the world. Look at Java apps on windows/osx - they often feel klunky and look ugly and don't support the native UI elements of the host OS (does AIR do this on mobile phones? I'm admittedly not that familiar with it). Because of the history of this area of technology, I'm highly skeptical. #3 I agree with, and covered this in a comment below. I believe Flash will be useful for desktop video delivery for a few years to come, but will eventually lose to native support.
  - benologist 15y ago
    Games on the internet are massive. We track 100s of millions of hours a month spent playing them. Adobe's not really killing Flash, what's happening is it's transitioning to a development platform rather than development + consumption platform and that's not a horrible thing - Flash is a great platform to develop in, being able to export mobile apps from it is far more important than being able to play the SWF files on mobile. Flash on mobile could have worked but there's two reasons it doesn't ... one is purely technical that time and improved hardware would erode, the killer one is consumption - games on websites are just a plain inferior way to play them vs apps, and ads + video + applications are all solved problems. There is no must-have use case as a consumption platform on mobile. They made the right choice - let Flash become just a development platform and let the output be whatever provides the optimal user experience - on desktops it is (or can be) the Flash Player, on mobile it's apps and HTML5.
ggerrard 15y ago
Yep, things change. Adobe also killed Director, another seminal and important product. They bought Supersplash, turned it into Flash (and a pile of money) and with Apple's help killed it too. Things change, but they stay the same.
secretbatcave 15y ago
Try and animate a walk cycle in pure javascript. now tell me that flash is dead.
- stuartmemo 15y ago
  http://digitalsurgeons.com/labs/html5/canvas/zombies/ http://digitalsurgeons.com/labs/html5/canvas/zombies/ Flash is dead.
  - secretbatcave 15y ago
    That was convincingly pixar level walk cycle On a 2010 macbook that runs at 15fps, which is a great step forward in speed for moving 8 sprites. Have you actually tried to animate anything other than a solid body, in just code? http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml is a walk cycle, and as you can see they are animating the control points, so the body smoothly deforms. As far as I'm aware you can control individual control points of an SVG with javascript. Even if you could without a decent interface you couldn't do more than move a ball about. HTML/JS is shit at animation. Flash is rubbish, and can be much more efficient, however HTML/JS is 10 times worse.
    - driverdan 15y ago
      I don't know what's wrong with your computer but my 2010 MacBook Pro running Chrome hits a steady 52 fps.
      - saint-loup 15y ago
        45 fps on Chrome, ~15 on Firefox (MBP 2009).
        secretbatcave 15y ago
        but that's the point, its 8 sprites!
  - 15y ago
ale55andro 15y ago
Dead is a rather harsh statement. It's true that the mobile market is flourishing and is more important now than ever, but what I see clearly is that adobe wants that market too and they seem to be investing in html5 tooling whilst maintaining their flash offering. So in the end it will come down to using the right tool/tech for the right job. More choice to you, more power to you and works out for adobe as well. Don't forget that flash still enjoys an excellent penetration rate on the desktop and there will always be a market for it. Perhaps one day when the pc is dead too and the indefinite, perfectly working apps written in flash are rewritten in html5 because we've now replaced the pc with tablets and mobile devices.
edison_c 15y ago
dead or not, companies STILL want to make a bunch of flashy, frustratingly not-very-useful websites. Until companies realize that consumers want information, quickly, and don't want to have to hunt around for it, we're going to plagued one way or another by web sites that eschew function over (yeeg) 'form'.
frooxie 15y ago
It's dead? Now how am I supposed to make a game with music and sound effects that is easy to play on multiple platforms?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
almogdesign 15y ago
Great post
gerggerg 15y ago
streaming video, streaming audio, socket connections, fast 3d(soon), advertising, webcam support, mic support, clipboard manipulation, install base... youtube, rdio, pandora, hulu, kongregate, flickr, imgur, github, googledocs, every site that has ads... There's a ton of money made off flash these days. No one's saying you have to use it, but lets be a little realistic with ourselves.
- JayeshSidhwani 15y ago
  Audio/Video Streaming is something for which Flash would be really needed. I don't see HTML5 devs talking about live streaming yet.
  - Andrex 15y ago
    True, but that doesn't mean it isn't being talked about at all: http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/
    - secretbatcave 15y ago
      Talked about != implementation 3D graphics directly in the browser has been talked about for well over 15 years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML for example Java for another.
    - JayeshSidhwani 15y ago
      This is very good, no doubt. But what really worries me is that there has to be a browser engine implementation, different for every browser being used. The devs have come up with the browser engine for Opera, FF but only for the latest versions. And, no one is talking about the great IE's. When I go in a production environment for a product, I cannot really keep a limitation on the browsers/or more so their versions. Once, this trouble is sorted, WebRTC looks goody.
  - Okvivi 15y ago
    Here's a very good read (granted, a year old) about Flash vs. HTML5 at Youtube. http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html
frenchfries 15y ago
probably the best article I've read about flash this week ... gr8
robdodson 15y ago
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.
poppysan 15y ago
People act as if flash is being abandoned. Its not. Mobile Flash is. Several new smart-phones and tablets nowadays use browsers with REAL FLASH on it, so there is no need to continue development on mobile flash. That's all that happened. No big win for anyone. Adobe has been focusing on html5, as have the rest of the web, and imho, Adobe has some great tools to author content in html5 already.
- joshtynjala 15y ago
  You're thinking of Flash Lite, but that's not what everyone is freaking out about. Adobe has, in fact, stopped development of the exact "REAL" Flash Player for mobile (tablet and smartphone) browsers that you refer to.
- notatoad 15y ago
  flash has been abandoned. developers won't (or at least shouldn't) use a closed platform whose developer has expressed a lack of faith in it. even though flash will still be developed for x86, it's clear that adobe is getting ready to drop it. and yeah, this announcement is about mobile flash, as used on android phones, not about flash lite. that's been dead for years.
brunoimbrizi 15y ago
- You want this? Sorry, can't do it. Flash is dead. Not possible in HTML yet. Design something else or wait a few years please.
driverdan 15y ago
90% of the developers I've discussed Flash with hate it, myself included (note: I haven't discussed it with many game devs). A much lower percentage of designers hate it. Geoff's article and the comments here seem to reenforce that. The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is.
- natesm 15y ago
  I am curious about that too, unless these designers aren't very good and are just trying to translate print media to the web without considering the ramifications of the platform (see: almost every iPad magazine). Flash isn't a terrible platform to develop for. The app itself (as in Flash CS5.app) is pretty horrid, but it's not that hard to write ActionScript in vim or TextMate. What Flash does offend is my sense of design, specifically UX design. Standard platform widgets? Nope. Standard platform behavior? Nope. Stealing keyboard focus? Yep. Bad scrolling? Yep. Back button? Nope.
- armandososa 15y ago
  The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is. Really? Try to write code using a brush on a canvas. That's what designers feel having to design using code. It sucks.
  - commieneko 15y ago
    I was doing visual design using code 30 years ago. It's doable, sometimes even preferable. It only sucks until you develope a facility with the tools. Just like watercoler paints or charcoal; which I've used for 40 years. Design happens in your head, but it's a feed back loop between your tools and your imagination. Different tools _do_ influence the outcome.
- nascentone 15y ago
  Designers love Flash because it gives you a canvas to express yourself on. Standards do not. If you think it does, I would predict you aren't a designer, because there's a big difference between technical parity and realistic results. I can concede that as a designer, I really don't care if HTML is technically better for some reason, I just want to have the freedom to do cool stuff, and that this is the tension between those are "Flash fanboys" and those who are Standards fanboys.
JenniferMason 15y ago
But Facebook is still alive. I look forward to "Facebook is dead. Long live the Internet." Think about it: as long as Facebook exists, 60% of the Web is on Facebook.
missing_cipher 15y ago
Far from dead. Only Flash on mobile is being discontinued, the larger, stronger, desktop market won't be discontinued.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
  Thousands of popular tv cartoons shows are made using flash only; competing head-to-head with Toon Boom Studio.
loup-vaillant 15y ago
The internet and the web aren't the same thing. Please don't talk as if they were. This is more important than it may seem at a first glance. Non-techies already tend to genuinely confuse the two. Those people have no problem buying a crippled data plans that will let them query web servers and nothing else, because they will believe they "have the internet" on their phones. But when you're behind a big NAT, with no public IP and most ports filtered, you don't have an internet connection. (Even according the big French carriers themselves. Thank goodness, They since stopped calling their data plans "internet" in their ads.) The obvious effect is that the web is taking over the internet. As it does, it becomes increasingly acceptable to block nearly everything else (for home connections at least). That would surely "tame the internet".
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  The Internet and the Web aren't the same thing. Please don't talk as if they were. Fixed.
gord 15y ago
Theres no reason why Adobe [ or more likely, a startup ] cant write a superb (web based) animation editor for designers, which spits out HTML5/CSS or SVG + Javascript. Couple that with basic workflow and 'publish to site' and you have a product with very wide appeal and usefulness.
jphackworth 15y ago
I'll believe Flash is dead when there's no Flash running on Kongregate any more.
trolol 15y ago
Java Applets FTW :D
jhuni 15y ago
Flash is still a fundamental part of the desktop user experience, so the battle is not over. The free flash alternative gnash remains a high priority project.
brownhornet 15y ago
I guess I'd be OK with the move to HTML5, if it worked on all of the browsers that my clients want me to support. My last application that I rolled out using canvas and excanvas is still quirky. Unfortunately, IE6-8 still lives on. Until there is a feasible way to do custom control creation, and have it work properly, there will still be a purpose for Flash/Flash Builder.
Thonbo 15y ago
why is every body talking about it like adobe is giving up on flash on desktops- they are not a new version just came out friday and they have huge list of things to come in the next releases
kirbydooo 15y ago
I have not read any of your comments yet but I plan on doing so...I feel right at home when I see comments as long as the ones are below because I know that I am dealing with intelligent people that understand and most importantly will probably understand or at least take the time to try to understand why it is that I too type such LOOOOONG comments....including places that I sholdn't like the corporate phuking job that I have as an account manager for an IT reseller company here in Scottsdale, AZ. Also, FACEBOOK...short and sweet seems to reign supreme because you are usually just dealing with family and friends and or considered the masses and most of them are not as 'technical' as I am and have only recently joined this FAD of weilding technology as a lifestyle that has only really been recently socially accepted by the masses and non-power users (I hate the stupidity of the term geek but to each their own) and not as a passion like I have always had and been doing for the past 30 years... I mean come one and face it people...the 'old school geeks' like me have spent half of their social time explaining technology to people and usually only when asked about something because they never got into that or all of a sudden want to be your best friend because they need technical assistance. That always burned me out I don't know about you folks but it was disconcerning at best when you would be doing your fifth 'tazmanian devil' on your buddy's computer because he still won't stay off the dirtiest porn sites imaginable and of course... when you were rendering this phreeeeeee assistance they would usually make the comment..."I don't know what I was doing when it got all phuked up...I think someone was surfing porn sites..." Thus the reason I always made a FRESH IMAGE of their machine after the 1st time I laid into it. Now I just tell them to call geek squad so that when they get a bill that costs them more than a new computer they think twice about taking us professional power users for granted. I don't think that their time is more valuable than mine in any way but they certainly seem to think so when they bring these antiquated machines to me and think that I am going to spend 4 hours fixing an OS infected with butt-sex viruses I call the 'AIDS of puterz' instead of the 30 minutes it should take me if they were to have a modern machine. Just the sight of one of these A-holez on my caller ID or now in my contact list coming up on the screen of my micro-powered hand held computer from hell (T-Mobile G2x running Cyanogen 7.1.0.1 MOD coupled with the Trinity kernel that let's me overclock the sucker just for phun and on the phly to 1560 Mhz PER CORE!!!) Oh yeah!....Just the sight of them coming up on that little powerhouse of a tri-corder that just also happens to make phone calls makes me want to wretch! NOW ONTO FLASH.....as you can see we are all 'skilled' and have deep roots in microprocessing love and many of you might even have more history than I but not very many of you trust me... I used to run BBS's back in the early 80's with my PORTABLE Commodore 64-SX computer with an IEEE 8 bit bus HBA jacked into my cartidge port so that I could hook up my SPIFFY SET OF 2 1001's SUPER HIGH DENSITY 1MB 5.25" floppy disk drives... so if you used to log onto COCONET and remember COMPUSERVE and the infamous ARMOR PLATED CARTRIDGE PORTS (one left and one right) of an Atari 800 that you played your first game of 'ULTIMA' wasting hours and days and weeks and months doing Lord British's laundry then you might be worthy of understanding the big picture here... we'll see though... APPLE PURCHASED ADOBE FOR ONE REASON ABOUT 6 or 7 years ago...THEY WANTED TO DISALLOW, PUT THE KABOSH(sp?), PURPOSELY NOT GIVE SUPPORT TO ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT WERE GOING TO BUY THEIR CRAPPY iDevices and future iPhones they had in their plans of releasing with all of the other crappy iCrapple gear like iPudz and whatever other rotten crAlpples that have yet to fall from the crApple tree of nightmare lipstick on a pig devices that we TRUE and LONG TERM (thus the big into on my credz) SUPER USERz have NEVER BEEN INTERESTED IN FOR ONE REASON AND ONE REASON ONLY!!! WE HAVE NEVER HAD THE DESIRE OR NEED TO PLAY WITH OVERPRICED YUPPIE TOYZ THAT WERE PROPRIETARY AND CREATED OUT OF PURE GREED AND DECEPTIVE MARKETING IDEAS TO TRY TO FINALLY TURN A PROFIT FOR A COMPANY THAT NEVER MADE A DIME ON THEIR BOTTOM LINE IN OVER 30 YEARS OF EXISTANCE UNTIL THEY STARTED SELLING A STOLEN PATENT BASED DEVICE CALLED AN iPud! Then they gave this iPud thingy the ability to make phone calls and started calling it a SmartPhone...You new people (last ten years) that think you know what the phuk is up....just shut the phuk up on this one because you have no phuking clue and you never will... Ya see new people... crApple Inc. has never invented a god damn thing ever...they have either borrowed (stolen), aquired, or just plain copied everything they have ever done and put a dress on it and then tripled the retail price of anything like it and the crApple subculture continued to bite like a school of freshly hatched guppies (but they were actually old school hipped turned yuppie so now I like to refer to them as YIPPIEz!) the whole time being snobs because they think that unless they didn't overpay and basically get ripped the phuk off that they weren't buying the BEST of the BEST gear. Well sorry to burst all you crApple wanna be's bubblez but any old school and still way ahead of the curve today geeks out there because of just plain common sense and not because we're wanting to tweak everything all the time would tell you today that they have never owned a crApple product, never had the desire to own or spend a dime on a crApple product and will never purchase a crApple product until the day they die or they can finally afford to buy that $HIT lying company and burn the phuker to the ground and build a memorial in its place in memory of the MAC LISA....(Don't know what that is???? then stop reading this ya jackazz!) So you've gotten this far in my lovely little tale of two worlds...one being the alien lifeform that has recently gained momentum but really has no sustainability because even you recent morons that are calling themselves techie'z are starting to realize that crApple SUX! always did, always will, and you got taken! So you made it this far? Well there is not that far to go for you to read why I am writing all of this first... so here it is!!! crApple Inc. purchased ADOBE so that they could purposely NOT GIVE TO THEIR IGNORANT DEVICE OWNERz the ability to watch the majority of VIDz out there on the internet but especially from YOUTUBE!!! Guess why or already know why? BECAUSE DUMMY, simple deal...it's owned by GOOGLE and GOOGLE is going to take over the entire planet...and this phuking geek is okay with it. Okay with it because Micro$oft is almost as bad as crApple in their bull$hit deceptive everything and GOOGLE and I have been in bed with each other for over 8 years of smartphone love. I have been using their PHREEEEEE everything even before my same day it was released to the public aquisition of the G1. THE VERY FIRST GOOGLE PHONE...keep it safe if you still have one people because some day it's going to be worth a fortune when it's inducted into the Smithsonian Institute of Science as the VERY 1ST GOOGLE HARDWARE DEVICE EVER!!! GOOGLE preys on the companies and advertisers that prey on you...Micro$oft Inc. and crApple Inc. PERY ON YOU! The device or product owner themself! I have never directly (read that again...DIRECTLY) given GOOGLE one thin dime of money and yet I use all of their products and services for PHREEEEEEE 20 times a day...however...when I first set up my PHREEEEEE GOOGLE VOICE account appx three years ago when it was still INVITATION ONLY! I also set up my GOOGLE CHECKOUT and when they verified my debit card account that day they gave me the dime...YEP...and I STILL HAVE ALL .10 CENTS BITCHEz! When I look at my GOOGLE VOICE VOICEMAIL TO TEXT TRANSCRIPTS using their widget (Don't worry about what a widget is crApple people because you don't have them) I always see my account balance at the bottom and it still says ".10" and its even colored in GREEEEEEEEEEN! awwwww....a nice touch.... so crApple Inc. valuable...?? NOPE, nothing about them adds anything valuable to your life...just more debt, deceptive advertising and marketing, half truths, only one part of the REAL story, and most important YOU the crApple device owner is now imprisoned into your little crApple trendy fad driven world and will be left with your little crApple dikz out when this bull$hit is over!

152 points by tensafefrogs 15y ago

It's far from dead, it's just fighting battles it has a chance to actually win. Practically every company out there has finite resources and as such can only fight so many battles if it has a will to win the war. It's not Adobe's fault that Flash has been overused and as such they've made strides to compensate. The AIR platform was a huge step in dissuading webmasters from Flash based websites instead it's incubating the desktop app culture. The work that has gone into the platform has been a huge win for them from a PR perspective. Again with their recent concession in regards to video with HTML5 (webm). We're likely to see Flash reborn in order to take advantage of things that it can do well, rather than being the stop gap it accidentally found itself as. I suspect they'll still be a major player in the web video market, but rather than fight against the tide, they'll embrace it. They'll work to be a lower cost alternative for webmasters by exploiting P2P technologies that vanilla HTML5 doesn't have. It'll be an interesting few years.

melling 15y ago
No, it's dead. It's about to enter a death spiral. If you want to write anything for the web that appears on any mobile device then you can't use the Flash browser plugin. We're going to have a billion mobile internet devices within 5 years, if not double that. Now, since this greatly diminishes the market, Adobe will invest less in it and more in their HTML5 tools because they want that market too. They're going to follow the money and where is the money going?
- sabret00the 15y ago
  The money right now is in apps. It's why ideas like Mozilla's B2G will struggle. It's why Adobe has thrown so many resources at AIR. To reiterate; If you ask a user if they prefer an app on their smartphone or a website, you'll be told an app. Flash really isn't a player in that regard. In truth it should've never been and hasn't wanted to be for a while. HTML sites will be and rightfully so, the standard for a long time. But we're living in the age of the app now. It's far more social and measurable than a website can hope to be. It's kinda like "there's web presence and there's PRESENCE" the app provides that in a way where by a website remains simply functional.
  - tensafefrogs 15y ago
    I'm curious what you think about the issue of mobile apps and scalability (in terms of having a distinct app for everything you do on your phone). The argument is that users won't want to install a separate app for all the various things they do on their phones (especially not the things that they don't do often) and would perhaps favor a mobile website instead.
    - sabret00the 15y ago
      You have some users who hate the idea of installing loads of things and those are generally users who have the phone for having the phone sake. They're users that have been forced to migrate to smartphones from featurephones. You also have the social users who like being able to talk about their apps with their friends and share via the different services available. For those users, which often overlap the more 'ignorant' users, what they simply want is a reachable recognisable service they can use anywhere. The argument that users don't/won't install lots of apps on their phones is simply wishful thinking. The reality is exactly the opposite of that. Users that have traditionally struggled with various features of the internet in browsers are able to do what they've always wanted in apps with far more ease. Even despite the a lot of the Mozilla community being dead-set against using a native UI, they've pushed on and will eat more market share as a result due to the instantly recognisable interact they'll get as they launch the app rather than waiting for the interface to load on XUL/HTML/JS/XML that just aren't as quick. You also have to take into account that with a website, you have no one to run to. Users generally feel ignored, where as with the social aspect of any app market users feel like they're patt of a community. Anything that currently states users prefer websites over apps is incredibly ignorant of the facts. A prime example is with Twitter. Tweetdeck on desktop and mobile shows far more usage than that of the website. As does Ubersocial and in fact their own apps. There's a firm desire on the parts of many to see people use the web over apps but those are merely desires of a small percentage.
  - secretbatcave 15y ago
    Where are the HTML5 web adverts? They don't exsist because: 1)you have to code things 4 times (once for all the browsers + fallback) 2) There are no artist friendly tools (google's flash translator only works for chrome, see above) 3) Everything looks different in each browser 4) JS animation is Sllllloooooowww 5) Animation primitives are missing, those that exsist are from the 1960s 6) there are no mature standard/implementations (in widescale use) with flash's workflow you: 1) create a flash file with the mature tools, test, release 2) create an animated gif as fallback yes its buggy, and the video is slower than decent native support, but it works the same across all browsers (90%)
tensafefrogs 15y ago
I agree that Flash will remain a major player in online video for a few more years (I also worked at YouTube on the video player team for 4 years). But for everything else it has fallen very much out of favor, hence the strong post title. Even non-Flash online video has made huge strides in the past year, so I expect that to eventually erode away Flash's grip on that as well. The only real question there is how long it will take to sort out all of the codec issues that are holding it back at the moment.

nascentone 15y ago

"Just keep making awesome things with whatever tools you have at your disposal." This is what's depressing, though. I want to make awesome things, but HTML is simply an inferior and more restrictive platform than Flash. The thought of programming in Javascript instead of ActionScript 3 is soul-crushing. Javascript is basically ActionScript 1.0 (which I thought I migrated from years ago) without the cross browser consistency and more advanced graphical APIs. Long live the internet, but losing Flash is a bad thing for the internet. It's not Flash that needs to die, it's the entire archaic and poor sighted standards stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript and the horrible plain file HTTP delivery system) in favor of a new standard stack that can actually do something close to the Flash Player.

tensafefrogs 15y ago
I agree that Javascript isn't as mature as Actionscript 3 feels, but would you really choose to build a website or web application in Flash over Javascript even if it meant a poorer user experience for your users? Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax. More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language. Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?
- joeyespo 15y ago
  > Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor? That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement? Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  Well, I have been using Adobe Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor for coding Javascript, but I hesitate to call it a great one. I suspect what you are looking for is a great jQuery/jQuery UI editor (i.e. a rich interface framework) that also happens to support javascript.

zabar 15y ago

It's not dead yet. Actually there is two things : - one of course is that as HTML5 get stronger flash loses interest for some scenarios (even if it's still the best choice for many like games right now) - the other is that for mobile web, it was never the right choice. If you want to target mobile right now, you either do a really simple site in HTML or you target a deeper experience with an app, but there was no space in between for a plugin. Adobe try to embrace both of these cases with their HTML5 tools for the web and Air for the apps. I think that what Stave Jobs understood early on and a reason why he never allowed plugins on mobile browsers.

tensafefrogs 15y ago
Most of the arguments against Flash being dead seem to be one of these: 1) Games 2) Mobile apps 3) Video #1 I agree that flash is better for making games, but how big of a market are games on the internet? It's a 'big' market, to be sure, but how big compared to the number of Flash websites a few years ago? Surely it's a low percentage (anyone have actual stats? I don't know of any). Is the amount of Flash games being made enough to keep Adobe interested in continuing to improve Flash? As the desktop market recedes and mobile devices become more popular with users (and I truly do believe that it will) what will happen to the Flash games? As for #2 - mobile apps. This could be the answer to the above, but why use AIR when you can get better performance writing native code for whatever platform you are working on? I'm sure it will work out for companies that want to save a few dollars and be able to launch a simple game on many platforms while writing it once, but that kind of development has rarely succeeded in the world. Look at Java apps on windows/osx - they often feel klunky and look ugly and don't support the native UI elements of the host OS (does AIR do this on mobile phones? I'm admittedly not that familiar with it). Because of the history of this area of technology, I'm highly skeptical. #3 I agree with, and covered this in a comment below. I believe Flash will be useful for desktop video delivery for a few years to come, but will eventually lose to native support.
- benologist 15y ago
  Games on the internet are massive. We track 100s of millions of hours a month spent playing them. Adobe's not really killing Flash, what's happening is it's transitioning to a development platform rather than development + consumption platform and that's not a horrible thing - Flash is a great platform to develop in, being able to export mobile apps from it is far more important than being able to play the SWF files on mobile. Flash on mobile could have worked but there's two reasons it doesn't ... one is purely technical that time and improved hardware would erode, the killer one is consumption - games on websites are just a plain inferior way to play them vs apps, and ads + video + applications are all solved problems. There is no must-have use case as a consumption platform on mobile. They made the right choice - let Flash become just a development platform and let the output be whatever provides the optimal user experience - on desktops it is (or can be) the Flash Player, on mobile it's apps and HTML5.

ggerrard 15y ago

Yep, things change. Adobe also killed Director, another seminal and important product. They bought Supersplash, turned it into Flash (and a pile of money) and with Apple's help killed it too. Things change, but they stay the same.

secretbatcave 15y ago

Try and animate a walk cycle in pure javascript. now tell me that flash is dead.

stuartmemo 15y ago
http://digitalsurgeons.com/labs/html5/canvas/zombies/ http://digitalsurgeons.com/labs/html5/canvas/zombies/ Flash is dead.
- secretbatcave 15y ago
  That was convincingly pixar level walk cycle On a 2010 macbook that runs at 15fps, which is a great step forward in speed for moving 8 sprites. Have you actually tried to animate anything other than a solid body, in just code? http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml is a walk cycle, and as you can see they are animating the control points, so the body smoothly deforms. As far as I'm aware you can control individual control points of an SVG with javascript. Even if you could without a decent interface you couldn't do more than move a ball about. HTML/JS is shit at animation. Flash is rubbish, and can be much more efficient, however HTML/JS is 10 times worse.
  - driverdan 15y ago
    I don't know what's wrong with your computer but my 2010 MacBook Pro running Chrome hits a steady 52 fps.
    - saint-loup 15y ago
      45 fps on Chrome, ~15 on Firefox (MBP 2009).
      - secretbatcave 15y ago
        but that's the point, its 8 sprites!
- 15y ago

ale55andro 15y ago

Dead is a rather harsh statement. It's true that the mobile market is flourishing and is more important now than ever, but what I see clearly is that adobe wants that market too and they seem to be investing in html5 tooling whilst maintaining their flash offering. So in the end it will come down to using the right tool/tech for the right job. More choice to you, more power to you and works out for adobe as well. Don't forget that flash still enjoys an excellent penetration rate on the desktop and there will always be a market for it. Perhaps one day when the pc is dead too and the indefinite, perfectly working apps written in flash are rewritten in html5 because we've now replaced the pc with tablets and mobile devices.

edison_c 15y ago

dead or not, companies STILL want to make a bunch of flashy, frustratingly not-very-useful websites. Until companies realize that consumers want information, quickly, and don't want to have to hunt around for it, we're going to plagued one way or another by web sites that eschew function over (yeeg) 'form'.

frooxie 15y ago

It's dead? Now how am I supposed to make a game with music and sound effects that is easy to play on multiple platforms?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

almogdesign 15y ago

Great post

gerggerg 15y ago

streaming video, streaming audio, socket connections, fast 3d(soon), advertising, webcam support, mic support, clipboard manipulation, install base... youtube, rdio, pandora, hulu, kongregate, flickr, imgur, github, googledocs, every site that has ads... There's a ton of money made off flash these days. No one's saying you have to use it, but lets be a little realistic with ourselves.

JayeshSidhwani 15y ago
Audio/Video Streaming is something for which Flash would be really needed. I don't see HTML5 devs talking about live streaming yet.
- Andrex 15y ago
  True, but that doesn't mean it isn't being talked about at all: http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/
  - secretbatcave 15y ago
    Talked about != implementation 3D graphics directly in the browser has been talked about for well over 15 years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML for example Java for another.
  - JayeshSidhwani 15y ago
    This is very good, no doubt. But what really worries me is that there has to be a browser engine implementation, different for every browser being used. The devs have come up with the browser engine for Opera, FF but only for the latest versions. And, no one is talking about the great IE's. When I go in a production environment for a product, I cannot really keep a limitation on the browsers/or more so their versions. Once, this trouble is sorted, WebRTC looks goody.
- Okvivi 15y ago
  Here's a very good read (granted, a year old) about Flash vs. HTML5 at Youtube. http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

frenchfries 15y ago

probably the best article I've read about flash this week ... gr8

robdodson 15y ago

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.

poppysan 15y ago

People act as if flash is being abandoned. Its not. Mobile Flash is. Several new smart-phones and tablets nowadays use browsers with REAL FLASH on it, so there is no need to continue development on mobile flash. That's all that happened. No big win for anyone. Adobe has been focusing on html5, as have the rest of the web, and imho, Adobe has some great tools to author content in html5 already.

joshtynjala 15y ago
You're thinking of Flash Lite, but that's not what everyone is freaking out about. Adobe has, in fact, stopped development of the exact "REAL" Flash Player for mobile (tablet and smartphone) browsers that you refer to.
notatoad 15y ago
flash has been abandoned. developers won't (or at least shouldn't) use a closed platform whose developer has expressed a lack of faith in it. even though flash will still be developed for x86, it's clear that adobe is getting ready to drop it. and yeah, this announcement is about mobile flash, as used on android phones, not about flash lite. that's been dead for years.

brunoimbrizi 15y ago

- You want this? Sorry, can't do it. Flash is dead. Not possible in HTML yet. Design something else or wait a few years please.

driverdan 15y ago

90% of the developers I've discussed Flash with hate it, myself included (note: I haven't discussed it with many game devs). A much lower percentage of designers hate it. Geoff's article and the comments here seem to reenforce that. The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is.

natesm 15y ago
I am curious about that too, unless these designers aren't very good and are just trying to translate print media to the web without considering the ramifications of the platform (see: almost every iPad magazine). Flash isn't a terrible platform to develop for. The app itself (as in Flash CS5.app) is pretty horrid, but it's not that hard to write ActionScript in vim or TextMate. What Flash does offend is my sense of design, specifically UX design. Standard platform widgets? Nope. Standard platform behavior? Nope. Stealing keyboard focus? Yep. Bad scrolling? Yep. Back button? Nope.
armandososa 15y ago
The Flash fanboys here all seem to be designers. I'm really curious why this is. Really? Try to write code using a brush on a canvas. That's what designers feel having to design using code. It sucks.
- commieneko 15y ago
  I was doing visual design using code 30 years ago. It's doable, sometimes even preferable. It only sucks until you develope a facility with the tools. Just like watercoler paints or charcoal; which I've used for 40 years. Design happens in your head, but it's a feed back loop between your tools and your imagination. Different tools _do_ influence the outcome.
nascentone 15y ago
Designers love Flash because it gives you a canvas to express yourself on. Standards do not. If you think it does, I would predict you aren't a designer, because there's a big difference between technical parity and realistic results. I can concede that as a designer, I really don't care if HTML is technically better for some reason, I just want to have the freedom to do cool stuff, and that this is the tension between those are "Flash fanboys" and those who are Standards fanboys.

JenniferMason 15y ago

But Facebook is still alive. I look forward to "Facebook is dead. Long live the Internet." Think about it: as long as Facebook exists, 60% of the Web is on Facebook.

missing_cipher 15y ago

Far from dead. Only Flash on mobile is being discontinued, the larger, stronger, desktop market won't be discontinued.

jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
Thousands of popular tv cartoons shows are made using flash only; competing head-to-head with Toon Boom Studio.

loup-vaillant 15y ago

The internet and the web aren't the same thing. Please don't talk as if they were. This is more important than it may seem at a first glance. Non-techies already tend to genuinely confuse the two. Those people have no problem buying a crippled data plans that will let them query web servers and nothing else, because they will believe they "have the internet" on their phones. But when you're behind a big NAT, with no public IP and most ports filtered, you don't have an internet connection. (Even according the big French carriers themselves. Thank goodness, They since stopped calling their data plans "internet" in their ads.) The obvious effect is that the web is taking over the internet. As it does, it becomes increasingly acceptable to block nearly everything else (for home connections at least). That would surely "tame the internet".

dredmorbius 15y ago
The Internet and the Web aren't the same thing. Please don't talk as if they were. Fixed.

gord 15y ago

Theres no reason why Adobe [ or more likely, a startup ] cant write a superb (web based) animation editor for designers, which spits out HTML5/CSS or SVG + Javascript. Couple that with basic workflow and 'publish to site' and you have a product with very wide appeal and usefulness.

jphackworth 15y ago

I'll believe Flash is dead when there's no Flash running on Kongregate any more.

trolol 15y ago

Java Applets FTW :D

jhuni 15y ago

Flash is still a fundamental part of the desktop user experience, so the battle is not over. The free flash alternative gnash remains a high priority project.

brownhornet 15y ago

I guess I'd be OK with the move to HTML5, if it worked on all of the browsers that my clients want me to support. My last application that I rolled out using canvas and excanvas is still quirky. Unfortunately, IE6-8 still lives on. Until there is a feasible way to do custom control creation, and have it work properly, there will still be a purpose for Flash/Flash Builder.

Thonbo 15y ago

why is every body talking about it like adobe is giving up on flash on desktops- they are not a new version just came out friday and they have huge list of things to come in the next releases

kirbydooo 15y ago

I have not read any of your comments yet but I plan on doing so...I feel right at home when I see comments as long as the ones are below because I know that I am dealing with intelligent people that understand and most importantly will probably understand or at least take the time to try to understand why it is that I too type such LOOOOONG comments....including places that I sholdn't like the corporate phuking job that I have as an account manager for an IT reseller company here in Scottsdale, AZ. Also, FACEBOOK...short and sweet seems to reign supreme because you are usually just dealing with family and friends and or considered the masses and most of them are not as 'technical' as I am and have only recently joined this FAD of weilding technology as a lifestyle that has only really been recently socially accepted by the masses and non-power users (I hate the stupidity of the term geek but to each their own) and not as a passion like I have always had and been doing for the past 30 years... I mean come one and face it people...the 'old school geeks' like me have spent half of their social time explaining technology to people and usually only when asked about something because they never got into that or all of a sudden want to be your best friend because they need technical assistance. That always burned me out I don't know about you folks but it was disconcerning at best when you would be doing your fifth 'tazmanian devil' on your buddy's computer because he still won't stay off the dirtiest porn sites imaginable and of course... when you were rendering this phreeeeeee assistance they would usually make the comment..."I don't know what I was doing when it got all phuked up...I think someone was surfing porn sites..." Thus the reason I always made a FRESH IMAGE of their machine after the 1st time I laid into it. Now I just tell them to call geek squad so that when they get a bill that costs them more than a new computer they think twice about taking us professional power users for granted. I don't think that their time is more valuable than mine in any way but they certainly seem to think so when they bring these antiquated machines to me and think that I am going to spend 4 hours fixing an OS infected with butt-sex viruses I call the 'AIDS of puterz' instead of the 30 minutes it should take me if they were to have a modern machine. Just the sight of one of these A-holez on my caller ID or now in my contact list coming up on the screen of my micro-powered hand held computer from hell (T-Mobile G2x running Cyanogen 7.1.0.1 MOD coupled with the Trinity kernel that let's me overclock the sucker just for phun and on the phly to 1560 Mhz PER CORE!!!) Oh yeah!....Just the sight of them coming up on that little powerhouse of a tri-corder that just also happens to make phone calls makes me want to wretch! NOW ONTO FLASH.....as you can see we are all 'skilled' and have deep roots in microprocessing love and many of you might even have more history than I but not very many of you trust me... I used to run BBS's back in the early 80's with my PORTABLE Commodore 64-SX computer with an IEEE 8 bit bus HBA jacked into my cartidge port so that I could hook up my SPIFFY SET OF 2 1001's SUPER HIGH DENSITY 1MB 5.25" floppy disk drives... so if you used to log onto COCONET and remember COMPUSERVE and the infamous ARMOR PLATED CARTRIDGE PORTS (one left and one right) of an Atari 800 that you played your first game of 'ULTIMA' wasting hours and days and weeks and months doing Lord British's laundry then you might be worthy of understanding the big picture here... we'll see though... APPLE PURCHASED ADOBE FOR ONE REASON ABOUT 6 or 7 years ago...THEY WANTED TO DISALLOW, PUT THE KABOSH(sp?), PURPOSELY NOT GIVE SUPPORT TO ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT WERE GOING TO BUY THEIR CRAPPY iDevices and future iPhones they had in their plans of releasing with all of the other crappy iCrapple gear like iPudz and whatever other rotten crAlpples that have yet to fall from the crApple tree of nightmare lipstick on a pig devices that we TRUE and LONG TERM (thus the big into on my credz) SUPER USERz have NEVER BEEN INTERESTED IN FOR ONE REASON AND ONE REASON ONLY!!! WE HAVE NEVER HAD THE DESIRE OR NEED TO PLAY WITH OVERPRICED YUPPIE TOYZ THAT WERE PROPRIETARY AND CREATED OUT OF PURE GREED AND DECEPTIVE MARKETING IDEAS TO TRY TO FINALLY TURN A PROFIT FOR A COMPANY THAT NEVER MADE A DIME ON THEIR BOTTOM LINE IN OVER 30 YEARS OF EXISTANCE UNTIL THEY STARTED SELLING A STOLEN PATENT BASED DEVICE CALLED AN iPud! Then they gave this iPud thingy the ability to make phone calls and started calling it a SmartPhone...You new people (last ten years) that think you know what the phuk is up....just shut the phuk up on this one because you have no phuking clue and you never will... Ya see new people... crApple Inc. has never invented a god damn thing ever...they have either borrowed (stolen), aquired, or just plain copied everything they have ever done and put a dress on it and then tripled the retail price of anything like it and the crApple subculture continued to bite like a school of freshly hatched guppies (but they were actually old school hipped turned yuppie so now I like to refer to them as YIPPIEz!) the whole time being snobs because they think that unless they didn't overpay and basically get ripped the phuk off that they weren't buying the BEST of the BEST gear. Well sorry to burst all you crApple wanna be's bubblez but any old school and still way ahead of the curve today geeks out there because of just plain common sense and not because we're wanting to tweak everything all the time would tell you today that they have never owned a crApple product, never had the desire to own or spend a dime on a crApple product and will never purchase a crApple product until the day they die or they can finally afford to buy that $HIT lying company and burn the phuker to the ground and build a memorial in its place in memory of the MAC LISA....(Don't know what that is???? then stop reading this ya jackazz!) So you've gotten this far in my lovely little tale of two worlds...one being the alien lifeform that has recently gained momentum but really has no sustainability because even you recent morons that are calling themselves techie'z are starting to realize that crApple SUX! always did, always will, and you got taken! So you made it this far? Well there is not that far to go for you to read why I am writing all of this first... so here it is!!! crApple Inc. purchased ADOBE so that they could purposely NOT GIVE TO THEIR IGNORANT DEVICE OWNERz the ability to watch the majority of VIDz out there on the internet but especially from YOUTUBE!!! Guess why or already know why? BECAUSE DUMMY, simple deal...it's owned by GOOGLE and GOOGLE is going to take over the entire planet...and this phuking geek is okay with it. Okay with it because Micro$oft is almost as bad as crApple in their bull$hit deceptive everything and GOOGLE and I have been in bed with each other for over 8 years of smartphone love. I have been using their PHREEEEEE everything even before my same day it was released to the public aquisition of the G1. THE VERY FIRST GOOGLE PHONE...keep it safe if you still have one people because some day it's going to be worth a fortune when it's inducted into the Smithsonian Institute of Science as the VERY 1ST GOOGLE HARDWARE DEVICE EVER!!! GOOGLE preys on the companies and advertisers that prey on you...Micro$oft Inc. and crApple Inc. PERY ON YOU! The device or product owner themself! I have never directly (read that again...DIRECTLY) given GOOGLE one thin dime of money and yet I use all of their products and services for PHREEEEEEE 20 times a day...however...when I first set up my PHREEEEEE GOOGLE VOICE account appx three years ago when it was still INVITATION ONLY! I also set up my GOOGLE CHECKOUT and when they verified my debit card account that day they gave me the dime...YEP...and I STILL HAVE ALL .10 CENTS BITCHEz! When I look at my GOOGLE VOICE VOICEMAIL TO TEXT TRANSCRIPTS using their widget (Don't worry about what a widget is crApple people because you don't have them) I always see my account balance at the bottom and it still says ".10" and its even colored in GREEEEEEEEEEN! awwwww....a nice touch.... so crApple Inc. valuable...?? NOPE, nothing about them adds anything valuable to your life...just more debt, deceptive advertising and marketing, half truths, only one part of the REAL story, and most important YOU the crApple device owner is now imprisoned into your little crApple trendy fad driven world and will be left with your little crApple dikz out when this bull$hit is over!