Flash has run it's course..
From a historical perspective, it *was* a killer app for many developers.
Certainly, hideous crimes were committed using the platform - and obviously, that will never happen with HTML5 canvas, oh no, not at all!
Flash bought the web forward in a *massive* way, which we completely take fore-granted now.
Before Flash, video on the web - well, it was laughable. Sure, part of that had to do with bandwidth, but to a large extent, Flash made putting video content onto the web viable.
Yes, it never was very good cross platform - on Linux, it's always been terrible. On Mac, well, not much better.
It's day is done, but don't rewrite history here - it served a very valuable purpose in bringing interactive multimedia content to the web.
Some may argue that this was the death of the web, that the web was never intended to be a rich multimedia experience, that it was simply to serve up text. Well, some people have neck beards and wear plaid shirts. They exist in the minority.
What we are left with, without flash video, is a bit of a mess of codec support.
It's currently more complicated to provide a cross platform experience - not impossible, just more complicated. I'm sure this will get far easier over time.
It's a good move and above all else, damn exciting too.
I can't wait to see what devs will be producing in 6, 12, 24 months from now.
Already, we're seeing some very compelling content - and we're able to see that across all devices, without the need for a proprietary third party plugin.
I'm massively stoked to be a developer again - it reminds me of the heady days of the web, '93 through to '99 - loads of great ideas, new developments, excitement over browser releases.
We then had a phase of - to be honest - drudgery. '00 to '05 were boring years for web developers by comparison - at least those not involved in developing the next wave. There was far too much propriety shit happening, far too much dominance by microsoft and we had the dot.com crash followed by an almighty hangover.
Now we've got mobile just taking off in a massive way, connectivity has ramped up by an order of magnitude, the amount of choice available is incredible and we've finally got - to a certain extent - a set of standards that are being adopted to ensure continuity.
Whilst the economy is going to hell in a handbag, there's still a bit of wiggle room for web developers - there's work to be had, at least, for now.
Viva HTML5, goodbye to the old faithful Flash, out to pasture with you old friend, you've served us well.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
