Be Excellent To Each Other

Adobe AIR? Really? GTFF. There was a time when it seemed like practically every game I installed asked me to install AIR when I first launched it (which meant instant uninstall obviously) but thankfully it seems to be relatively rare these days.

Adobe giving up on Flash is really only good though if all the websites also give up on it. Otherwise it's just more content that'll be denied to people on mobile browers. I'd love to see Flash used less because it's awful for video but something else needs to become common before it can be meaningfully replaced.

Seeing as flash already exists on android and works as well as one could expect from flash, there probably isn't a problem here in the near future. HTML5 is way better, mind you.

/looks at thread title
/looks at quote
/looks at thread title again

Am I on the Daily Mail website by mistake?

There weren't enough characters in the Beex thread title for me to put a qualifier or quote mark in the field.

ZDNet is confident its sources are correct, so this isn't an unsubstantiated rumour. A formal announcement is expected today. Adobe has also announced 750 redundancies.

Edit -- Guardian reporting this also.

Edit 2 -- Adobe product manager John Nack obliquely confirms it.

So, no.

Do you think Grannell is going to post, or will he have actually exploded with smug?

I wish you were. I wish we all were. Have you seen the amount of racy pictures of sexy celebs you get on that site? That's exactly the sort of thing we could do with on here.

"Flash has been axed for Android - here's pregnant Jessica Alba in a little thong"

fucking bonus mate.

How about:
Adobe ending development of Flash for phones & tablets?

"Maybe".

"Adobe maybe ending development of Flash for phones/tables"

Should fit!

"Stuff! Maybe! More At 11!"

Falls foul of Betteridge's Law, given that I'm pretty sure this story is true.

Here's Tom with the weather!

Isn't presenting something as true before it actually is true always going to be libel, though? Even after it becomes true?

Betteridge's Law is critical that people misuse the question mark to run stories without evidence. To use it correctly, rather than abandon it, is the correct respone.

And this is the Internet, the title can be changed as status changes.

Adobe ends development of Flash for smartphones and tablets.

So, with the "did it happen?" question aside, that leaves a few interesting points:

• Is this a good or bad thing? To what extent does "no new Flash player on mobile" coupled with the rising sales of tablets mean you'd have to be an idiot to be writing new content in Flash?
• Would this have happened if Apple had allowed Adobe to ship a Flash plugin for the iPhone?

No they don't.

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not. User-geeks might (quite rightly) think this is a great thing, as it will, in time, make the web a better place. Dev-geeks will probably agree with them about the future, but be mighty pissed-off right now because they've got a load of work to do. Normal smartphone users (which is, I'd guess, most people) will probably just be angry that their favourite website won't load (much like non-techy iPhone users currently are) and it will be because we, the devs, have failed them.

What does this mean then?

That they're going to in the future - except for bug fixes and security changes.

Did it happen? No. Will it happen? Yes.

Also, there's no real timescale yet - Mobile Flash 11 (or whatever it's on) may well continue to be bundled with hardware for years, and with bugfixes and security updates there's only reason hardware companies will have to remove it is if (a) it doesn't work with the new hardware, (b) it doesn't work with new Flash features (although I'd be interested to see if that comes under 'bugfixes'), or (c) there's no Flash on the Internet any more.
So in that sense, it's going to make no difference to ordinaries at all, at least not for a while - unless it's mentioned in the Metro or something (perhaps with a headline much like this subject here) they probably won't even know.

Or perhaps they'll just build a version of flash for each set of hardware, to ensure features are standardise and not to duplicate work across different product types? Well perhaps.

EDIT:

OK I'm wronged!

I'd say it depends on the content. I think anyone creating a Flash-only public website these days is a dolt, with the exception of desktop-only entertainment/interactive/rich-media work that cannot be created using other tech. Restaurants remain some of the biggest culprits here, using weeeee pretteee Flash bollocks for simple sites and that doesn't work on iOS (i.e. not for many people out and about and maybe looking for a local restaurant), nor, often, terribly well even on tablets that claim to support Flash.

Flash in and of itself will still have a fairly long life, though; that said, it's just effectively become Director—an authoring environment for apps and games. I'm not thrilled about that prospect. The Flash bits in CS are dreadful (such as the FW palettes that don't bloody well work on Mac or Windows), and I've been chatting with game devs about Flash games on iOS lacking optimisation; the response: if games are fun, backwards compatibility doesn't matter anyway. In this case, 'backwards compatibility' meant 'anything other than the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S'. Gnh.


No, or at least not nearly as rapidly. It's Apple's moves that 'forced' a bunch of companies towards HTML5* video; it was also one of the things that really pushed a huge amount of creativity and development regarding web standards and libraries for fairly advanced tasks. (And before someone goes "Well, you would say that, Apple fan-boy", I'm making this statement on the basis of being heavily immersed in web design/dev through my regular contributions to .net, which have involved talking with dozens of devs since Apple's announcement. Even the hugely pro-Flash people I once knew barely touch it now, with a few exceptions, such as 2Advanced—and even those guys aren't relying on the tech for almost everything these days.)

* And, yes, I know, but blame W3C, not me.

For the typical internet user Flash is synonymous with streaming video and very little else to my mind. As Craig says, Flash based websites are thankfully (mostly) a thing of the past and I don't know how much use Flash based game sites get any more. If you accept that premise then few people are creating new 'content' as such; they're just continuing to push new video clips out using the existing encoding and video player apps that are already in us. Those will continue to be at least as playable as they are now across the board so if nothing else changes then I don't see a lot of impact. The big change would be if Adobe added new features to the desktop version of Flash which streaming video sites began to use; thus rendering their videos (even more) unplayable on mobile plaforms.

The real issue though is what the hell to replace it with in this most typical use case. HTML5 video seems to be a mess of competing standards and there's fuck all else out there ready to compete, unless there's a burgeoning technology waiting in the wings I'm not aware of?

There's no solution on the table (that I've seen anyway) for implementing DRM in H.264 streaming. This means the likes of Netflix and Hulu and Vudu and iPlayer etc etc simply cannot adopt it; it's Flash (or similar proprietary like Silverlight) or native apps only for those guys.

That's not really true - for a typical Internet user Flash doesn't exist. It's just "a web page".

It's a bit of a buzzword as well, mind. I've heard plenty of people bring up Flash when talking about phones and tablets; they can't explain what it is or why they'd need it, but they're often aware of its existence and feel that it's desirable.

For a lot of people it means "dynamic stuff", or "stuff that moves" when I click it.

For a lot of people, it's what they clean their bathroom with

Same with Ajax.

And a (pronounced properly) gif.

Oh, except it's cif now.

Well, okay, yes, what I probably meant was something more like:

"For the typical internet user, using Flash is synonymous with streaming video and very little else to my mind."

OT, but I always wondered why this was. I mean, it's Guh-raphics, not Juh-aphics.

Gonna need a citation on why JIF is "proper" and GIF is "wrong".

Erm, no, Gif is proper. Right?

Well, I still think it's stupid, but http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

'Jif' is stupid. You don't get to make up your own rules of pronunciation just because you invent an acronym. Also, from that page, 'PNG' is apparently 'Ping'. Get to fuck is it. It's Pee En Gee. Wankers.

Mehh, ok then. Stupid nerds.

I pronounce it like 'gib' and 'gift' too, but I'm aware that it's "wrong".

Who does, then?

So if you want to come across as a pedantic nerd when discussing gifs with anyone then pronounce it jif, then when they ask what the fuck you are on about you can then bore them shitless with the story of how the inventors wanted it pronounced that way. Excellent.

See, I also think Jif is stupid (and if it wasn't then there wouldn't be so much debate about how to say it). But I do say 'ping' for PNG.

@Grim... how do you pronounce 'gib' then?!

Nobody. Just like I can't invent the word 'flom' and decide it's pronounced 'occipital'. A 'g' followed by a vowel is a hard 'g', unless you're French.

Read it again, Welsh.

Aren't they pronounced differently?

So, if someone says "what was that image file again", you'd actually say "picture dot ping"? Eugh.

Does anyone here say URL like "earl"? Someone said it to me the other day and it took a moment to understand what they meant.

One has a 't' on the end...?