The future of Flash
Mon, 27 February, 2012 - 12:51:29
Last Thursday I attended the London Flash Platform User Group (LFPUG) meet-up hosted at the offices of WCRS, where Adobe would be making a presentation on the future of Flash. The room was packed when I entered and there was a good atmosphere with Flash devs noisily chatting over beers laid on by the hosts.
I sat down and chatted with a guy who was a little concerned about where Flash was going. He worked for an advertising agency creating Flash Ads for websites and was concerned that the emergence of HTML5 and CSS3 meant he would have the wrong skill-set.
After a short introduction from the hosts and from the organisers, Mike Chambers began his presentation. Just a few days ago I gave my view on where I see Flash going in the Future. Just a few hours later, Adobe released its white paper Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes. Mike's presentation focused mainly on the content of the white paper. The main points were that Adobe are moving the focus of Flash to two areas. Premium video and Gaming. They stressed that Flash could still be used for everything that it had been used for in the past, whether that be branding websites, ads or animations, but that the future would focus on gaming. Mike didn't go into much detail about premium video but did talk more extensively about gaming, saying that Adobe believes that Flash is "the game console for the web". He also discussed Adobe's decision to discontinue development of a standalone player for Linux, which will be replaced with a built in player in Chrome for Linux. This means that viewing the latest Flash content on Linux will only be possible in Chrome.
The group was fairly vocal with questions flying out from the crowd throughout. Some people questioned Adobe's decisions to discontinue support for Flex and Flash mobile. They expressed their concern that clients can have the view that Flash is dead. This led to the Adobe team's admission that PR and community contact had been bad in the past and that the point of meetings such as this were to improve those relations.
After a short break the session continued with Lee Brimelow's presentation. Lee talked about new features that will be available in the next few releases of Flash which have been added with gaming in mind. These included Mouse Lock and full keyboard support in full screen, the ability to disable the context menu (which raised a cheer) and right click and middle click support. There will also be hardware acceleration support for iOS and Android and support for desktop graphics cards, initially back to 2008 and later to 2005. There will also be multi-threading, improved audio support for low latency audio so that sound effects can be triggered without delays and a performance index API which will allow Flash application to check the performance of the device it is running on and optimise itself. All of this was well received by the crowd but I think a new piece of software called "monocle" had the biggest wow factor. Monocle is a piece of diagnostic/monitoring software that allows you to look in detail at what is happening when your Flash is running. It breaks down the Flash, frame by frame, and displays statistics of what resources are being used in each frame and what functions are being executed. You can even step through each function and watch as the scene is drawn in each frame. It will be a big step up from the trace statements that appear all over my code! After that, Lee finished up with some impressive demonstrations of 3d Flash games that ran very nicely despite the amount of objects on the screen.
The presentation was very enjoyable and there was plenty of banter between the community and the Adobe guys. The Adobe team were very honest with their audience, admitting when they didn't have an answer for particular questions and being very frank that, ultimately, Adobe is a business and that if something is not going to make them money they will stop developing it. From a personal standpoint, it was great to be in a room with like minded people who really care about Flash. It got me very excited about working with Flash and has got me thinking about my own future. In particular, I need to look into all this 3d malarkey!
London Flash Platform User Group
Tue, 21 February, 2012 - 12:49:09
This Thursday (23rd Feb) I will be attending the London Flash Platform User Group meetup. Mike Chambers will be talking about the future of Flashincluding recent changes to the Flash platform and how the player and the actionscript language will evolve in the future. I personally see the focus continue to shift to gaming. The majority of web designers seem to shun Flash, especially with the emergence of CCS3 and HTML5. Yet at the same time we are seeing new developments on the gaming side of Flash with the use of Unreal and other 3d engines in web and mobile games. I expect to hear the evenings second presenter talk alot about this. I have been following Lee Brimelow and his work for years now, via his FlashBlog, his gotoAndLearn tutorials and on Twitter. It was one of his tweets that first made me aware of the event in fact.
I'm looking forward to meeting some other Flash Developers and seeing what I can learn from them. It should be a great experience. Plus, there's always the chance I might win the Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection!
Ideas...
Tue, 07 February, 2012 - 13:02:13
I made a minor change to the site today, renaming the "widgets" section to "ideas".
When I first created the widgets section, my intention was to have a page where I could upload bits of Flash that weren't necessarily whole games, but were work that I wanted to display. I considered a few names for the page; misc, flash, stuff, etc and finally settled on widgets. However, thinking about it again recently, I realised that the widget title wasn't really appropriate. I think ideas is better because it more accurately describes the content there. In particular I can use the page to upload half finished game ideas without having to polish them up as "finished" games. Expect to see a few posts appearing in that section soon.
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