The end of Flash? …Maybe Not!

June 17, 2010 at 3:21 pm, Category: General Computing, Reviews, Web Development, by Luke

Over the past few months the future of the rich internet media development has been debated extensively, with the popularity of Apple’s products at an all time high, a lot of people are taking note of their arguments against supporting Adobe’s Flash plug-in.

It has been hard to avoid the on-going battle of wits between Apple and Adobe, but just in case you have, here is Steve Jobs take on Flash: ‘Thoughts on Flash‘ and Adobe’s response to which can be read here: ‘Our thoughts on open markets‘.

As the standoff between the two companies seems set to last, the future of flash development appears to hang in a balance, if other companies begin to adopt the Apple way of thinking on the subject, support for Flash could be dropped from other browsers. With the new features of HTML 5.0 and the canvas tag there are new ways to develop rich content for the web, could this really be the end of Flash?…Maybe Not!

Smokescreen:

Flash…Without the Plugin

Smokescreen is the creation of a programmer named Chris Smoak. The software is an alternative to the flash plug-in built completely in Javascript, it works by decompiling the SWF file generated from flash and “translates” all the elements as web standards-compliant code as the animation plays. There are a number of demo pages available on the official site. You can see the software in action in this video:

From Smokescreen:

We’re putting Smokescreen out there as a preview right now. We look forward to adding support for more of Flash, fix bugs, and improve performance over time. This is just a start. Smokescreen currently supports a sizable subset of Flash 8 animation capabilities, streaming sound, sound effects, some input, and basic ActionScript.

What this does mean is the code that is currently available in the demo pages doesn’t fully support all the features of Flash, making the full flash plug-in the best choice for complicated applications and animations. However for a simple animation like an ad banner the code works very well with the basic motion tweens of flash.

Not all browsers currently support the Javascript used here, and while creating a workable example there were a few browser crashes involved. So the stability and availability of the software is far from perfect at this stage. Smokescreen also currently has some speed issues with the Safari browser on the I/Pod/Phone/Pad so it’s definitively an early stages project at the moment.

HTML 5.0 Canvas Element:

Recently Google turned their logo into a playable version of PACMAN using HTML 5.0 plug-in free technology, this showed us a perfect example of the potential in these emerging technologies. If you haven’t seen it yet you can take a closer look here.

The canvas element is also starting to get some attention from the developers as well, Canvas Demos shows off some of the latest projects from developers and also provides some tutorial links to get started with the element.

Although the new technologies in HTML 5.0 are set to change the web, we are still in the early stages of development, not all the browsers currently support the HTML 5.0 features, nor are there any WYSIWYG applications that allow for direct authoring of animated canvas content, requiring Flash designers to jump into code.

At the moment none of these technologies is supported throughout all browsers, the flash plug-in isn’t available to Safari on the I/Pod/Phone/Pad. Smokescreen isn’t available to Internet Explorer or older versions of FireFox. HTML 5.0 again cuts out Internet Explorer (although is confirmed to be supported for IE9.0).

The choice on which development tool to take in hand and run with is a difficult one. Each of the options available has their advantages and disadvantages, it will be up to the developer to decide on their target market and choose the tool accordingly, but one thing is clear, it’s far from over for Flash as a development tool.