… how sloppy people seem to be when it comes to “reading news and messages carefully”!
In the last couple of days, I heard from several people something like:
“Did you hear? Adobe stopped developing Flash! OMFG!“
So, just to get some things right: Adobe will continue to develop the Flash Player on desktop computers. The features of Version 11 added nice things like accelerated 3D graphics for HD video (including content protection) and console-quality gaming. They’re also working on several new features and significant architectural changes are planned.
What they stopped developing any further is the “Flash Player for Mobile“ (means: Flash Player for Android, etc.). The main reason for this was the huge amount of ressources this required. On mobile platforms, Adobe now told to concentrate on the further development of “Adobe AIR for Mobile“ for the creation of standalone applications on a wide range of mobile devices like Android, iOS and the BlackBerry-Tablet-OS.
The development environment “Adobe Flash Professional” will get a lot more support for HTML5/Canvas and some more nice things helping people doing mobile prototyping and developing.
There is no doubt that HTML5 is the way to go, but counting Flash out is quite a little bit too early I think. There is no reason that these two technologies can’t co-exist.
Also reading news carefully and at least trying to understand them in the right context is an important step to actually make correct decisions, especially in companies. Spreading false rumours should be avoided if possible, because it mostly leads to misjudgement of the current browser market situation and can result in high costs for the migration and development of company websites that could have been avoided or at least timed a lot better.
BTW: The full informations on Adobe’s strategy can be found in the appropriate Adobe Developer Connection article.