Sunsetting Flash – Sunrising What?
I’m promising myself that this is the last time I’m writing about Adobe. It doesn’t worth it and it seems I’m too lazy to write anyway.
In this blog post Unity announces giving up on the Flash deployment support. I remember, back in the days they announced that they support deployment for Flash that I was excited about it, even if I have never used Unity. I was just thinking that they embraced deploying for Flash because of the popularity of the player.
“We don’t see Adobe being firmly committed to the future development of Flash. This is evidenced by the cancellation of Flash Player Next, the instability of recent Flash Player versions and by Adobe’s workforce moving on to work on other projects.”, Unity says. Let me translate for Adobe : you fooled me once, shame on you – you fooled me twice, shame on me! I’ve learned just about everything I know in terms of design patterns because of Flash and it’s former SDK called Flex. It helped me make the jump to Java Spring very easy, after developing my own dependency injection system in Actionscript.
I wasn’t expected Flash to sunset so soon – and it probably won’t, but the feeling I’m having is Adobe betrayed me. After investing more than ten years to become some sort of a expert (guru), I’ve found myself forced to explore other grounds that are more stable (like Java and C++).
I’ve have seen before how a company committing suicide before my eyes, due to it’s bad decisions took by people that have no global picture of the things. Now I can recognize this pattern in Adobe’s moves – as I’ve said in the previous post – they have no idea what to do with Flash. Their evangelists keep poking the community with a stick called HTML5. For me, it isn’t working : I’m not going back in time, at least not this way. I’m only saying that, over the time, I’ve started to enjoy the comfort of mature products and tested features (as a Japanese saying “if ain’t broken, why fix it”). That’s why, my trip “back in time” (of high-school I might say) starts with C and goes to C++.
This lack of trust in Adobe that I’m feeling, I’m sensing it all over the Flash community, so my question for Adobe is : “Sunrising what?”. Adobe is going to loose more and more trust from those that mattered to it the most. Overall, it’s going to be a painful loss for everyone, since all the great features of Flash and AIR are not out there just yet.