Developer's Blog

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.

“We’re stuck!”, Adobe says in this huge page describing it’s plans. You could also get a sense of confusion while reading that, since the main message is that they changed their minds, as they did several times before, leading into community disapproval and strong reactions. Short answer for that strong reactions would be that while others corporations have communities, Adobe has developed a CULTURE.

Most of the Actionscript developers I’m watching are so passionate and so keen on building exiting new things on top of a great piece of technology. And that piece of technology is slowly crippled by bad decisions took on bad reports regarding what people expect. We – the culture – we’re expecting Actionscript Next, no doubt about that. We’ve embraced the rumors regarding what it would be possible, got excited about it and now it’s gently suggested to rethink our own roadmaps.

They even gave up on their initial plan to changer Premium Features, which says loud to the world that, again, they don’t know what to do with the damn thing. I’m sure that they will present this as “we’ve always have been opened”, or they realized that they market they were addressing to doesn’t exist. In any of the cases, it was a bad decision when introduced this Premium Features or it’s a bad one when dropping it. It seems to me Adobe is drifting around.

I remember about them governing Flex SDK as an open source project and that was a failure because of the manner in which they did it. Adobe kept decision taking outside community, but pretending that community runs it by voting features and bug fixing. The governor had no idea about how open source communities work – allowing the community to contribute. Why? Because the big corporations are not working like communities do, where the responsibility is of each and every member and decision making is common vote. Corporations have always a head of “something” that is responsible for all the decision making for that “something”. I can still sense this corporation behavior from time to time on Apache Flex mailing list.

I recall the voice of community when they donated it to Apache – all the fears that it will die and all the noise describing the unknown future of it. I don’t know why they gave up on such a good SDK, but my sense is that they didn’t had enough data to showcase it’s greatness to the world. Most enterprise applications that I’ve seen or heard about were so private – for instance, used in a bank – that they couldn’t be showcased to noone.  Or maybe they realized they have no idea how to handle it in an open source manner.

I love Actionscript and I consider it more mature OOP language than Javascript, in many ways. I won’t argue with noone that Javascript has it’s recent evolution towards better and it will always have a future. I’m even eager to see the Apache Flex SDK compiler producing Javascript applications that are written in Actionscript…

Adobe, what I’m trying to say is that I fear about your future. You seem to have a disease called instability on your road map. You have forgot that you have created Flash Platform from nothing, against all other concurrent platforms and, most importantly a growing culture – Flash Platform Developers. Since I have to make a living out of applications development, I have to have some degree of  stability on my own roadmap.

Please tell me now if  “cancelled” means “never”, so I can move to Java forever and do C++ for fun…

The sooner you will tell me, the better will be for both of us!

Just a quick note to self, eventually for those who are facing the same troubles. When you switch workspace to ones created by Flash Builder 4.5 or lower, Flash Builder 4.7 WARNS YOU that you might experience unexpected results.

Therefor, when you are selecting “New” > “ActionScript Mobile AIR Project”, immediately after typing the project name, you will get an error like “The selected Flex SDK does not support building mobile projects”. If you go to “preferences” > “Flash Builder” > “Installed AIR SDK” you will notice that there is no AIR SDK known to Flash Builder.

Also, I’ve noticed that the compiler gets really confused in the case of libraries that are monkey patching SDK classes.

Be careful what you expect when working with old workspaces : it’s best to create a new workspace and import a copy of all projects for getting good results. But hey, maybe someone at Adobe will have the time to make an workspace importer tool… or not.