Is Flash dead?

Well no, but Adobe's direction with Flash is changing. No longer is Flash king of the web (some will probably say it never was), and it's move to mobile hasn't worked thanks not only to Apple not allowing it on iOS, but due to the performance on the mobile player.

So now we have a big push toward AIR, which I'm glad about. I like AIR, I like working with it and that it gives me the ability to write cross platform apps for both desktop and mobile.

If Adobe just release this news over the last week that would have been fine. Flash on mobile isn't really working, so use AIR for mobile, fine. Unfortunately they decided to also announce a massive number of job losses (750 so the press release said) that is a massive amount of jobs gone or going.

Then there was the announcement of the open sourcing of Flex SDK, which I thought was already open source, and now that the direction and development of the Flex SDK is now in the hands of the community through the Spoon project, again not terrible news. The Java community have wanted Java to be open like this for ages. I think the Spoon project is a great idea, I've signed up to be part of it (still waiting to see what is happening).

Handing over Flex like this does seem that Adobe have finished with Flex, yes it is still going, but Adobe have moved on to concentrate on games and AIR.

So what now for a Flash/Flex developer like me, well after listening to the latest CreativeCoding podcast the decision that a developer has to now make is, what area do I want to focus on. Is it games, web, desktop or mobile. First decide on that, and become a expert on that area and not worry so much about the technology you'll use. For example I may want to focus on mobile, so for that I could use AIR for mobile, or I could use AIR and learn Android development, HTML for mobile (jQuery for mobile) and more importantly how to design a good user experience for mobile.

I've always been a Flex fan, still am and I'm glad that it is still going via the Spoon project, but now with Adobe's latest news it's time to look at something else as well as Flex.