Jeff Croft recently published a short post advocating the rebirth of Flash ala the Javascript renaissance. You can read the comments to his original post if you want to hear a few good reasons why that probably won’t happen — at least not in such a cut and dried form.
Regardless of how you feel about Flash, however, I think the proprietary vector-driven technology is bound to reenter our lives once again, though in a slightly modified form.
Mac, PC, say hello to Adobe Apollo.
If you haven’t heard about Adobe Flex and Apollo, it’s high time you did. A quick search of the interweb is all you really need to become immersed in the recent hype surrounding Adobe’s (relatively) new runtime. Without delving too far into the details, Flex uses Flash as it’s runtime environment, so developers are essentially building rich internet applications with Flash and Action Script 3. Apollo promises to deliver rich cross-platform internet-based applications to the desktop — with or without Flash.
What does that mean for Croft’s revolution (and OSX, of course — this is the Apple
First, I think Flash will be making a remarkable comeback in the form of Flex-based internet applications. Since Flash supports AJAX, all of us Web 2.0 JS junkies will still have plenty to do, but Flex has the potential to retake the interface. However, I wouldn’t expect full-Flash websites to be making a comeback anytime soon.
Second, since Flex is being geared towards both web-based and desktop applications (via Apollo — Adobe’s cross platform runtime), Flash will soon be coming to a desktop near you. If you happen to use Lightroom like I do, much of the GUI already has. That means that a consistent OSX GUI will become even more difficult to attain, as Apollo-based applications bear their own distinctive interface. Take a look at Lightroom as an example. The menubar and the window pane are the only interface elements that carry over from the OS — the rest is all Adobe.
What do you think about the future of Flash? Are you excited about the cross-platform interfaces that Apollo promises to deliver? Should Mac users embrace a technology that breaks completely from the traditional OSX interface guidelines?
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