Recently I made the personal decision to stop doing Flash development work. I will finish and support current projects but that’s it. No more.
So what happened?
Let me start by stating that this is not really about the whole ‘HTML 5 will replace Flash’ discussion. I agree with that but it has been done to death in other places. This is personal.
I was a bit surprised to find myself in this position. I used to love Flash. When I first started using Flash it was with version 5 and for me it was the perfect combination of creativity and coding. I got my first job as a designer in large part because of my Flash skills. And I only had started using Flash a few months before…
Fast forward a few years and using Flash to create anything has become a drag. Like with most other Adobe software the quality has gone downhill in the last few versions 1. Doing anything in the Flash IDE has become a chore. From launching that software that takes way too long while forcing you to stare at a splash screen you can’t click away. To the window management that was made up by some insane dictator. Sudden crashes and cryptic error messages when compiling. Etc. Etc.
As a designer I need flexible and frictionless tools that allow me to create, iterate and experiment. But Flash is no longer such a tool.
Luckily for me, as Flash got worse in recent years, Javascript got better in every way. So for the kind of interaction designs I like to make I no longer need Flash anymore. Actually in a current project we switched from Flash to Javascript while greatly simplifying development and improving the final design.
And the fun is back…
So bye bye Flash. I wish you well. And hello Javascript…
- Don’t get me started on Photoshop. ↩