Last year I was searching for alternatives and new paths for myself.

Mobile or game development is my dilemma now. With new trends (fashion) in the web development… I can’t see myself spending 3x more time for writing, learning, goggling and debugging across all OS/browser combinations. If I would never knew AS or Flash never happened to us, maybe… but over a decade pushing every single line of code to make something faster, more efficient it is against my nature now to ‘hack-to-get-job-done’.

And as freelancer… well, in my humble opinion HTML5 hype kills freelance market in general, because it is no longer impossible for individual to learn all available combos html(style)/css(framework-style)/js(framework). You can be lucky to find something that suits you but there will be a very big risk involved in time and resource assessment, usually done by not very technical people.

This is very sad time for all of us, but it is happening.

Thank for your article, it is good to know, I am not alone in analysis of the current state of the market.

I can totally understand why you might feel that Flash as an aesthetic is dead, it certainly seems that way. I believe the reason for this has been the dire lack of solid animation tools. CSS3 animations, jQuery.animate() and the existing crop of js animation libraries are severely lacking compared to what we were used to with scripted animation in Flash.

Disclaimer: I work for GreenSock, but I think you will be very interested in knowing that the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) which contains TweenLite, TweenMax, TimelineLite and TimelineMax has been successfully ported to JavaScript.

I don’t want to link-spam your article but here are a few that I think you and your readers will find very interesting:

http://www.greensock.com/gsap-js/
http://www.greensock.com/css3/
http://www.greensock.com/jquery/
http://codepen.io/collection/jmHAn/1

GSAP isn’t tied to any one rendering layer. You can animate any numeric property of any JavaScript object. Use it with WebGL / threeJS, canvas or to animate DOM elements with the CSSPlugin.

My GreenSock employment aside, I was quite terrified of the HTML5/JS landscape but I found that using my existing GSAP knowledge with a very little bit of jQuery made it very easy to start building fun and powerful animations without Flash. Give it a spin, I’m confident it will revolutionize your animation workflow in the non-Flash world.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. I’m equally saddened to see Flash take such a hit but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Best,

Carl

HTML5/javascript/CSS is the new kid on the block, and as the name suggests, it’s a sprawling mess. While it presents nicely designed png’s very well, it’s a compatibility bomb worse than anything we faced in the mid 90′s.

Flash is fading, but maybe it’s the genre of websites it was used for that is disappearing, as you can sell an app, but can’t sell the same thing in a web browser. We are left with HTML5 for database driven presentation type projects, and have to look to Unity for gaming. The more experimental artistic sites are STILL being made in Flash. If Flash is niche, it is still an enormous niche. Flash is just not sexy any more.

I have considered dropping Flash/AIR, but it means dropping creativity itself for a while. That’s tough. The things I build in Flash can not yet be made cross-platform in HTML5. This leaves one in no mans land.

Anyway thanks for all the articles and workshop you have already done, and I’m looking forward for more exciting projects from you!

I don’t have tested it yet, but what do you think of PlayScript ?
http://flashdaily.net/post/49082766508/playscript-cross-platform-compiler-for-as3-devs

I think I could have write this post 2 years ago, when I began to do JS/HTML and CSS :)
Besides the technical analysis, I think one of the most important aspect of your post is : “this means that Flash is condemned both as a technology, as an aesthetics and as a cultural phenomenon.”
This is a question I asked myself too. Does the old paradigm of the full-flash website still works ? Agencies’ Flash websites “a la FWA” have lived, there are plenty other ways for brands to advertise (think FB, social viral buzzy bullshits, mobile apps, videos…). Maybe this niche (it was) will become a super-niche.
What’s great about all that, it’s the possibility to create our own tools. For me, I won’t rely on a proprietary solution anymore, lesson learned. JS is chewing gum, you can do whatever you want, it’s free and all you need is a notepad and a browser. I love this simplicity, even if the lack of structure and strong conventions in JS is a real pain in the ass sometimes. But there’s a HUGE JS community, things moves very fast, conventions and good practices are emerging, ES6 is on his way, TypeScript is really great, nodeJS is super powerfull (at least you won’t do PHP ;), PhoneGap is getting stronger in each version,…
There are 1000 reasons to be optimistic when you watch JS world, while there’s 1000 to despair when you see Flash and AS3 position today….
Once again, you’re the man, thanks for your speech, respect for all you’ve done.

Nico

dom is gpu accelerated.

hth,
Vic