As we should have expected, Adobe isn’t taking the Apple lead attack on Flash and support of HTML5′s video tag as a replacement, lying down. As Adobe gets closer to releasing Flash Player 10.1, it seems some of this might have just been due to the timing. Flash Player 10.1 is optimized for mobile and has made some big improvements for OS X. And some Flash evangilists and developers have come out in full force with examples of how much Flash Player has improved.
Mike Chambers posted some stats showing some performance tests he did on his Mac Pro where he compared HTML5/JavaScript examples to similar Flash examples. The performance varies surprisingly from browser to browser but it seems, at least to me, the Flash Player 10.1 performs very well on OS X. But I did see one thing that confirms something I’ve thought for a while, Safari for Windows is pretty bad. Although, why people use any Apple software on Windows is beyond me, it’s like Apple puts it out there to suck and hope people blame it on Windows, but that’s a completely different topic.
Fabio Sonnati put up a huge post called Flash Player 10.1 will kill HTML5. While I disagree with that statement, I agree with him that Flash video isn’t quite dead. And he’s got tons of info on all the codecs that Flash Player can play.
At gotoandlearn.com, Lee Brimelow put up a tutorial demonstrating the multi-touch gesture support that has been added to Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0. It’s pretty simple stuff and as usual Lee shows how to do it in a very easy to understand style. At first I didn’t really care about multi-touch, but after seeing this, I’m actually kind of excited about it. It could really make for some interesting apps, especially with Flash CS5 being able to make iPhone apps. I plan on making my own stuff and just putting it on my phone!
The Flash Mobile Blog has a post about the distribution plan for Flash Player 10.1. They also go over the installation process on mobile devices, showing how close it is to the desktop so that people will have an easier time with it. They’re very hopeful that the Open Screen Project will result in Flash Player being on a majority of mobile devices. I think if they can get Flash on all Android and Windows Mobile devices, Apple might open up and they might at least figure out a compromise about Flash on the iPhone, even if we don’t get the full blown one on there.
So far from what I’ve seen in all these Flash vs HTML5 arguments, the people that are predicting Flash’s death seem to be the ones that never use it or have used it for a long time and have developed a big hate for Adobe over the years. ActionScript 3.0 is a pretty good language and the Flash IDE is a pretty good environment to work in, although the coder could use some work. And HTML5 needs JavaScript and debugging it is a pain! Hopefully the improvements the Flash Player are enough that I don’t have to worry about JavaScript debugging anytime soon.
