Flash is Dead, Long Live Flex (as Flash)
I’m writing as a response to Kevin Suttle’s post Found and Lost: The Flash IDE which asks the question: what happened to the Flash IDE?
Over the past few years, Flash Professional has been marginalized more and more to make room for Flex Builder and the upcoming Flash Catalyst. As a professional Flash developer/designer I’ve ranted many times about these changes and decided to throw my opinion into the debate.
The life of Flash (as we used to know it) peaked with the rise of Actionscript 2 and Flash video. Prior to this time, Flash was exciting, artistic, experimental media for delivering websites, animations, and the occasional ad banner. When Flash video became mainstream, internet and media teams jumped to the Flash platform.
With the jump came very talented programmers who produced a lot of great stuff in Flash. At the same time they looked upon AS2 and declared “this is not optimal” and looked upon the timeline and exclaimed “WTF!?”
So something natural happened: a coup d’etat. Regime change. Unfamiliar with what Flash was, these talented programmers started replacing Flash with what they knew: Java and Eclipse. Around the time of the release of CS3 emerged Actionscript 3 (Java) and a new IDE (Flex/Eclipse) that enabled programmers to do Flash in their old familiar environment, using their native language.
No longer necessary for “real projects”, Flash Professional got tossed in with Creative Suite. As such Flash Pro became one of many aging creative apps downshifted to semi-annual maintenance updates and half-baked features. I say half-baked simply because bugs are no longer seriously addressed in periodic updates. Instead they are released in concert as part of a paid upgrade every 18 months. So half-complete features such as Flash’s new Motion Editor won’t be updated until the release of CS5. In contrast, Flex programmers can grab nightly builds of Flex 4 (long before it even goes beta) to use with their free Flex SDK.
Despite that rant, I’m pretty much past the point of being shocked or upset. The fact is Flash Professional is going the way of Director, and Flex has risen to be the center of the Flash Platform. Programming is center stage and creative media has been left alone, coasting along from it’s own inertia (for now).
So how should Adobe fix the Flash IDE and make it creative and media savvy again?
I’ll save that for my next post.
April 21st, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Summed up very well. Not only am I not shocked, but I kind of don’t care… and I do all of my coding in the Flash IDE!! I just see it as a “That’s just the way it is” kind of thing. So we wait, and we see, and we trust in Adobe.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I don’t quite think it is as dire as you put it, at least not yet.
Flex is great, but if you build even a minimal Flex app with no components in it, it is at least 100k at the moment. That’s a big issue that needs to be solved, perhaps by embedding the Flex libraries into the Flash player eventually.
Flex is best for app development on the Flash Platform, but the Flash IDE is still best for the more design-y things (animations, games, ads, etc).
But to say Flex has risen to the center of the Flash Platform is a giant overstatement. Many Actionscript/Flash developers still don’t even know about Flex. The Flash IDE has thousands and thousands of people who can use it, where the Flex IDE is being given away to students (and the recently unemployed) by Adobe to drum up interest.
I think both IDEs have their place for now. I think Catalyst will support both, not kill off Flash.
At least not yet.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:29 pm
FWIW you can produce AS-only builds in Flex without the overhead.
It’s just not well documented.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:40 am
I’ve been meaning to try that. I find myself wanting to use the mxml bits less and less, and the AS3 parts more.
Still, if the direction really is more towards Flex, then eventually the player itself needs to have Flex built into it, so that the framework doesn’t have to be downloaded.
Of course, RSLs can reduce your file size, but that assumes people have the framework loaded via using another Flex app elsewhere. An assumption that doesn’t really do anything for people who have not done so. You might as well as say it doesn’t matter how big the images are on your site because someone who’s already been there has them cached.
Now I think I’m going to go rewrite some small Flex apps in AS3 only just for fun.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
[...] and Lost: The Flash IDE, I posted a (slightly exaggerated) rant yesterday summarizing the recent shift to Flex that is taking place in the Flash [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
In theory, RSLs aren’t meant to be universal (i.e. shared between many services). Rather, RSLs are a way of caching often-used web apps, so it makes sense not to hard-code this stuff into the player. Still, I don’t think RSLs are quite as great as claimed and suspect that they tend to build up and slow down the Flash Player over time.
OTOH, I now gladly accept Flex’s file size overhead. Years ago I was much more size-minded, but this got me thinking. People are watching dozens of 10-200MB videos daily, so a 100k web app is nothing these days. It actually takes longer to show & hide a preloader animation that it takes to download a 1MB web app. In fact lots of common digital processes such as email often have a bigger header than the actual message contained. So if they’re cool with it, I can be too.
June 7th, 2009 at 4:45 am
Merge everything and call it Flash ffs. It’s stupid to have all these different paradigms and frameworks. AIR, Flex, whatever… concentrate.