Digital Royal

Robert Scoble “Can Flash be saved?”

Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t. What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web. The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.

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John Gruber “Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?”

Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers. Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells. What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.

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Michael Pinto “The Beginning Of The End Of Flash?”

My problem is that I’m using Flash to develop online games for kids, however that’s a small niche market in the bigger picture. My guess would be that the biggest use for Flash is video (YouTube being the most high profile example), however with HTML 5 coming there may not be a need for a video plugin. Another use for Flash has always been to create multimedia interfaces for websites, however AJAX has started to really to really chip away at that market. Yes a microsite for a Hollywood film might still use Flash but my guess is that 80% of animated slideshows that you see out there are powered by AJAX scripts.

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Dave Winer “What If Flash Were An Open Standard?”

Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple’s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.

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Jeffrey Zeldman “Flash, iPad, Standards”

Apple and Adobe invented modern publishing together in the 1980s, and they’ve been fighting like an old unmarried couple ever since, but Apple’s decision to omit Flash from the iPad isn’t about revenge, it’s about delivering a stable platform. And with HTML5 here, the tea leaves are easy to read. Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash—but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out.

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Jilion’s “SublimeVideo” Player for HTML5 - The Herald Of The Future?

from the demo:

• HTML5 video goodness: no browser plugin, no Flash dependencies
• jump anywhere in the video and it’ll start buffering from that point
• Custom styled controlsv
• Full-window mode: Sleek zoom-in/out transitions
• Live-resizing (when resizing the browser window)
• More advanced controls on a draggable pane
• Press spacebar to play/pause video
• Full-screen mode by alt-clicking on the full-window button (currently only supported in latest