It's dying a slow death, but it will be gone from the desktop soon also. There's too many speed and security issues with Flash.

Jeez, Kelly, crabby much?

A fair amount of what I do these days is interactive training tools in Flash. For example, a (rather basic) simulator of a computer's BIOS screens where you can at least click on the menu items and get a sense of all the options.

I don't need Flash for video, I need it for interactivity, and I need something that other people (temporary hires) can understand how to author without being hugely specialized. And I need an environment that keeps a project organized.

Flash does this. Am I married to Flash? No, but I definitely want something that provides a good development environment and doesn't soak up every last Watt of the dwindling brain power I have left.

At the moment, none of what I do is expected to push out to anything but IE on the PC since it's all internal communications, but that's still (potentially) about three hundred thousand pairs of eyeballs. So Flash is just fine, but, yes, it looks like it's time to get serious about other ways of doing this...like Javascript. Canvas tags, and CSS3...but at the moment it's looking a bit like chewing glass. The goal being to produce interactive content that *can* go out to tablets and phones.

But none of this has much to do with Vegas. Vegas is just the video equivalent of Photoshop (or GIMP, if you prefer). The closest Vegas gets to interactivity is menus in DVDA.

Rob Mack

I'd say flash would be better then HTML for most mobile (aka non-PC/Laptop) stuff. You could use the screen space better.

I'd say the ONLY reason Adobe is killing it is because they're a second fiddle. They want to be the one calling the shots like with Photoshop & AE.

I'd say flash would be better then HTML for most mobile (aka non-PC/Laptop) stuff

I'm not so sure of that. There are many great things about HTML and CSS. probably the most important (in this context) is that they can very easily and naturally reflow when you rotate your mobile device from vertical to horizontal. Added to that, you can automatically swap stylesheets based on the output target, so if it's a mobile device the page could look one way, if the document is being printed it could look another, and it could have a third look for standard desktop screens, etc.

Add to that the easy ability to make pages accessible to screen reader software (something that is usually mandatory with large clients) .

It's true that you can build a bit of this into a SWF but it's just not as simple as building it into the HTML of the page.

There are instances where Flash adds value, but it's not really in its ability to play video, nor is it inherently in it's ability to take the place of html. To my mind, Flash adds value when it provides interactivity and animation in a single media element, and in a way that is easy to author and easy to maintain.

There's nothing that says that Flash has to be the method of delivering animation and specialized interactivity, but it's a common enough tool that I can find people to work in it and they don't necessarily have to be coders.

Ideally, even though my projects are never intended to be displayed on tablets and phones, I still want to make sure that avenue is open. At this point it sounds like Flash isn't going to provide that so I'm looking more seriously at the options. Or at least trying to figure out what the options are.

Tablets and phones are the growth side of the computer market right now, which seems like it's got companies in a panic to get onto that bus (or maybe just the majority shareholders who want ever increasing returns). I think it's fairly obvious to Adobe that the Flash platform really isn't going to cut it on these new devices and falling back to what other people support within HTML5 puts a lot less of the onus on Adobe. Mainly, Adobe needs to be in the business of selling content creation tools more than they need to specifically push Flash. So in a way, the phone and tablet market gives them a great reason to transition away from Flash.

Rob