I have serious problem with Adobe. I just watched a presentation video from Adobe on CS 5 here (YouTube video). My problem is with their last feature: exporting Flash animation to HTML5 canvas.
This seriously encourage people to stick with outdated technology (it is debatable, but this is my view) and not move on to program directly in future technology (HTML 5). Well, this, obviously, is what Adobe wants. However, Flash is never a good platform to develop with. I’ve heard some experienced Flash developers (and mind you, these are the good ones, not your run-of-the-mill Flash developers) complaining about the shortcoming of Flash technology. Why should we let programmers get lazy and stick with lousy platform when there is momentum to force them to move on to newer, cleaner technology. (Yes, part of the problem is the developers themselves; lots of lazy ones out there.)
Also, knowing that Adobe does ship very buggy Flash Player, I’d doubt that their Flash-to-Javascript/HTML5 compiler would be any good. Extrapolate a little and we might see a wholesale exporting of Flash games to HTML5 in the future. Oh gosh, I don’t want to imagine that world. This is what I see: Javascript code exported from Flash with lousy performance, probably pollutes the global namespace, and likely to be bloated as well. This will cause the web to crawl as slow as ever when developers could have moved into faster, cleaner technology. (On another note, Microsoft demo-ed its IE9 recently with hardware acceleration to render HTML 5 canvas and animation, uber cool. Other browsers will definitely go there as well.)
At the end of the day, what we are missing today is backward-compatibility of HTML5 canvas to browsers with no canvas implementation. What we don’t miss: forward-fitting old, outdated technology to newer, cleaner HTML 5. So if anything, I would want to focus on writing a backward-compatible Javascript abstraction of canvas. Enabling substitution of HTML 5 with older technology (yes, I’m talking about Flash). We’ll see whether I have the time to take that up.
Apple might not do everything right, but I totally support their attempts to stamp Adobe out of iPhone/iPad, including the infamous change of Section 3.3.1 on top of not implementing Flash at all in iPhone and iPad.
