Fi­nally (Sigh!) - Adobe Mov­ing Away from Flash!

On Au­gust 1, Adobe Sys­tems pub­licly added a new prod­uct to their line of web de­sign and an­i­ma­tion pro­grams. It’s still in beta, and it’s named Adobe Edge.

Adobe Edge is a tool for cre­at­ing web­site an­i­ma­tions. It al­lows you to add rich mo­tion de­signs to any of your HTML projects, re­gard­less if it’s a web­site, desk­top pro­gram, or mo­bile app. With Edge’s cur­rent tools and ca­pa­bil­i­ties, you can ef­fort­lessly cre­ate new com­po­si­tions, im­port pop­u­lar graphic files like JPG, PNG, and GIF, and give life to ex­ist­ing HTML pages with­out mess­ing up their un­der­ly­ing code.

Be­fore any­thing else, I want to point out that I have never re­ally fa­vored Adobe Flash. Yes, it is flashy (pun in­tended), but it comes with sev­eral flaws, namely:

• Bad for search en­gine optimization.
• Hor­ri­ble us­abil­ity on stand­alone Flash web sites.
• Breaks de­fault browser be­hav­iors (like the back button).
• Ren­ders in­vis­i­ble on an in­creas­ing num­ber of ma­chines, for ex­am­ple Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

In fact, I rec­om­mend to clients that they stay away from Flash as much as pos­si­ble, and I have been do­ing so for years, know­ing that this tech­nol­ogy doesn’t have a bright future.

The Ap­ple Adobe War

Ap­ple Inc. has been in a close re­la­tion­ship with Adobe Sys­tems be­fore. How­ever, as time passed by, a rift formed be­tween the two.

Ap­ple con­tin­u­ously mo­tioned Adobe to de­velop Flash and fix its in­ter­nal prob­lems that re­sult to Mac crash­ing and apps not be­ing com­pat­i­ble with Apple’s mo­bile plat­forms; as a cross-plat­­form tool, these is­sues are def­i­nitely un­ac­cept­able. The prob­lem was: Adobe had been too slow in its actions.

This Ap­­ple-Adobe prob­lem wors­ened and ended up in an ex­plo­sive issue:

Ap­ple com­pletely banned Flash from iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

Apple’s top bosses have been rel­a­tively calm and tight-lipped about it, but with Adobe Sys­tems seem­ingly in­sin­u­at­ing that Ap­ple is on the los­ing end, Ap­ple sim­ply could­n’t let it slip. Fi­nally, on April 2010, Apple’s Steve Jobs re­leased a con­tro­ver­sial state­ment called „Thoughts on Flash.”

This state­ment pointed out not only the prob­lems Ap­ple Inc. is en­coun­ter­ing with Flash but also listed rea­sons why peo­ple should gen­er­ally stay away from Adobe Flash—the state­ment that has in­du­bitably mapped the down­fall of Flash.

With Edge, though, Adobe Sys­tems seems to be try­ing to con­vince crit­ics, my­self in­cluded, that it is still the lead­ing mul­ti­me­dia soft­ware provider. Adobe Edge is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—Adobe’s an­swer to the new de­mands of the mar­ket and the con­tin­u­ous com­plaints against the poor per­for­mance of Flash. With this new prod­uct, Adobe Sys­tems reaches out to mar­kets that it can’t oth­er­wise touch into with Flash.

In­tended to be added to the Cre­ative Suite Pack­age, Adobe Edge fea­tures a sim­ple drag-and-drop in­ter­face guided by a time­line. You sim­ply drag your ob­jects around and make your set­tings, and Edge trans­forms every­thing into pro­fes­sional HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

As Edge uses CSS con­trolled by JavaScript, it of­fers a smooth text and graph­ics transitions.

As of this writ­ing, Adobe Edge is in its beta phase. That is why Adobe is still pol­ish­ing its to-do lists, aim­ing to al­low in­cor­po­ra­tion of videos and au­dios along­side the graph­ics for­mats they cur­rently han­dle. Nonethe­less, even at its cur­rent stage, Adobe Edge al­ready of­fers a great al­ter­na­tive for web con­tent de­sign. Aside from the fact that it in­te­grates with Dreamweaver, Edge also adopts We­bKit, the lay­out en­gine used by pop­u­lar browsers and top cor­po­ra­tions such as Ap­ple Inc., Google, Ama­zon, and Nokia.

There is no doubt that Flash is start­ing to get thrown over. Nev­er­the­less, with Edge, Adobe Sys­tems hopes to keep their lead­ing po­si­tion and recog­ni­tion among web and mo­bile users alike.

Adobe Edge: The Rea­son be­hind Its Creation

Adobe Sys­tems In­cor­po­rated has al­ways been one of the lead­ing com­puter soft­ware com­pa­nies. Founded in 1982, it has since grown into a global provider of com­puter soft­ware, with prod­ucts rang­ing from desk­top pub­lish­ing, video edit­ing and spe­cial ef­fects soft­ware, to web de­sign programs.

When it comes to web de­sign pro­grams, Adobe is most pop­u­lar for Flash. Adobe added Flash to its port­fo­lio (to­gether with Dreamweaver) when it pur­chased the orig­nial Flash de­vel­oper Macro­me­dia Inc. back in 2005, thereby killing its own web de­sign soft­ware ‘Go­Live.’

Adobe Flash is ac­tu­ally a mul­ti­me­dia pro­gram that al­lows web mas­ters to in­clude video, an­i­ma­tion, and other forms of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity on their web pages. With a lot of users, web­sites, and even browsers re­ly­ing on Flash to run ap­pli­ca­tions, al­low video stream­ing, and lev­el­ing dif­fer­ences be­tween browsers, there is no doubt why Adobe Flash has hold the po­si­tion of top web con­tent plu­gin for years. That is, un­til nu­mer­ous is­sues, es­pe­cially us­abil­ity and se­cu­rity prob­lems, gave it a bad rep­u­ta­tion and al­ter­na­tives came up.

So, why did Adobe Sys­tems cre­ate Edge? If you are still won­der­ing, here is the straight­for­ward an­swer: be­cause now there is HTML5 and CSS3!

The most im­por­tant rea­son why Adobe Sys­tems started to change ship and cre­ated Edge is the fact that HTML5, the suc­ces­sor of the HTML4 stan­dard, has cre­ated a solid foun­da­tion with re­gard to struc­tur­ing and pre­sen­ta­tion of con­tent on the Internet.

With HTML5 it is pos­si­ble to play au­dio and video with­out us­ing any plu­g­ins, like the Flash plu­gin. Play­ing video has been the ma­jor rea­son for mil­lions of web sites to use Flash. Now even YouTube is of­fer­ing HTML5 ren­dered video.

With CSS3 and JavaScript, it is now pos­si­ble to an­i­mate graph­ics and text, also with­out need of any plugin.

With these new al­ter­na­tives for mul­ti­me­dia play­back and an­i­ma­tion, there is lit­tle need for re­source hun­gry workarounds like Flash.

Why You Should Not Opt for Flash

Among the points raised by Steve Jobs, the most no­table are prob­a­bly that Flash doesn’t pro­vide suf­fi­cient se­cu­rity and that it only pro­hibits de­vel­op­ers from con­tin­u­ously advancing.

Se­cu­rity. Flash has raised con­cern among de­vel­op­ers and users due to its poor per­for­mance. Not only does it make web pages load slower; it also has a ten­dency to crash, leav­ing users no choice but start work­ing again on on­line projects they are han­dling at the time it crashes from the beginning—a big in­con­ve­nience that Adobe has yet to cre­ate an ef­fec­tive, per­ma­nent so­lu­tion for.

De­vel­op­ment. Flash is meant to help de­vel­op­ers de­liver top-of-the-line apps for con­sumers by be­ing a cross-plat­­form de­vel­op­ment tool. How­ever, Adobe Flash is de­vel­op­ing rel­a­tively slow, putting up a strict limit to which plat­forms cer­tain apps can be viewed—something that op­poses its sup­posed objectives.

The above two points are strong enough rea­sons for users to de­vi­ate away from Flash.

Af­ter sev­eral years, Adobe Sys­tems fully felt the im­pact, prompt­ing it to fi­nally cre­ate an HTML-based pro­gram in the form of Adobe Edge. Con­trary to Flash, Adobe Edge em­braces open stan­dards yet re­tains qual­i­ties like clean, crisp graph­ics and move­ments that made Flash a phe­nom­e­non before.

Fu­ture of Adobe Edge

Right now, a lot of spec­u­la­tions are bud­ding around Adobe Edge. While it proves that Adobe Sys­tems is ready to move for­ward and adapt to the de­mand for open sys­tems, the fact that there are al­ready sev­eral play­ers, such as Sen­cha an­i­ma­tor, that have al­ready es­tab­lished tools for CSS-based an­i­ma­tion, might make it hard for Edge to gain the recog­ni­tion it aims for.

But then again, Adobe has a knack for get­ting at­ten­tion and ahead of com­pe­ti­tion, so we can only just wait and see how Edge will be wel­comed by the community.

You can down­laod the beta ver­sion of Adobe Edge here:

https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge