It has been a while since I have posted and things have definitely changed. I have been working in Flash since Flash 5.0. I remember when a Flash dev could command an amazing salary, and media companies were popping up all over the place to capitalize on the multimedia goodness of Flash. Unfortunately, those were the days of dial-up, and the Flash player was evolving. Let’s just say expectations far exceeded what was possible.
We are now at Flash player 11. Adobe named this player the “console for the web”. I remember a post back in 2009 by Ben Garney of Torque and PushButton Engine fame begging Adobe to do just that. Now here we are with hardware acceleration, and Stage 3d, and few get what has just happened. What was impossible back in the day (circa 2000) when people were writing business proposals over lunch on napkins for multimedia based .coms and getting huge investments for vapor, may actually now be possible.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to do, and a long way to go before it all becomes as practical as working in the current IDE, but at this stage (no pun intended) it really looks promising. It’s really early in the game. It feels like the time just before the Flash boom back in the late 90′s. The thing that Flash has going for it now is penetration and trust. People will update the flash player thanks to video. The tools that support Stage3D will eventually come. Adobe has delivered the goods, and if they aren’t too late, and they can get mobile nailed down, we could actually have another boom. Only this time it won’t be all hype. I for one am excited, and glad to be able to once again say, ‘It’s good to be a Flash developer’. Now where’s my napkin?
DCF
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