End-of-life Flash or what about Adobe Flash Builder future...

[popolino17]

Hello Adobe,

We would like to be informed in more details about Your decision to “Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encoura....”

We are a university community and university professor's authority and high school teacher`s community.

We are planning to extend existing inter-organizational educational game platform project which current version is based on ActionScript and executed via ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2).

We are deeply concern what will be the future of Adobe Flash Builder and Adobe Animate CC which licenses we intend to buy for a long period.

If Your intention to stop updating and distributing Flash Player (e,g AVM2)  how should this products work  - for example Adobe Flash Builder render its ActionScript code through Flash Player!? Adobe Animate CC executes preview the movie – this is in Flash Player!!!

So, in summary  - Whether this two products shall continue to work without limitations after 2020?

[jeromiec83223024]

The wise long-term approach would be to adapt your curriculum to use technologies based on the Web Platform (HTML and JavaScript)  or a dedicated game development platform, in favor of Flash Player and ActionScript.  While we're well aware that Flash Builder and Animate CC are great tools for building games, as you've noted, Flash Player is going away. 

The technology and workflow choices that are right for you are going to be largely dependent on your curriculum and the needs of your students.

It's also worth noting that as the major U.S. browser vendors move forward with their agenda to deprecate Flash Player and plug-in interfaces altogether, you'll see an increasing amount of friction in running Flash content on your workstations well before the 2020 deadline.  You'll probably want to adapt your course sooner, rather than later, if only to stay ahead of the support pain. 

[popolino17]

Thanks jeromiec83223024,

Although Your answer is crystal clear targeting Flash player plugin demise - the main question was - Is it worth We to BUY a LICENSE for the products (mentioned above) that rely on dying technology?

If the concequences of deprecating Flash player have so huge negative impact on Adobe Flash Builder and Adobe Animte CC - We will abandone our idea to implement it both at all.

[jeromiec83223024]

That's really going to depend on your course and what your needs are.  If your students aren't developing the course in ActionScript, buying an ActionScript IDE like Flash Builder probably doesn't make sense. 

That said, if you're adapting your course to focus on game development using HTML5, Animate CC may be a great solution for in-game animation and asset creation.  We wanted to take the rich content development workflows that animators were used to with Flash and bring them forward to the modern web.  The addition of support for HTML and JavaScript output is what inspired the name change.

My personal focus around here is relatively narrow.  I work on Flash Player, and am focused on engineering details.

Adobe has a fantastic education team and a lot of product evangelists that focus on helping customers build great experiences using our tools.  It's probably worth your time to reach out to our education team to see how we can best help you to both transition your course, and choose the best products to support that effort.

You can find contact information for the education team, here:

Creative Cloud for education | Educational institutions

[popolino17]

Ok, I understand. I'll try to rich this educational team.

I appreciate Your help!

Thanks

[Nancy OShea]

Firefox, Chrome & MS Edge have already begun to remove support for NPAPI plugins.   This is not unexpected either.  This move away from 3rd party plugins towards native web technologies has been on the radar for several years.

The makers of the wildly popular Candy Crush & Soda Saga have developed web friendly replacements for their Flash-based games.   I recently evaluated the newest HTML5 version of Candy Crush and it's very impressive.  Best of all, no plugins required.  

Animate CC projects can be published as HTML5 Canvas or SVG.  See below for details.

Specify publish settings for Animate CC 

Nancy

[popolino17]

Hey Nancy,

Your note made me calm!!!

As far as we have worked with prior to Animate CC (Adobe Flash) releases the main question was - is it worth to use this great programing language - ActionScript in future in our courses?

I have my reason to beleave that there will have been be new thechnology of rendering FLA (project file) into new(other than SWF) executed file type (and well accepted).

We salute this Adobe evolution to sacrifice just one plugin (Flash Player) but to save such absolutelly dominating convergention of programing conception (formely Flash) and programing language (cousin of JavaScript).

Let Steve Jobs rest in peace now -  Flash Player is dead! Long live FLANIMATE

[Nancy OShea]

Shockwave & Flash were developed by Macromedia in the early to mid 90s when the web was just starting to take off.   ActionScript was a really nice ride while it lasted.  But 25 years later, it's no longer useful to me personally or professionally as my bread & butter is web development.  

[jeromiec83223024]

I share this sentiment as well.  My personal opinion is that you're doing a disservice to your students by avoiding the jump to technologies like JavaScript, which are relevant to a much larger population of potential employers, and which will be around long after Flash Player has left the scene.  While ActionScript may have applications in some niche markets, it's unlikely going to be work that the majority of your students will find themselves doing.  I see clear pretty clear parallels to architectural programs that still put a lot of weight on pen-and-paper drafting.  There's value there, sure, but it's largely academic.

In terms of preparing your students for life in a commercial development environment 5-10-15 years down the road, they would probably be better served by different technology choices.

[popolino17]

I don't believe to my eyes!

Members of this community, among of it dedicated specialist, to make statement like this and to not able to see to real devastating ugly TRUE !

This is a corporate war!!!

A Goliat(Apple, Chrome, Microsoft, Mozila etc ) against David (Adobe).

And wholle this is happed in front of the entire community ...in front of the entire free digital world!!!

Obviously You do not undrestand the revolutionary conception of this so called Flash technolog.Unfortunately the money makes the world goes round - including killing technology!

Let me say in this perspective:

The content someone created few years ago by using certain well established, standartized,working technology because of someone's decision with a HUGE FINACIAL MERCANTILE MOTIVE will not be able to be accesed, to be shared and to be edited never again!

Could You explain this normally - It is Dictat! It is impingement against freedom of modern digital conception to create, to share and to edit digital content.

And one more  perspective about new thechnologies - HTML,Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic, - were created before AcsionScript!

And the content created by use of these languages, for example in 1999,it is still accesible not only by the creator but everyone else.

Where is the freedom to have what You 've created?

The contemporarry problems are not because of programming language - You should  understand that simple truth!

The "shockwave" content  is NOT DANGEROUS!

As an expert in the filed You surely have fully picture of this, right, Mr Flash Player engineer.

There is not prove of that!

Content is not harmful! The way of usage - maybe! But i have to chose what to do.

As a programming language ActionScript is not the problem. In my humble opinion the problem lies in AVM2. But I will not discuss the problems. This is entirely different point of view. The content must be protected. The big lie is that this is an obsolete thecnology. Says by who?

Those of them with oldest thechnologis than this!

People, they took from us our freedom of our digital creations (studies, publications, poetry, arts, films, lessons, books...). Just content. But ours!

Could You explain how could be possible to be accessed  this content created in 1991: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html/

via Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox etc. and will be accessed after 2020 when the swf content will be no longer accessed ( The meaning word is accessed -  not supported)

Where is the new thecnology here? Just plain html content.

It is so sad that free world does nothing about it. I'm not corporate supporter at all. I value freedom of sharing information with other parts of this world.

And not be so verbose I'll put the end of this with the prediction that all same Flash functionality today will be fact in the near future but not called Flash .

OTempora!. O mores!

O Sancta Simplicta!

[Nancy OShea]

For the record, I don't work for Adobe.  The opinions expressed here are my own based on 25 years of professional experience.

Technologies have always come & gone.  Humans once communicated on clay tablets, then the printing press and eventually the digital age.  Modern technologies often change at breakneck speed.  To give you just a few examples,  I would no more use EPS (encapsulated post script) images today than I would HTML 3.2., Adobe Spry or the once highly touted YahooUI framework.  The same goes for MooTools, Scriptaculous and many other coding frameworks that have been replaced by jQuery & jQuery UI.  As wonderful as those older technologies may have seemed in their glory days,  they are nothing more than zombies now.  Finito.  Nobody uses them.

popolino17  wrote

Where is the new thecnology here? Just plain html content.

No. Flash on the web can be replaced right now with a combination of technologies.  SVG, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery and native Web APIs like HTML5 Canvas.

This has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with keeping one's skill set relevant to remain competitive in the workplace.  There is no freedom if you can't find a job.  How many employers are looking for ActionScript programmers today vs 10 years ago?    The bottom line here is you must give people what they need today;  not clay tablets & a stick.

Nancy

[Guest]

AS3 & flash player are still better than HTML5, CSS & JS today. It's kind of funny that all the problems people would say about flash payer 10 years ago are now the exact same problems that people say about HTML5 & JS today. I think the main problem was that AS3 wasn't open source early on. Open source is very important. AS3 is still useful in Adobe AIR but AIR is also falling behind the time lately.

The one thing I always wondered about was why Adobe never released their own web browser. All the web browsers favor JS over AS3 but Adobe could have built a web browser that favored AS3 over JS.

[Nancy OShea]

brianm74259883  wrote

The one thing I always wondered about was why Adobe never released their own web browser.

How much do you pay for your browsers & updates?

Zero.

Assuming for a moment that Adobe created a browser, how many people do you think would buy it?

All the web browsers favor JS over AS3...

And for good reason. JavaScript is recognized by the W3C (world wide web consortium).  There's no mention of action script in the web standards.  

JavaScript Web APIs - W3C