I’ve been using Flash since 1999 or so. It’s responsible for my career and any small bit of fame and fortune I might have. Most of the people I count as friends have come from the Flash community. Flash will always be something more than just a technology to me. I think Flash has seen its golden age and is probably unlikely to see such times again. But it will continue to fill several gaps, I’d guess for several years to come. The areas that Flash is focusing on now – 3d gaming, advanced video, and mobile apps – are not areas that interest me very much. So I am currently more interested in other technologies and activities. And that’s all I really have to say on the subject.
In the past week, the layoffs at Adobe and the dropping of the Flash player on mobile browsers have a huge storm in the Flash community, and wider technology community as well. Of course there are the people who have always been anti-Flash, now predictably dancing in the streets and tearing down statues, rejoicing that Flash is dead. Then there are many in the Flash community who feel personally betrayed by Adobe by this move, shouting things like, “Flash is dead, and Adobe killed it!” Then there are those insisting this is a great move for Flash that will help it move forward.
To my ears, this is all a whole lot of noise and whining. Two things I read last week resonated with me. One was a friend who said, “Twitter is like a license to be an asshole.” The other was this graphic that’s been floating around:
In the first part of my life, I was painfully shy. I don’t consider myself shy anymore, but I think most people who know me personally would say I am in general a quiet person, at least until I know you really well. Having a blog and twitter and other social networks has given me a voice that is louder than one I’ve ever had before. Like many others, I’ve used that voice carelessly a lot. But more and more I find myself consciously and purposely being more reserved about it. Holding back on tweeting the first snappy remark that comes to mind, or banging off a blog post that expresses my outrage at some situation. I find that later I’m always very glad that I held back. The world isn’t going to fall apart if it doesn’t hear my take on recent events right this minute.
Anyway, I’m taking some time off twitter and most other social networks. It all just sounds like nails scraping on a chalkboard to me. I’m going to try to blog more, as that’s something I’ve found I’ve been doing a lot less of. And I intend those blog posts to be some useful bit of information, not just noise and opinions on the latest technical scandal.
I wrote a Twitter client that doesn’t show any output and only accepts input. It’s just a window with a text field in it. That might work for you 😉
Take care man <3 More blogging is always good
Brilliant. That’s all most people need anyway.
Great post and nice to see you taking the high road in a way I can totally respect and wish I could emulate. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to cut down on twitter again, especially since I am one of the biggest abusers of it. I guess that is why I started my Code Warmup site so I could just get back to what really got me started in programing which is making cool little experiments and challenging myself. I look forward to reading your blog more again.
Your code warmup site is a great idea. It is so much more what is needed than endless commentary.
Hey Keith,
When people like you were really into Google+ when it launched I was extremely excited about the possibilities. Now I feel that the very reason I was so excited about it is the reason I too want to just turn it off.
I was really hoping it would turn into a wealth of energy and information but it’s turning out to cause me a lot of unnecessary stress and angst.
Looking forward to more blog posts.
Just a few days off twitter and I actually feel calmer.
I agree that sitting shut-up is good and relaxing. That’s why I deleted my Facebook account and forgot my Twitter password. I work in advertisement and I’m not flash guru like Peter. So a clever ignorance is a kind of bliss. But… well why not to say something really relevant regarding Adobe – they are responsible for the new technologies development. I think to be not involved into a politics is a kind of politics, init? I was really happy that flash player 10 is rendering animation with the same speed as it was in 2001 on my Celeron 333MHz machine. Recently I was visiting many times local Currys digital store and was testing every new tablet in terms of Flash player performance. I have realized that JavaScript is in many cases equally slow as flash, even iPad 2 was not really amazing. So I did not buy any tablet yet because it’s a gimmick toy to me and if I’ll buy one it will be probably Windows 7 based machine – not a gmail reader and sophisticated video photo frame which is twice more expensive than average PC netbook.
Seems pretty callous to call everye a bunch of whiners, because they are worried whether they will have a job next year, or are a 50% pay cut to keep working.
I’m not in that boat myself, but this is people’s livelihood here, this is personal stuff. It’s easy to poo poo everything when you’re financially secure, and don’t have to worry about how you’ll feed your kids and pay the mortgage… Something Adobe made much harder for thousands of families with its horrible handling of this announcement.
I don’t call valid concerns whining. But what are you going to do about it? What I was seeing was a whole lot of snide remarks, jokes, name calling, angry rants. None of those are going to help you remain financially stable. So yes, if you’ve invested your entire career in a technology owned by a single company, and have not ever added to your repertoire, and now you’re upset because that company is changing… I don’t know.
Thanks Keith, I’ve noticed myself spending far too long on Twitter just getting frustrated with what’s being spouted and not achieving anything. I regularly write several thoughts into tweets only to never click the send button. I’m glad I didn’t but wish I’d not wasted the time in the first place.
Like yourself, I’m going to put more effort into sharing via blogging and code.
So, cheers for the kick up the backside!
Keith, i largely share your view in your blog post above, hence why i these days usually spend way more time on designing and developing stuff and being an active member in beta groups for products i feel advance nicely than to post a lot on twitter, facebook etc.
I also share the conviction that as designer and/or developer one should and has to constantly look what other languages and tools are upcoming and a good choice to get into, instead of remaining confined to using a single tool/language and being in the hand of a single company deciding your fate.
Hence why i learned to use all sorts of languages and middleware in the last few years, right now i´m spending lots of time making games in C# in unity for example, also dabbled with UDK and lots of other stuff though.
So, even despite having been a flash content creator for many years, the recent news around flash have very little (if any) actual impact on my livelihood, being able to pay my bills etc.
And still, i felt the need to post enraged posts on various Adobe staff member or Evangelist or similar stance authors´sites.
Why?
Cause yeah, i did get kinda enraged regarding how Adobe lead to the stepwise decline of Flash after buying Macromedia and even more, that now after the demise also largely caused by them (no one could have blamed Flash seriously for running poorly if it had run exceptionally well on all platforms ages ago), well, they betray their longtime user and client base.
And i don´t say betrayed in enraged mode now, nor lightly, i think its a very fitting term when comparing Adobe´s statements from the last few days with some they made last year.
Next to that i also think their moves are shortsighted because they seem to only consider the new user base of html5 content creators they can sell tools to and are not thinking (enough) about the reputation and trust loss among those users they had, nor about the side that in a year or two there might be a demand for in depth media mashups on browsers (of then more powerful) tvs and tablets and those then maybe can´t be always fully satisfied with still in infancy html5 content yet.
Anyway, in a nutshell i think in this case its not just about a company changing its course slightly in reasonable way, its about a company who preached an own platform with “Evangelists” for many years and which due to that should be more well aware of and acting better regarding the responsibility it put onto itself by making so many believe in them and invest into them and their languages and tools.
And yeah, hence why i felt Adobe lead deserved some blaming, even if next month many of us will (have to) use their tools again for many things in our daily work, maybe ,just a little bit of “hey, its not ok to treat everyone like that” is deserved =)
(Next to maybe even considering getting tools from other companies for some where those make sense).
When someone like Mike Chambers talks about him having a tough time on his blog while the things his company and he himself announces and puts into action is done in such unresponsible way as if not 1000s of people´s livelihood would take a serious hit from those things, well, i felt the need to write something on that.
I totally understand and agree it gets tiring to read such things, even to take part in the exchange, but if that is all whining by all those complaining about Adobe for one reason or the other now, ok, fine, i think a lot of people deservedly feel more than just their candy being taken away from them.
At the end, in a few years, it will probably be one tool/language taken away as option of things one can use and those still wanting to do that kind of stuff will either use other middleware, languages and tools for that to get it onto the browser or will make native apps, maybe less indepth media mashups on the web then and feeling more like years older stuff in some ways, and more happening as native app again, but yeah, its an ongoing cycle, not all bad =)
Before the time in which there was css, flash and dhtml, there were static web pages and more complex stuff was done as native app.
So yeah onto another cycle.. =)
Ok, now, as you said, enough ranting, back to work and creating cool new stuff =)
Weird, I quit Twitter last week too, for pretty much the same kind of reasons. Maybe that is a general feeling a lot of people are having.
(thoughts on what exactly that feeling is, for me at least: http://blog.debreuil.com/?p=234)
Btw I love that sign, but it works even better with the nots taken out I think. People are all these things, its so great when they contribute accordingly (and don’t dwell too much on the ciritc one : )
I’m ready (excited, even) to enlist newer technologies where they’re applicable. I only hope that in addition to his blog posts, I’ll some day have a number of Keith Peters books written for Javascript. My initial experience writing classes, understanding namespaces, and mimicking inheritance, etc., in JS has been frustrating and confusing. While Actionscript and Flash may well fall out of favor, it would be a real loss if folks like Keith and Colin Moock (to name just two) weren’t motivated to continue teaching thousands (millions?) of programmers. For me, the only thing scary about ditching Flash is losing the abundance of resources that currently exists.
Joel, I’m with you on some of the challenges of JavaScript. I think the biggest factor is that JS is so loose and dynamic that there are many ways to accomplish the same thing. With ActionScript, we had Adobe telling us what to do, how to do it, and defining best practices. With JS, there are many different schools on “the best way” or “the correct way” to do object creation, inheritance, code reuse, namespacing, etc. In the end, it’s best to get a feel for what’s out there and then adopt the one you feel comfortable with.
That means a ton coming from someone with your expertise and credibility, Keith. You hit the nail on the head in that the rigidity of ActionScript has conditioned me to believe there is a singular (or limited) approach to each situation I’ll encounter. It’s a relief to learn others are bewildered–to varying degrees–by all the options. I’ve been struggling to reconcile the numerous patterns I’ve encountered and discover the “official” technique. That’s a fool’s errand, apparently =)
Yes, I’ve come to grip that there is no “official” in JavaScript. But rest assured, no matter what you choose, someone will be there to tell you you’re doing it wrong. 🙂 Consider it character building.
Hi Keith,
I know you had a lot vested in Flash, and while I was very excited when I bought Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation I’m even more excited about Foundation HTML5 Animation with JavaScript whose ebook I just bought in the Alpha Program at Apress. I carefully studied the former a couple years ago and planned to put some of the knowledge gems into commercial practice but just couldn’t feel strong enough about Flash given my limited computer science background and hearing about Flash’s “security issues.” Although I just might not understand enough for this opinion, I feel much more confident about HTML5, and the rest of the trinity, and I’m so happy that Foundation was redone for this. I just wasn’t feeling like I was grasping enough from even the best online sources on the subject (own company website development being the subject, which I left alone until recently again), but already on Chapter 3 I just had to come by and Thank You for precisely what I was yearning for to finally feel this close to realizing an important goal.
Best regards,
Nathan
Hi Keith,
I just only want to thank You for your effort put into the education like me, who started to thinker with Flash after reading Your epic book: Making things move. I don’t have anything to show up, only the small experiments i have done in my spare time (even if i wished to experiment a lot more and had more time to learn), but your contribution into this field is invaluable. I can’t agree more with You concerning the flash platform shift to 3D, is a decision which arised me a lot of uncertainty and made me think this is the proper time to start learning Javascript (which i actually started to learn). Games and video, like for You, are not areas which interest me very much. Anyway, i don’t think the attitude showed in last days by proclaiming the death of Flash through some manifesto are the most proper ways to show affection for a custom platform, and i don’t think this is the proper way to manifest our self.
Regarding the twitter, i realized the scope of this is to assimilate a lot of information, and be more receptive 🙂
Endre