Ya, right now, on a phone, with its screen size, it is not the best way to consume Flash rich experiences like Aldo Shoes for Life. The screen is too small, you don’t get as much as what you get on the desktop. But the same goes for HTML rich experiences; would you interact with the Wilderness Downtown on a mobile phone? I don’t think so. Where I think it is more problematic, is on tablets, where the screen has more real estate. Most rich experiences would work pretty well on that. The problem is that the only tablet worth the name is the iPad (well that will change in time) so no one could see rich flash experiences on them and realize that it is working quite well.

So short term, no biggie, doesn’t really change much, nobody was doing Flash sites for mobile anyway. Long term, it’s hard to say. Phones are gonna get bigger screens that I am sure off, be it foldable screens or some other innovation, screens will get bigger. Also, there will be more tablets out there and their uses will be more defined. For that alone, it would be nice to have Flash on mobile. Then, there is the new mobile application paradigm, where instead of building web experiences and apps, you build native apps. I don’t know if this is a trend that will last forever. I mean the desktop is slowly moving toward web and cloud, shouldn’t mobile do the same too? So I think it might be a mistake to stop mobile development.

But I also understand a bit, I mean Adobe was already developing 3 Flash players : PC, MAC, Linux. Now with mobile, it would have to develop one for every mobile operating. So here it is, my views on the topic, one more in the sea of web.

I believe it should be the same with Flash. Every day you can see an awesome piece of creativity if you go to theFWA.com; sometimes you know how it is done, sometimes you don’t. This is the time where you should reverse engineer the work. Learn how they did it, how they solved certain problems. You should do so, not to replicate the piece, but to make it your own. Mix it with what you already know or give it a new twist; do something even better. That is how you should pay back.

The community, platform (Flash) would grow from this. People would start decompiling your work and even better pieces would be created. In the end, we would all win from this. Better creations means more confidence in the platform, more money invested into it (Adobe, web agencies) and more jobs.

If you think individually, you’ll only see the bad sides of decompiling, but if you open your mind and have a broader view, you’ll understand the benefits.

So with that in mind I made simpler swf files. I even made some using Flash to see what would get indexed and how. In each of my experiments I have included a unique search expression basically formed from Fleximagically Searchable plus another word. If you search Google with that expression and one of my experiment shows up, it means Google indexed the content. Here are my experiments:

Flash:

We don’t even know what type of swf is or is not indexed by Google so I sat down down and I made the simplest ones. Since Flex is pretty complex, I made some files using Flash.

The first one is only a static textfield right on the timeline. we know Google used to index those files, let’s see how it does it.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v1/

The second one is still in Flash using a prefilled dynamic textfield.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v2/

The third one is using a dynamic textfield again filled using ActionScript.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v3/

The fourth one is using a static textfield added to the stage using ActionScript.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v4/

Flex:

Since we don’t know if Flex files get indexed at all, I made three simple experiments using basic components: TextArea, Label, Text. In those experiments the content is filled using the text attribute in the MXML file.

Flex file using TextArea.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v5/

Flex file using Label.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v6/

Flex file using Text.

http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v7/

Now let’s wait for Google to crawl these pages and then we will be able to better understand how this all works.

It’s true that videos in Silverlight look good, but now with the moviestar release of the Flash Player, I don’t think one is better than the other on that characteristic. It’s nice for programmers who know .net, they can just jump right in and start programming Silverlight applications (maybe with a small learning curve). Good for them, .net programmers are already in demand, now they are going to be even more in demand, their salary is going to increase, so does the cost of building a Silverlight application.

One of the thing that Flash as always suffered was the penetration rate of the Flash Player, as a proof, website using flash 9 are now starting to emerge even if its been more than 6 month since it’s been release. Silverlight will suffer even more as people are not willing to download anything anymore. Flash as the chance to be adopted by huge website like Youtube and Facebook and has been around for way longer, people trust the Flash brand.

A big advantage Flash has over Silverlight is all the documentation lying around the web. If you want to know how to do something in Flash, just Google it, it’s that easy. Also open source projects like papervision3d and Tweener are just amazing.

For all these reasons, I don’t think Flash programmers have to be afraid for their jobs because of Silverlight and that for at least five years. I actually think Silverlight is a good thing; a little competition never hurt anyone, Adobe will have to keep improving Flash which is very good for us.