According to Steve Jobs, Flash is dead. He should know, because he’s the one holding the murder weapon. Flash is dead to Apple because they are not allowing it on the iPad, a device which otherwise would seem ideal for viewing the kind of rich media content the Flash platform excels at.
Obviously, Apple’s decision, and Jobs’ declaration, is not a prescient message from the future, but a company policy intended to protect the profits from their app store. They do not want their sexy device to be able to access all the rich content from the web, they want to be able to charge you for it instead. Even so, when someone like Steve Jobs declares Flash is dead, people take notice. So if the future is no longer Flash, … what is it?
Even before Apple weighed in, I’d noticed the demand for Flash has been on the wane. And even more noticeable has been the wavering interest of my fellow Flash devs. Symptomatic of these times, the Flash Brighton group, the collective home of the finest Flash designers and programmers in Brighton, is in the process of a rebrand, which will very likely include (gasp) dropping the word “Flash” from the group name.
On an individual level, I’ve seen many of Brighton’s finest recently devoting their attention to non-Adobe products. And these are the folks who know. So here are some of the technologies people have been playing with:
Unity – a 3D games engine, also banished from the iPhone via their T&Cs, but capable of some amazing browser based interaction. See http://blurst.com/ for many fine examples. If you want a Unity developer, may I recommend my friend and colleague Iestyn.
OpenFrameworks – a C++ framework, capable of creating multi-platform content. Ideal for interactive art, ambitious installations and audio-reactive work, but also capable of publishing to devices such as the iPad, iPhone and Android. This has been my own favourite toy of late.
Processing – a highly accessible language based on Java. Not so great for the web, but excellent for digital art, video or offline interactive work. For the web there is Processing.js, a JavaScript port, which is probably the best Flash animation alternative currently. I have written an introductory book on the subject of Processing, if you want to get up to speed that might be a good place to start.
HTML5 – this is Jobs’ answer to the lack of Flash on the iPad. Unfortunately, while HTML5 has a huge amount of promise, it is still many years away from Flash’s current power. Even if Adobe were to cease developing Flash/Flex today, by the time HTML5 had caught up the iPad will be a distant memory (because we’ll all have migrated to Android devices long ago).
Objective C – inevitably, many Flash devs don’t like being locked out of the platform-de-jour, so have been awarding their attentions to Objective-C, Apple’s OS language. Again, if you want an iPhone developer, there are people I can recommend.
Flex – while Flash demand is dropping, Flex demand has been on the increase. Flex app are still using the Flash Player, so they’re no more welcome on the iPad than any other breed of Flash, but it still remains the best solution for rich media online.
Personally, I disagree with Apple; there is still a future for the Flash platform. Although Adobe are going to have to pull their socks up to fight back, ignore Apple’s greedy posturing, and focus on all the things that HTML5 can’t do very well. Video for example. Or how about 3D?
This is going to take longer to explain than it did to build (literally 10 minutes, and 8 of those were spent googling for the image). Click above to see it in action.
Richard Lord was guest speaker at our Flash Brighton user group last night, presenting his Flint particle system. I think every creative coder has found themselves toying with particle effects at some point (do check out my generative stuff) but Rich’s system takes all the heavy lifting from the coding and just leaves the fun part. And it can create some really authentic looking smoke, in very few lines of code.
The movie above is my riff on a very old David Lynch photograph from his “Nudes and Smoke” collection (see here). A lot of Lynch’s “still” art work involves incorporating moving parts into paintings and sculpture, so I hope he would approve of this subtle animation.
Rich will be introducing Flint to a wider audience at FOTB08 next month.
I’m sure this isn’t the first PaperVision game, but I might make claim on it being the simplest. But then I only really had a day free to do this, which doesn’t allow the time for any sexy 3D modelling or texturing. Otherwise, you’d be looking at day-glo Tron Light Cycles racing around the grid below, rather than blue blobs. The keys are A/D or Left/Right arrows, and the idea is to collect the green things. The rest you can work out for yourself. Fullscreen version here.
What you’re looking at is PaperVision 3D. Not the silly snake game, but the Flash 3D engine rendering all those polygons. PV3D is probably the greatest Flash Open Source success story to date. At my local nerd club, a recurring topic of conversation is the “Open Source question” – i.e. should I open source my code or not, and what exactly do I gain by giving away my work for nothing? The creators of PaperVision, Carlos Ulloa, John Grden and the rest of the crew, answer this question. Rather than being the authors of a great 3D engine no-one knows about, by setting their code free they have become the leading experts in a 3D engine that EVERYONE uses.
At November’s FOTB conference PV3D was on every developer’s lips, within six months even clients are asking for PaperVision. By giving away their work, the creators of PV3D have made themselves coding mega-stars. This is how Open Sourcing works, the trade is in kudos, not commodities. The Open Source movement is the economic paradigm shift of the 20th Century, it happened in software five years ago, last year it made it’s mark on music, this year it will be publishing. The year after that … who knows. As the Chili Peppers advised, give it away, give it away, give it away now…
It’s been six months at least since I’ve had the spare time for any ‘leisure’ coding but I finally found a few hours to get back into my Flash isometric 3D engine this week. And I’m really chuffed with what I’ve achieved.
You can move the ball with keys QAOP (once you’ve clicked on the movie) but the really interesting bit is the sliders. Thanks to AS3’s speed, I can now redraw the isometric space at runtime, so it is a “true” 3D engine.
It would have been so easy to go for yet another generative artist for the pick of FOTB07 Day 3, but good though Jared Tarbell was, today the thing that blew me away was the first session to go so far over my head it made me feel like a junior again (which was a nice feeling).
Flash is absolutely crap at playing with sound. All you can do is shift the pan and the volume of imported sounds really. Unless you get in and start hacking around with the byte code that is, then you can actually start generating sound. This is what Andre Michelle has been doing recently. Once you have tricked Flash into generating sound, if you know what you’re doing, you can start playing with the wave and, next thing you know, you’ve got a synthesiser.
In the past I’ve had a hard job convincing colleagues and contemporaries of the value of Flex 2 (and the recently beta’d Flex 3). Firstly, it is not immediately obvious who Flex is aimed at; the Web Developers or the Flash Developers, (the answer is neither. Or perhaps both), so no-one is sure if it is their department. Secondly, because it is so new it is difficult to point to something on the web to say “there, that’s what Flex can do”, and blow people away with a cool demo.
But now Adobe have provided a useful resource to solve the second problem. Their new Flex Showcase, launched on Wednesday, is a directory of some of the pioneering Flex apps out there, with new apps being added every day. It is also a rather slick Flex application in itself, so instantly gives you a feel for the product.
I am convinced that Flex, and it’s sister app AIR, will dominate eLearning within the next five years, just as Flash is king today. Which is why the Futuremedia dev team are very interested in this technology. Even if many of our clients (without Flash 9) will not be able to use a Flex built course yet, we are developing in-house tools using Flex2 in preparation.
There will doubtless be lots of Flex evangelism at this year’s Flash on The Beach conference, and Flash Brighton are organising a Flex event to follow, both of which we are looking forward to. But for now, if you want further information and opinion you can also read my recent review of the book Programming Flex 2, or to get a feel of the product in action, go explore the showcase.
So, unsurprising, I was very excited by the project Tom at Flexible Factory has been working on recently. He has reverse-engineered the open source Jasper emulator, originally written in Java, and rebuilt it in ActionScript 3. From Tom’s account this sounds like it involved some pretty hardcore coding, but I’m glad he persevered as now we have Flasper, the Flash ZX Spectrum Emulator. It’s light weight, can be easily embedded in a browser, and it ROCKS!
Tom demoed this for the first time last night at Flash Brighton, the regular get together of the local Flash talent. Every time I attend one of these meeting I find myself blown away by the range and quality of work being produced across our small collective. It can be quite intimidating, I mean, if all you can show from your recent work is some pretty fractal effects, how do you follow a guy who’s been mapping and simulating the brain of a snail (Hi Peter).
Last night we also saw some sweet animation, an AIR Twitter app, and a Flash/ASP project called Communicator World, the work of unwrong, an Edinburgh company who have just moved down to Brighton. Welcome to the south coast guys, I think you’ll be right at home here.
But everyone’s work was great, so I shouldn’t single anyone out. The full list of last night’s exhibitors is on the Flash Brighton site.
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