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?
“Extropianism is a fascinating movement. It’s the idea that the human condition is changeable–and for the better. Smart drugs, life prolongation,mind uploading, personality augmentation, improvement. I’d callit Panglossian, except that Dr Pangloss’s name has become a dirty word. All too many people who look at the future do so with dismal, malthusian expectations, and the key feature of extropianism (once you strip out the tendency for American Libertarians to jump on the boat) seems to be techno-optimism.
The open source movement is also fascinating, but unlike the extropians, it’s one with muscle in the real world–enough muscle that Bill Gates and the music and film industries are scared witless by it. Free software (open source is merely the commercially-correct politically sanitized version of the term) addresses the key contradiction I mentioned earlier in the concept of “intellectual property”–it’s free as in speech, not free as in beer. You can sell free software: the only thing you can’t do with it is prevent people from copying it.
I think if legislators don’t crush it the free software movement–which, incidentally, has its roots in the culture of scientific research and information sharing–will be one of the big industrial drivers of the next century. Forget software for a moment and think in terms of mature nanotechnology or biotechnology. Both these fields are distinguished from previous technologies in that they will work with self-replicating systems that can be programmed to produce end products. One can see the free software movement as a precusor for a “free hardware” or “free wetware” movement–one that will provide free libraries of designs for biological or nanotechnological products that replicators can be programmed to churn out. Just as I don’t spend money on email clients or text editors when there are really good free ones available, why would I (for example) spend money on a sofa when there’s a really good free template for one available on the web and I can grow it myself in my ACME Home Factory(TM)? Or even grow a GNU Free Factory in it, and stop paying ACME royalties?
The combination of techno-optimism and self-replicating technologies and free software for controlling those technologies is going to be explosive. Sometimes literally so.”
The Open Source movement has been getting software developers excited for many years now, and is partly the reason why software and web development has been such a ground-breaking industry. But it is when open source principles start being applied to other industries, especially more traditional capitalist sectors, that things will start to get really interesting.
Already, the music industry, for all it’s power, has found itself having difficulty assimilating the new download culture. The technology is moving too fast for behemoth conglomerates to react, so the people defining the new playing field are the bedroom geeks, and (more importantly) the consumers themselves. And what the young consumers of today are advocating is “sharing“, just like our mothers taught us to do as children.
This trend is starting to spread to movies and TV too now. Consumers know what they want, and how much they are prepared to pay for it, and if the traditional sources can’t cater for that need, new sources of distribution are appearing to fill the demand. It is an emergent phenomenon, what we used to call “grass-roots” organisation. It is not anti-establishment particularly, these are still capitalist forces at work, although, in the case of the music industry, it might be theorised that traditional sources are also being shunned in reaction to years of consumer exploitation.
Any companies who intend to survive into the next few decades will have to start thinking of new ways of doing business if they are to meet their consumers needs. Because their consumers, especially the younger generation, already are.
If you liked Stross’s words above, you may also like to know that he walks the walk too; he made his 2005 book Accelerando (and many of his other works) freely available for download under a Creative Commons license.
Another well known cellular automaton is Conway’s Game of Life, not to be confused with Hasbro’s Game of Life, which costs £9.99 and is nowhere near as interesting. In the 1970s the field of Computer Science was obsessed by this exercise. Super-computers were employed to churn through iterations of the game over periods of weeks. Today it can be simulated in the 5k Flash file embedded below. Click start to see it in action:
(technical note: while this is only a lightweight file, it can hog the processor quite a bit while running, so apologies if you have a slow machine)
Again, the basic algorithm is extremely simple. As with the Vichniac Vote, each cell lives or dies according to its neighbours. Rule 1: If a live (black) cell has 2 or 3 neighbours it continues to live, otherwise it dies of either loneliness or overcrowding. Rule 2: If a dead cell has exactly three neighbours it miraculously comes back to life.
Start it from a random seeding and you’ll get some idea of how patterns evolve. But try creating your own seeds (when the simulation above is stopped you can draw on the canvas with your mouse) and you can explore how your own creations survive in the game. There are many tried and tested patterns (thanks to our 70s Computer Scientist friends), open this page for a few examples to try.
Ok, so you might argue that these creations don’t really resemble anything you might call “life”, not unless you really squint – they only have form by the patterns we ascribe to them by our pattern recognition obsessed brains. But regardless, they adequately demonstrate the simple algorithm, complex result principle of Universal Automatism. And they are a nice way to waste a few hours.
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