Final Thoughts on Flash

You may have heard that in a couple of days Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player. Although I haven't used it for over a decade, I echo the sentiment that it marks an end of an era! Yes, it may have had its issues, but in its day it was a brilliant platform. Maybe I'm nostalgic because of the stage of my career when I was using it to build sites and games.

I started using Flash back in the late 90s and at that point it was far more superior than anything else out there. It was terrific application for Coders, Designers and Animators to all collaborate and bring ideas to reality extremely quickly and with ease. So easy in fact that I reckon Flash was a big reason why over-expectations were imposed on frontend developers later on in Post-PC era. Even now, after more than a decade has passed, it's still unthinkable that such richly animated interactive websites or online games could be built and deployed so rapidly as well as cost effectively. 

Flash was also an aid to the creative process, I liken it to a music studio session where an idea could be explored whilst in the stage of production, of which the artist could then easily incorporate into the recording. Flash enabled ideas for features to be presented to the client as both a prototype and production at the same time, only maybe requiring some optimisation if approved. There was so much less risk involved in being creative with UIs, which in turn allowed for more experimentation. Sometimes these small experiments could lead to a whole new exciting realm for a project. For web production today, that way of working is no longer viable.

Some people have likened this era to being the teenage years of internet. An explosion of UI experimentation which on occasions did create a bit of a mess. The more matured Post-PC era brought with it a lot of UI standardisation which did away with the Flash UX headaches that users were increasingly becoming frustrated with. And I'm not going even going to touch upon Flash's poor security and performance issues. So I guess likened to teenage years, Flash is probably something that is looked back on fondly, but wouldn't be chosen to be relived.

Wirall was founded in the noughties whilst Flash was still on top and we built quite a large development team around the platform. We even opened an additional production office to house the team. But when it was clear that Flash was being phased out it meant we had to do the same. Following this, other technologies have also have come and gone, but none have ever felt quite as impactful as Flash. I think this is down to the fact that the industry is now more expectant that platforms and frameworks will have a certain shelf life. Back then I think the majority of the industry was taken aback on that day when Steve Jobs dropped the bomb with his infamous open letter, "Thoughts on Flash".

Today at Wirall we channel our creative energy into the exciting tech of the moment, like combining IoT and Machine Learning to increase the scope of what is possible. Also our interactive department is still very much alive and pushing the limits of where the UI technology and standards will permit us. At Wirall we make it our business to keep a very close track of technology trends to ensure our clients receive the optimum lifespan from their software applications.