An Ode to Adobe Flash
Written by Matt Clement
July 27, 2017
Most of you have probably seen the news from Adobe, but I still want to throw in my two cents.
Adobe has finally put a date on the ‘Death of Flash’ that we’ve all heard so much about over the last couple of years. They will be supporting and providing updates for Flash through the end of 2020. After that, Flash will beautifully drift off like a summer sunset, most likely using a sweet quadratic easing equation, becoming an ever more distant blip in Internet history. This history encompasses everything from enabling the online video revolution, to a short, awkward, phase in my career where my number one client request was to “make a cool intro animation for my website!”. Most importantly for us, it enabled Nxtbook Media to create a product that others were only dreaming about in the early days of digital publishing.
Seeing an official end of life date from Adobe, I can’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia for the technology that I built my career on so many years ago, but alas its time has passed. I have long moved on and I must strive to remember how Flash brought beauty and order to the chaos of the browser wars. It also allowed me to build full rich web based applications at a time when HTML designers were still experimenting with the blink tag, rather than just “those annoying ads that killed my mom’s computer that one time”.
On a more relevant note for our current clients, those who are still on the flash Nxtbook version may not realize that over 50% of desktop Nxtbook visitors are already viewing the HTML version via our fallback interface, technically making it the canonical version of their content. Only a couple of months ago that number was around 40%, so the trend is moving fast, and it’s doubtful that by 2020 any of your readers will still have Flash enabled anyway.
Our goal is to fully roll out nxtbook4, our fully HTML product, to all our clients here very shortly. If you would like to discuss the switch to this platform or our fully responsive HTML platform, PageRaft, feel free to reach out. We would be glad to discuss this.
If you would like to continue to reminisce, here is Adobe’s official announcement:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html
Reflecting Fondly,
Matt
