Adobe to Flash, “You are ceased”
Adobe made an announcement via ZDNet that from here on out, they will be ceasing development of Flash for mobile platforms and focusing more on its html5 development.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.
–Adobe
So what does this mean for us content creator? I for one have agreed with Steve Jobs’ statements earlier regarding Flash being an outdated platform and a computer processor hog. Everything is going smaller and mobile so having a platform like html5 is great since it also is compatible with standard computers. I only wish they would optimize Flash on desktops so that my computer fan doesn’t kick in when watching videos. But back to the topic, it means for the most part 1 encode (h.264) MP4 format for videos and html5 based animations for sites. I still remember when Apple introduced h.264 and the codec Pixlet when they introduced Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther”. Hopefully this means that h.264 will have a longer shelf life before they introduce the next format – which by then should still be backwards compatible.
