Will Adobe's HTML5 Strategy Help Developers? 129
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Adobe's shift toward HTML5 as a boon for developers only if the company secures its place in the Web developer tools market — but initial signs suggest that this won't be the case. 'The opportunity for Adobe now lies in filling the gaps in today's IDEs, code editors, and graphics software with new tools that can help designers and developers more easily take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of HTML5,' McAllister writes. 'Unfortunately, however, it sounds like Adobe is going to drop the ball. In this week's meeting with financial analysts, the company said its emphasis is not on building great tools but on subscription pricing, Web-based content creation software, and — most important of all — growing its digital marketing, advertising, and analytics businesses. That's right: Adobe wants to be Google. It's too bad because Web developers could really use an Adobe right now.'"
Re:Doesn't Dreamweaver fit the bill? (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of developers like Adobe design for development and will find it useful.
However I think the demise of Flash isn't all good for Adobe. As some of the developers only used Adobe products because they kinda had too.
Adoibe screwed up big time.. (Score:5, Interesting)
De-emphasizing Flash is probably the worst move they could have made as a business. The user experience may come out better in the end as a result, but at the expense of Adobe's bottom line. They pretty well *still* have control over much of the web (particularly streaming sites with DRM demands).
I think the key factor is Adobe trying to emphasize a strategy to make nice with iOS, but they are trying to do so at the expense of a pretty robust core and I simply don't see them succeeding in the IOS world, with or without flash.
Oops Adobe did it again (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe sure loves to misstep.
Adobe builds a good SVG player to be a flash killer... SVG is still early and nobody supports it
Adobe buys Macromedia so they get flash
Adobe essentially opens the SWF file format, but doesn't open source the flash player
Adobe focuses on using the flash player to stream video (eg sell it's streaming server products)
Advertisers adopt video for ads, thus ensuring a poor performance on many sites
Apple puts it's foot down and says no crap on the iphone, that includes Flash
Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod get 3% of all internet traffic, thus sites start recoding their sites
HTML5 and javascript basically makes it possible to replicate all the features in the flash player ( http://gizmodo.com/5552545/smokescreen-converts-flash-to-javascript-on-the-fly )
Adobe fails to keep ahead of better animation tools, thus losing the animator group.
Adobe fails to create 64bit plugins on the desktop, thus ensuring that developers create html5 pages for 64bit browsers, meanwhile browser developers delay 64bit versions because of no flash plugin.
Adobe fails to create power efficient flash plugins for mobile devices, and subsequently abandons it.
Firefox, MSIE and Chrome/Safari naively support SVG
So you see, it's just snowballing. The next version of flash CS6 better have an "Export to animated SVG" otherwise the flash tool is doomed. Which is a pity as it's the easiest vector drawing tool there is.
Video in HTML5 (Score:4, Interesting)
This blurb is a bit old, but it's still relative (from dive into html5 [diveintohtml5.info]:
There is no single combination of containers and codecs that works in all HTML5 browsers. This is not likely to change in the near future. To make your video watchable across all of these devices and platforms, you’re going to need to encode your video more than once.
While many of us don't like Flash, for various reasons, there's no denying that video streaming over HTML5 is a real big pain in the ass for developers. This is one of the problems with "open" formats; nobody agrees, everyone squabbles around and tries to push their own agenda. Sometimes it's better to have a dictator than a democracy (I'm sure I'll get modded down just for saying that..).
Re:Oops Adobe did it again (Score:5, Interesting)
One comment on this; and only because I see it repeated so often I assume most consider it fact.
Flash does WAY more than video streaming, and html5 has not yet even come close to the robustness that flash offers. Smokescreen made it possible to convert the animation part to html, but not much of the actual programming.
Recently I tried to take an SVG worldmap from Wikimedia Commons and use it directly in a webpage. The resulting file was about 1.5MB big, and an average webbrowser would grind to a halt. Then I imported this vector image into Flash, and the resulting SWF with a lot more was about 40KB, had the same level of detail, and was about 1000 times faster. I have no idea how they do it, but I think that it's a great peace of work, and fun too. I wonder how that SVG would work on an iPad...