Over In A Flash

Back in the 1990s Adobe got on the wrong side of  Steve Jobs and refused to release versions of its creative software packages for Macs, emphasising the PC platform. Big mistake. A decade later Jobs refused to let Flash run on the iPhone and iPad and signed the death sentence of what had been an ubiquitous technology.

Flash has been the dominant platform for delivering video over the internet - Microsoft's WMV and Silverlight being the only significant competitor during that time. Now, the world has moved onto HTML5 and MP4, Flash has become increasingly irrelevant. Adobe has finally announced that it is giving up the ghost on the Flash plugin for mobile devices.

Even Adobe's own tools now output a variety of formats, with Flash being quietly deprecated (like Microsoft's Silverlight before it).

The trouble with this is that the replacement, HTML5, is hardly a standard and is still nascent.

All of this is an indication how the Internet is evolving from the web browser to the app. A couple of projects I'm currently involved in are starting with apps and will only later look at adding a website.