I wanted to make a New Year’s post to get the year started off right. My good buddy Ryan Stewart posted the first of a three-part blog post talking about what happened with the Flash Platform in 2009. I won’t try to duplicate that kind of post here as Ryan can out-blog me with both hands behind his back. Instead I just want to send out some messages.
To the Flash community
I’m now into my second year as an evangelist and my love for Flash and its community is stronger than ever. You’re what gets me up the morning and the fact that I get to interact with you on a daily basis is an honor for me. Our community really does feel like a family. Sometimes families disagree and get into spats and we are not immune to that either. Families can be open and honest with each other and say things that are at times harsh. But that is OK because you know that deep down, we all love each other. Other communities try to mimic us because of the tight-knit bond we all have and the immense amount of creative work that is produced by us each year. Be proud to be a part of it. I know I am.
To unnamed company 1
On personal level you guys are great. I count many of you as my friends. You unfairly get a bad rap on everything that you try to do. I wish I could say that I wish you success this year, but I can’t. So far it hasn’t been much of a fight and I don’t expect that to change this year. Focusing on your existing base is a wise way to proceed. Looking forward to seeing you again this year and swapping stories. Oh and fire your marketing team or at the very least tell them to stop copying everything we do.
To unnamed company 2
Like many people, I love you and I hate you. I love the products you make and I suppose I wish deep down, that you felt the same. Your arrogance has gotten you where you are today. But be careful, as many a great institution has let their arrogance be their downfall. Recognize who your allies are in this world, as you may one day need them.
To open-source and standards zealots
I have to admit that of all the groups I deal with, you are definitely the most frustrating. As for standards, I hate to be the one who breaks it to you, but Flash is a standard. It has been made a standard by the people who matter the most, the end users. Everyone knows what Flash is and they will readily update it because they know that it is an integral part of the web experience. You can go on and on about ECMA or whether or not Flex is really open source. In the meantime we will be pushing the Flash Player forward and the end users will benefit from it. Clients and consumers don’t care whether or not the site they are interacting with was built in a proprietary tool or runtime. As for the open web folks, HTML 5 looks to be great and I am looking forward to using it myself. I am the first one to state that Flash should be used only for certain things. HTML will always be a part of the web and I think it is time you acknowledge that Flash is just as much a part of it too. If you want to use HTML and JS to do everything and hope that Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE will all agree on the same implementations then I wish you luck. But I gave up worrying about browser differences years ago when I became a Flasher.
To all the complainers
There have been many people who have chronically complained about us over the last year. I put these people into two groups. Group one is filled with passionate people who love Flash but are frustrated with certain decisions or directions that we take. These are the people that I don’t mind hearing complaints from, as a lot of the time, we agree completely with you. If your true objective is to help the Flash Platform become the best that it can be, then please continue ripping us a new one and we will gladly pass that feedback to the appropriate teams. The other group is filled with haters, egomaniacs, and people who are just trying to cause drama. If you say that you think Adobe should give up trying to bring the Flash Player to mobile devices and that in 5 years Flash will be irrelevant, don’t expect to be on our Christmas card list. So to sum up, all I ask is that you bitch-slap us for the right reasons.
To Latin America
I love your culture and think that you have an amazing community of Flashers that have been under represented for too long. I will continue to try and change things in 2010 starting with Flash Camp Brasil and ending with the second Latin Flash Tour. I promise to try and work on my Spanish this year.
I can’t wait to spend 2010 with you all!
Lee
Happy New Year Lee!!! See you soon!!
First of, a happy new year to you all!
There’s a lot of good stuff in there, especially about standards fanatics and flash haters.
I love the Flash platform and play to spend the rest of my life using it, and as long as the community stays as strong as it is at the moment, these people will have no effect what so ever.
I’d just like to say thank you to all the Plat Ev. and all the folks at Adobe for bringing us such great products, and I cant wait to see what happens this year, and decade.
Happy New Year!
Harry.
Thanks Harry! I appreciate your kind words.
This is simply golden. Agree 100% – Nothing constructive to add since this is so spot on.
I just bought myself the CS4 upgrade, its downloading as we speak.
Lee, Adobe, I wish you a wonderful 2010.
Ps. When you would think the FLASHER shirts will be there? I’d love to wear one.
Happy new year, lee! Have a Sapporo for me, too!
thanks for all that you do for the flash community, keep pushing and let’s all have a rockin 2010..viva la Flash!
Happy new Year Lee! Love your work. Congratulations!
Thank you and happy new year Lee! You’re so great!!
Hi Lee – very happy new year to you. I do agree with you about the company # 2. Please next time use an Android device for deaddrop instead of this one to broadcast your location. I saw your tutorial on this company # 2 product but will never try it because there is no point of giving them $ 99/year license fee while developing the app in flash CS5!!! What is the point??? Really frustrating…
Great post! Happy New Year to you and the rest of the Adobe team. Thank you for another year of great information and resources.
Wow. effing brilliant post. Happy twenty-ten.
Happy new years Lee. We really appreciate all of the efforts you put into the community, and all the crap you put up with. I would imagine it could be a pretty thankless job most of the time.
Also, if you need help with your Spanish, I write software to teach Spanish. It is written in flash, and can revolutionize the way you speak. Send me an email if you are interested in trying it out, etc. I’m sure I could work something out for you.
Happy New Years!
Happy New Year Lee!! You shouldn’t drink Sapporo alone. We’ll make up for it when you get to Vegas next.
Happy New Year Lee, this year Im actually excited about Flash for the first time in ages – I just posted my feelings about on my blog daviddoull.wordpress.com
Happy New Year Lee. Because you had few messages, so have I
I hope you guys will focus on stability in 2010. CS4 crashes and is unstable, you are aware of it, but still, no updates coming. I hope one day Flash Builder will be less painful for more demanding apps. Our company doesn’t make any feature requests, we don’t have time for it, because we are filling bug reports for your beta and dealing with problems that doesn’t appear in more serious technologies like Java. I know it’s beta, but problems are more philosophical. But hey, it’s better every year, so maybe
Thanks Lee for a great roundup end of the year message. Keep up the good work and thanks for you consistent presence with great tutorials and inside feedback!
If I had to guess:
unnamed company 1 – Microsoft
unnamed company 2 – Apple
Happy new year.
We really appreciate all the things you’ve been doing for the Flash community.
Cheers,
Chris.
Happy New Year Lee, I hope to see you in Israel one day.
Hilariously delusional
– I think my favourite part was “Flash is a standard” ! lmfao
Thanks for the laughs!
Lee, I wish that there was a Flash plugin for the iPod Touch and the iPhone. It really makes Apple look bad by not having Flash on their mobile products. I have heard it’s because Apple will not release the source code to Adobe so a plugin can be built. This really stinks! This has been a major gripe of mine for sometime.
I’ve been using adobe products for over 10years now, I have loved using these products but I’m begining to feel that they’re getting a bit lon in the tooth. As more and more inovators bring their streamlined products to the Mac (Panics Coda, Pixelmator) they really start making the Adobe suite seem slugish. Don’t get me wrong CS4 is an amazing leap foreword from CS2, but after watching a video on Youtube about Freehand vs Illustrator I really wanted those features in Illustrator and am wondering why they aren’t in there after the acuisition of Macromedia. I really feel that whole suite needs a major overhaul and for all the shortcuts and UI to be standardised, why the scrubby sliders in Photoshop aren’t availabe elswhere I don’t know.
I could go on, I just hope that CS5 will be leaner, meaner & cleaner.
Happy new year.
X
Happy New Year bud.
Bring on 2010!
p.s. try Portuguese instead of Spanish
Merry Christmas and Happy new Year Lee and I am so exciting to spend 2010 with this wonderful flash community and learn so mush of it.
Merry Christmas and Happy new Year To all flash community
Look at Lee, coming out and taking jabs at MS and Apple.
Sam Kinison movie quote: “Good answer. Good answer. I like the way you think. I’m gonna be watching you.”
I kind of resent that the Flash CS5 development team has to jump through hoops because of Apple and the iPhone. There are so many other things they could have done to improve Flash…
Hi, Lee.
Excellent post, I hope you can come to Colombia again this year, I really lost Latin Tour last year.
I love Flash Platform and I’m waiting to see it grow even more.
Hurrah! I’m so pumped about the tings Adobe is doing right now. I tend to complain about wanting “better, faster, stronger”, but it comes from a good place. I’m the guy who’s seriously bummed about a lack of warp-core technology, and fake hoverboards, so I have a general passion to increase the rate of technological leaps forward.
Are the two companies Microsoft & Apple?
Dude, get AS3 on devices, get that Open Screen project burning and I will be a very happy camper. Very happy.
Happy New Year from unnamed company 1!
I look forward to another year of healthy competition between us. There’s nothing better for the creative community as a whole than two companies that care passionately about the space and have smart engineers working as hard as they can to build a platform that enables creative professionals to turn their dreams into reality.
Take care, Tim
@Eric that is the plan for this year. Let’s hope we do it right!
@Tim damn you figured it out
Seriously we should team up this year to combat those foolish people that believe all browser plugins are bad.
happy new year lee
Thank you for all your work and infomation you gave us
it really helped me a lot
Happy New Year to You Lee, it’s great that the Latinamerican Flash community it’s getting under the radar now. My best wishes to You and your family for this 2010. Until next Latin Flash Tour MX, See You around
Happy New Year to you too !
Hope 2010 will bring Adobe and you success and all what you desire !
Just a little personal note here : I know Adobe would have like to put the Flash Player on Apple’s devices (iPhone + iPod Touch), but I think Adobe should focuses on what they have and not what they don’t (or can’t) have. A lots of devices will benefits from FP 10.1 and I think the market will grow with time. You have big partner with Open Screen Project. It’s sad that Apple refuses to collaborate to implement it to their products, but it’s their business and it’s their choice. I’m sure Adobe had already refuse a valuable partnership in the past. Business is business.
Happy New Year again !
Ok company 1 must be Microsoft, but company 2 attitude description depicts word by word the actual Adobe to me……
Happy new year Lee! Thank you for all your hard work.
Flash will never appear in the iPhone browser,
and it’s your own fault. Flash performance on Mac is terrible.
On the iPhone it’d be 100x worse. Adobe is clearly
unwilling or incapable of addressing this, so you lose out.
Calling people “zealots” for requiring a real standard spec and
independant implementations, is just arrogant and small-minded.
Standars exist to protect users from the failures of a single company.
Blaming others for your failures, and the hostile tone you
take, is incompetent marketing. All the Adobe marketing people
(especially John Nack) have that same inability to listen to
complaints and address them, you just shout at people.
So, this is why you will die out. Nobody likes you because
you’re bad at what you do and hostile to the public.
Oh, and the language of Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish. Typical for Flash people, can’t even get the language right.
I’m sorry you find the open source community to be frustrating, but we also find Flash to be excruciatingly painful as well so I guess the feeling is mutual. I do appreciate what Flash has done for the web. Obviously at one point in history it was ground breaking, and absolute crucial. It brought a stable platform to the web where cross-platform/browser issues were largely mitigated. No doubt, that must be appreciated.
However, the Linux community is constantly growing and becoming ever more important. Yet, I have to jump through hoops to use Flash in Linux. Controls don’t always work, had to use the 32bit plugin in 64 bit distros for awhile which came with it’s own issues, and then the constant freaking crashing. When you constantly feel like an after thought you start to build a feverish hate for the company responsible. This is especially true when if it wasn’t for open source software, there’d hardly be a web for your technology to exist at all (Apache httpd dominates the web server market, and is obviously OSS). I guess we just want to feel like the Apple and Windows users do. Instead, using Linux has forced me to constantly curse all that is Adobe due to all the issues that come with using Flash in any *nix distro.
Also, yeah, we get it. Flash is basically a web standard. However, it is closed source, and development in Flash is non-free. You’re never going to make the open source community terribly happy with that. If writing HTML required an entrance fee, where would the web be today?
Anyways, I do respect Flash, I really do. I lack a lot of respect for Adobe though. The web’s nothing without open source software, but for some reason as a company, Adobe seems to not have any problem treating that community like lepers. They give you stable servers to serve your Flash enabled sites, the least you could do is provide a Linux variant of a Flash plugin that even *resembled* stable.
@mdhughes first of all are you want to talk to me about tone. Maybe you should look at your own comments.
But I want to address what you said. Please name me the open-web technology that runs the same in all browsers and has the same capabilities that Flash does. If there exists a technology like that which does not require a plug-in I think we would all use it. But the fact of the matter is that nothing like that exists.
So you call something a standard because it has a spec? OK fine. I call something a standard when everyone uses it.
As for Flash being in the iPhone browser, we will see won’t we. I wouldn’t be quite so confident if I were you.
You said nobody likes us. Well obviously that is not true. Maybe you want nobody to like us.
Oh and I’ve been to Brasil before and have plenty of friends there. Maybe if you reread my post you will see that I wasn’t talking just about Brasil.
@Mark Rogers thanks for your comments Mark. If you’re a Linux user I completely understand your frustration with Adobe, and a lot of other companies for that reason. But I feel like we have been making progress, although slowly, with technologies like Adobe AIR.
As for the Flash Player, Linux is the first to get a 64-bit version. So on that one you are the very first
But if it is unstable then please file a bug so we can address it.
And you do not have to pay a nickel to develop in Flash. We have a free SDK that you can download at http://opensource.adobe.com.
“..Oh and fire your marketing team or at the very least tell them to stop copying everything we do…”
*chuckle* you put too much faith in the marketing dept power/capabilities lee
Happy New Year dude, and looking forward to seeing whats next on the Adobe horizon.
Scott Barnes
-Former Member who quit the “Marketing Dept”
I completely agree with your message to standards zealots. I have had the unfortunate experience of getting a new boss two years ago who is a standards fanatic. Little did I know what I was in for. Two years later – the flash apps we (the last two left in our company who really understand the power of flash and flex) snuck in are the only thing showing increased profit and the majority of our time is not spent ensuring that we are standards compliant. (Our most recent application was outsourced and ordered to be done in javascript when it could have been more easily created with flash – do you get how crazy this person is yet) Needless to say, our website now lacks any innovation and somehow the standards ideology has superseded all rational thinking. I won’t be staying there much longer. My working life has gone from one of creative problem solving to very dry overly long discussions about things like whether or not something is tabular data.
Remaining blind to the idea that there are better tools to do certain things and that there is a lot more waiting to happen on the web is just an excuse for not exploring and thinking for ones self. Flash is most definitely not the enemy, it is really sad to see people trying to destroy it simply because they do not understand it or prefer a set of rules that give structure, but do not allow for true innovation.
Quite obviously, company 1 is Microsoft, but I wonder why you use the Flash blog to complain about your own company? Company 2 is Adobe, right? Well, Adobe during the 90s and early 00s. Today, most people (and a huge part of your own user base) don’t even love the products anymore, unfortunately.
You would have to complain a lot less about your customers if you did the following:
1) Go back to making the best products you possibly can. Focus on speed, stability and on being consistent with your target platforms. This applies not only to Flash (compiled Flash looks terrible on the iPhone and is way too slow), but also to other Adobe products such as Photoshop (looks like an alien application on every system, not stable, slow).
2) There is no step 2. Just do step 1.
At some point, your own users may even start evangelizing your applications again instead of constantly complaining about them. Of course, there’s a chance that might put you out of work, so I can see how it’s not on the top of your list of things to do
Lee, well done for once again blowing over the point that Flash is a hog on Mac OS X, CPU usage goes up and over 100%, fans kick in and the whole machine still gets too hot, all for the most trivial of websites. This is why it’s not welcome on Mac, and just imagine how badly it would run on the iPhone.
Thank goodness for ClickToFlash.
@Chris here is some advice for you. If you want to spread misinformation, at least say things that aren’t so easy to disprove. The post below this one contains a Flash video widget. Is your CPU at 100% with fans blazing? If they are then you are either using a very old Mac or haven’t upgraded your Flash player in a long time. But it’s more likely that you are simply talking out your ass.
And let me tell you something about Flash Player on Mac. If it is not 100% on par with Windows then you need to look to Apple for that. Here is a case in point. Flash Player 10.1 introduced hardware acceleration for H.264 video so sites like YouTube and Hulu take up tremendously less RAM and CPU. We could NOT add that for the Mac player because Apple does not have a public API to do so. That is a fact that you can verify with Apple. Microsoft sees the tremendous value in making the Flash Player run fast on their OS and have been much more open to making that happen. And this is a company that has a competing runtime to ours!
If you actually want to discuss this then please tell me what we should have done for the H.264 issue.
Lee,
I am enjoying the fiesty attitude! I completely agree with you regarding unnamed company 2. With the right cooperation it could be a match made in heaven. I just don’t get it. Too many turf wars.
Thanks for a great 2009.
Craig
Whatever you’re doing to decode H.264 is insanely CPU intensive at even SD resolutions. Flash on Windows without hardware decoding is still much less CPU-intensive than Flash on Mac without hardware decoding.
I use the latest Flash beta for Mac on a 2.26 Core 2 Duo and it runs like a _damn_ _dog_.
Also: I’m shocked someone pays you to evangelize given your attitude towards customers. Telling them they *must* have an old Mac and putting up a flimsy argument about hardware decoding that is irrelevant, as Flash for Windows has always been much better than Flash for Mac even before hardware decoding was around.
I suppose it is much easier to be blind to Mac users complaining about Flash and instead pretend they’re either using incorrect hardware or pin the blame somewhere else.
@Craig match made in heaven indeed
Happy new year!!!
Thank you for all the great work… in 2010 I wish you to have all the time you need to make some more issues for flashermag.com
John Austin == Apple fan boy.
Don’t get mad because Lee is spreading the truth about Apple. Its troof.
Adobe is doing a great job and if you can’t see that you are blind. Just watch Lee’s Flash CS5 preview video. I’m excited to continue learning as the program evolves.
Happy 2010, Lee. Thanks for answering all our crazy questions.
Brazil!! WOOO HOO!! thanks Lee!
hope to meet you soon here
Call my complainer type #1 or #2, I don’t care.
All I have to say about 2010 is that Adobe better have fixed the god-awful performance and UI of CS4 or it’s gonna be a bad year.
Hey Lee, you have to come to PANAMA PLEASE!! Write it down on your TO DO LIST!!! Please!! haha would be great if you considered our country for a visit! If you need to know anything about Panama just let me know.
Happy Happy to all Flash Freaks.
Flash Camp Brazil? I want Flash Camp South Africa!!!
C’mon even the Football world cup is heading this way this year
I don’t hate Adobe or flash in fact I love the flash platform and have been developing for years with it. However I do have my doubts about the flash/iphone platform. I don’t think it’s from ego mania or plain hating but simply until the more serious performance issues are resolved or improved (amongst other things) I can’t really ignore the other development platforms (iphone, android) or really take flash seriously in the mobile development realm. I don’t think it’s fair to categorize one group of critics as benevolent and fair and others as ‘hater etc.’ If you choose to be in evangelist and voice your opinions criticisms on all levels are part of the game sorry. Either way keep up the good work and look forward to new developments in 2010.
Keep fighting the good fight. The Flash platform is superior to DHTML, period. Flash’s primary competitor is a nonexistent future “standard” that doesn’t even begin to address some of the features Flash brought to the web in the 90s, and likely won’t be supported by the majority player in web browsing (Microsoft). People say stupid things about Windows platform, too…doesn’t mean Mac OS and Linux have taken over yet.
But always remember that competition is good, and this painful fight has helped the Flash platform immensely, and is set to continue to do so. Take the complainers to task with 2d/3d acceleration, super-low CPU/mem usage, and an exorbitantly superior feature set. Let them enjoy their 90s web without Flash while we continue to serve the 99.99% of the world who enjoys content only properly supported by the Flash platform.