What is this site about, anyway?

2011 saw massive changes to, and a blunt conversation about, the interactive production industry. Whatever the exact future of Flash, it is clear than it will be different from its past; and many increasingly see the rising importance of alternative technologies, and the wisdom of learning new skills, even as Flash may well remain a valuable element in your skill-set.

At the same time, as I believe is becoming increasingly clear to more people: this is hardly a cut-and-dry scenario, and many people have a lot of very valid questions on what they should learn, how they should brand themselves, and how they should direct their careers (Lee Brimelow has some advice on that front).

Stated briefly, Flash has long filled a tremendous number of roles in digital media and communication. Scripters, coders, developers, designers, character animators, gamers, motion designers, user experience designers, multi-media producers — all of these people worked with Flash. So, picking alternatives is just not a simple question. And, the amount of misinformation in the marketplace about these technologies and their capabilities does not help the situation at all.

Of course, so much of the conversation has focused around HTML5. And, I believe it is clear that HTML5 is the future of great web experiences. But (runtime consistency issues aside), HTML5 and Flash offer different feature sets; and the authoring tools for these technologies are not in an equivalent state of maturity. And because of these differences, the process of conceiving, designing, engineering, testing, releasing and maintaining rich HTML5 experiences is, well, going to be different from how comparable experiences have been produced in Flash. As a result, there’s a lot of frustration and learning to be had across the coming years, in every aspect of production workflow, as I believe is evidenced by this recent post on the Adobe Edge blog.

But, the question is even more complex than this. Many Flashers have options beyond HTML5, and outside of the browser. Application development (interfaces that run as applications on devices, outside of the browser) is one main area where Flash has been expanding over the past few years. Flash (via AIR) offers options to create and publish native applications for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and BlackBerry. If that’s a market in which you are interested, the landscape is rich with options. Of course, you can move to native languages, like C (Windows), Objective C (iOS) and Java (Android). But there are also more cross-platform options, like PhoneGap (which relies on HTML5), Haxe (a higher-level language that compiles to multiple formats), as well as niche-specific options like Unity (for gaming).

In short: there are a lot of options!

The amount of data in the world, and the number of screens on which we experience that data, continues to explode. Correspondingly, the number and complexity of interfaces required to experience that data will continue to expand — with, or without, Flash; in and out of the browser.

As many of you know, over the past 12 years, I have contributed a significant amount of my time to the Flash community: writing, speaking, and teaching, as well as building platforms like LA Flash and the Rich Media Institute, to support users of Adobe’s Flash technology. I view this Transitioning.to site as my way to continue supporting the same wonderful community, in this period of rather significant change.

Over the coming year, we plan to publish content on this site, from a variety of authors, to help you answer questions such as those introduced in this post. Because, while there are no clear answers, you can still make informed decisions. It’s a new and exciting era in digital interfaces — let’s dig in!

Share and enjoy!

-r