technology simply changes. i met a guy who was the lead engineer of commodore 64. do you think when he was on the top of his career, he stopped learning? this segment changes a lot. it is a lifelong learning. get used to it.
html5 is not ready. even w3c says it'll be in 2014 (as i remember). and i think, it won't kill air. neither flash. of course it will depend on a lot of things, but the two technologies are good in different segments. you cannot do a prezi.com in html5, and you cannot do an entire webpage in flash. (login remembers will not work, etc...) the key is to know both, and know when to use what. On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Kevin MacDonald <kevinmacdon...@gmail.com>wrote: > > > Hello developers, > > I have come to some unfortunate conclusions about how Adobe operates. I > would be interested to get your opinions on the matter. > > Some years ago I helped build out a desktop application using Macromedia > Director. It ran on both Mac and Windows, and was heavily backed by web > services. In principle it was much like an Adobe AIR app might be today. > After a few years Adobe bought Macromedia Director, with promises to the > developer community that they would continue to support it. They came out > with a few maintenance releases that were extremely buggy, enough so that > we tried to roll back to the previous version. However, Adobe made sure > there were some gotchas that made it painful to either stay on the current > version or roll back. Shortly thereafter they killed Director altogether. > > An Adobe evangelist came to our office and sold us hard on moving to Adobe > AIR, which we did. We completely re-wrote our application on that platform. > Now, several years later, Adobe is very obviously moving away from AIR and > towards HTML5, again with promises to their loyal developers to continue > supporting it. > > Based on their history what I expect Adobe to do is kill AIR before too > long. And you should have no doubts that they can make it very painful to > remain on that platform. For example, AIR apps use whatever version of > Adobe Reader is installed on the client machine. Adobe Reader updates > happen independently of updates to the AIR run time. The latest update to > Adobe Reader broke certain aspects of our client application, something > that might directly hurt our business. What can you do when the HTMLLoader > object no longer correctly displays a PDF? What I expected Adobe to do - > and what the evangelist led me to believe - was that Adobe would evolve AIR > and Flash Builder towards HTML5 over time, bringing all of us along with > them. But they don't do that. They scorch the earth and start over. > > So, what's next? I suppose we will hear from Adobe before too long that we > should run out, buy PhoneGap Builder 1.0, and once again chase their > code-once-deploy-everywhere carrot. > > We are not the customer. We are the product. We are the means by which > Adobe makes money for their shareholders, nothing more. I suppose in true > jaded developer fashion this should come as no shock to me. But the truth > is, it never feels nice to be a pawn in someone else's game. > > Kevin > >
