My answer was, that I’m absolutely convinced that cross-plattform mobile apps based on HTML5 will be the future and that only in rare situations you will have to switch to native app development due to performance issues or in order to integrate some sensors, the JavaScript frameworks are not yet supporting.
From my perspective, one of the last advantages of Flash against HTML5 and JavaScript is the easy to use and very powerful development environment that Adobe has created which makes creating an animation easy as pie, so that designers can do that and you don’t need developers for that job. This is a key issue from my perspective and even Microsoft has learned that and created Expression Blend for designers so they can create the UI and don’t have to use Visual Studio, which was not meant for other people than developers.
HTML5 apps are currently lacking exactly that support and everybody who has created apps that make use of canvas knows that it is a real pain in the ass to create animations with such a low level framework. How much easier would it be to create animations with keyframes and tweening like you can do with Flash. Why is nobody developing a tool that does exactly that? HTML5 for designers! Such a tool actually exists and guess who is producing it?
You are right! It is Adobe! Who else has the know how about such a tool. Who else would be able to convince designers to use such a new tool if not the Flash creators themselves. And who else could demonstrate it more obviously without saying it that Flash is dead, not only on mobile devices but in general? Adobe is not only developing Edge, which is the most promising HTML5 design tool available (as beta in the moment), but has also bought PhoneGap, which is the best cross platform JavaScript framework (in my eyes) at the moment. What more proof do you need, all you Flash developers out there, that you should learn about HTML5 and don’t invest too much in Flash any more? HTML5 is there. It’s already existing! Although it’s not an official standard yet, every recent browser supports large parts of it. It’s not something that might be worth looking at in 2-3 years, but it’s already working pretty good! Of course there are still some laggards using IE6 that have never heard of HTML5, but if you are waiting for the last one to jump onto current technologies, you will wait forever and your competitors will have leapfrogged you long before that. Open your eyes and you will see that you have still all the possibilities you had before. It’s just a different technological basis, but you can still implement your bright ideas for games, productivity tools and informational websites. Nobody needs additional plug-ins any more and with Mozilla shifting towards H.264 video codec, we might even get a common basis that works on all recent browsers that doesn’t need any browser detection and special cases for certain browsers. The time is ripe and with the advent of Windows 8, at the latest, you will gain competitive advantage only with betting on HTML5, not Flash, not Silverlight, not Java FX, but HTML5. It’s the most flexible technology and it will continue to mature and overcome it’s childhood deseases.
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