Adobe shifts focus to HTML5, Javascript and CSS as viable substitutes for Flash

Adobe Fellow Mark Anders:"Flash is still critical for making games for the web as well as high quality video."Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Toronto: A day after Adobe announced its updated Creative Suite 6 (CS6) and its new Creative Cloud initiave in San Francisco, some of Adobe's key fellows were in Toronto for FITC  (Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity) 2012 to discuss the new features and business direction that Adobe is taking with its new products. 

Anders: "Last year we showed the earliest version of Adobe Edge but a lot has changed, we had an incredible response wiht 50,000 downloads in the first 24 hours and since then 400,000 downloads with five different versions."

During a lunch and learn session at the Toronto Hilton, we joined Adobe Fellow Mark Anders who met with members of the press to discuss the latest developments in Adobe's key suite of apps and solutions. Anders, whose background is in development, spoke mostly about Adobe Edge.

Adobe Edge is a web development tool developed by Adobe Systems that uses HTML5, Javascript, and CSS3 functionality. It is currently in development and available as a preview via Adobe Labs. Edge is Adobe's answer to the lack of Flash on iPads and similar devices. The Flash plugin has long been considered a resource hog on browsers as well as on mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone.

Adobe announced it was discontinuing development of mobile Flash in November of last year. A statement issued by Adobe in their blog read, "Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations."

There are now 365 million iOS devices as per Apple's latest report, making mobile a platform that companies like Adobe want to be able to develop solutions for. Adobe Edge uses web technologies to approximate the dynamic animation and content that people are used to seeing in Flash. Google's Android devices have always been ablet to run mobile Flash,but at times quite poorly.

"How do we do the same things we did in Flash with HTML?" Anders asked and explaine that this has been Adobe's key focus of late. While Flash itself cannot run on iOS devices, it has proven to be a viable tool to create and export applications that run on various mobile devices like smarpthones and tablets. 

Anders said that Adobe's development process now integrates a lot of user feedback. "We're able to take in the feedback and iterate on it," he added that the user community is often given access to early builds of new tools so that user feedback can be integrated early on.

"We went to see customers who said 'we've been doing Flash for years and it doesn't run on the devices we now use," Anders related. "We discovered that there are ways to do it without developing a new platform. We became optimistic and excited at the opportunity. It is a huge opportunity for Adobe because it is a new medium."

Adobe Edge will be part of the Creative Cloud solution once it is ready to ship. "We are still in preview and the preview is now free.  Users need  an Adobe ID in order to access Adobe Edge.