"Sorry Flash, You're out of luck"

I have a special fondness for Flash. Having worked at Macromedia in the years before it was purchased by Adobe, and then staying with Adobe for a few years after the acquisition was completed, I came to know a fair amount about this great little vector graphic program that made web animation work.  One should be aware of nuances when talking about Flash. You know you are looking at Flash animations when your file extension ends with a ".swf". SWF is to web animations that PDF is to written documents. Somewhere near 50% of all SWF development tools come from companies other than Adobe. An FLA file is also Flash. This is used to designate files used during development; FLV files are used for working with Flash video. Flash Player is needed to play Flash content on devices. It is currently on approximately 97% of computers in the world. It differs from Flash Professional, which is a scripting-level development tool. Flex and Flashbuilder are being used to develop all kinds of new apps and RIAs.

One would have to have been living on a desert island to have missed the sniping between Apple and Adobe about not being able to play Flash-based content on the iPhone and the iPad. Steve Jobs has been slapping Adobe for being lazy, slamming Flash for being bloated and inefficient. And on and on.

So I was amused when I saw this cartoon in my local Sunday paper. Bill Amend's Foxtrot is my favorite comic strip. I subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle for a number of years for my daily fix of nerdy Jason and the rest of his family. Foxtrot now shows up on Sundays. And this is what showed up on Sunday March 21st. I'm still snickering.

I once asked Bill if I could use his comics in some presentations I was doing, and  he said it was okay with him if I wasn't making any money on it. Hope his agency agrees. Enjoy!

Comments

[Ellen Wagner]

Hi Shaun - can you tell me more??

[Shaun Hammer]

Ellen,
Great sense of humor. I'm with Apple. Flash is really missing the boat.
~Shaun