Adobe Effectively Kills Flash, Administers Last Rights With Animate CC Suite
Adobe has finally gotten the hint and is retiring the Flash brand. “Flash has played a leading role in bringing new capabilities to the web,” said Adobe in a corporate blog posting. “From audio and animation, to interactivity and video, Flash has helped push the web forward.”
While that was once true, everyone is ready to move forward with a more open standard, and that standard just so happens to be HTML5. “Today, open standards like HTML5 have matured and provide many of the capabilities that Flash ushered in,” Adobe continued. “Our customers have clearly communicated that they would like our creative applications to evolve to support multiple standards and we are committed to doing that.”
As a result, Adobe is renaming its Flash Professional CC suite to Animate CC. The removal of the Flash branding signals that Adobe no longer sees it as a credible way forward in the increasingly mobile-dominated Internet, and likewise, Animate CC puts HTML5 development front and center (over a third of all content crated in Flash Professional was already HTML5-enabled) while Flash goes on the back burner.
Adobe is by no means completely irradiating Flash from the face of the Earth, and it is calling on big name partners like Microsoft, Google and Facebook to “help ensure the ongoing compatibility and security of Flash content.” But today’s announcement marks the beginning of the end for Flash development, and I for one welcome our HTML5 overlords.
