PhilterBlog

After taking a year away from the Flash world entirely (to reno and flip houses...that's a story for another day), I've returned to experience a sense of excitement and energy that I haven't felt personally since the days of Flash 3. Sure, there were other periods in Flash history that produced moments of near euphoria:

• ActionScript introduced in Flash 5
• Flash Video introduced in Flash MX
• AS2 in Flash MX2004
• Bitmap effects in Flash 8

However, the era that I look back on with the most warm fuzzies was back in the day when nrg.be and matinee.co.uk made heads spin with their sheer slickness and everyone hung on the edge of their chairs for the new version of Gabocorp. You know...the days when motion tweens were in, and TellTarget was for "real" coders. That was what birthed in me a REAL passion for Flash, and I knew back then it was what I wanted to do. Now it's 10 years later and things have changed substantially in a way that few of us would have predicted. A lot of Flash designers have moved into the role of "developer" and learned a thing or two about programming through this thing called ActionScript. And now we even have our own "developer" IDE in FlexBuilder. Who would've thunk it?

Yet, as I read the blog posts and see the excitement over Flash/Flex/Apollo/etc. I can't help but feel somewhat the same as I did 10 years ago. A sense of buzz over what the future holds for Flash, centred largely around this framework called Flex. A lot of people talk about how Flex has changed the Flash ecosystem (some wonder where designers are left in all of this). I can't help but think of the possibilities the future holds for us. At what point in the past have we had:

• Flash player being adopted as quickly as it is now.
• A framework and component set as rich and robust as that of Flex (having worked extensively on Flash frameworks before, I know that to build something that everyone - or at least a majority of developers - will find useful isn't an easy task)
• Flash being taken more and more as a serious platform
• A Flash based runtime that allows cross platform development of desktop apps!
• The explosion of new Flash/Flex jobs
• The financial backing of a company like Adobe to further move this thing in the right direction.
• A "real" developer IDE that Adobe has committed to improving upon (remember that the next version of Flex will target Flash player 9 - so this next version will be entirely IDE and framework improvements and not new player features)
• A build of the Flash IDE that will tightly integrate with Photoshop and Illustrator (though details on this are still unknown)
• The capability of even approaching realtime 3-D rendering in a practical way(rock on guys \m/ ;).

I think it's a great time to be a Flash/Flex developer. Even though we're far removed from the days of Flash 3, I anticipate looking back on these days 10 years from now with the same fondness as I do those days 10 years ago, knowing that we were on the verge of going somewhere bigger than we were (at least if I'm not off flipping houses... :)

I look forward to posting useful tidbits on anything Flash related in the coming days and weeks...