JavaScript is the New Flash

Our good friend and idol, Steve Jobs, has been stirring up quite a storm regarding Flash support on the iPhone and iPad. We’re not taking sides on this issue (we’re both Apple and Adobe developers), but we will say that Steve has been making a big enough stink that our clients are now asking us to build them Web solutions that do not rely 100% on Flash. One of our clients actually asked us how much it would cost to convert all their Flash demos to HTML 5.

The good news is that

1. Flash isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s a great tool and a great technology; and despite what Steve says, is supported nearly everywhere on the Web (except iPad and iPhone), including Android smart phones, and doesn’t crash that often.
2. You actually can do a lot of the same things with Flash using JavaScript and HTML 5, so that Flash is not a requirement if you want to make a rich media experience that works on the iPad and iPhone.

Now unfortunately, HTML 5 browsers are NOT widely used (The HTML 5 spec is not yet final). However, we’ve discovered that we can do an incredible amount of rich, dynamic things on a plain old HTML 4 browser, just with JavaScript. That’s right JavaScript. That mis-named (it has nothing really to do with Java) scripting language from the 1990s, is turning out to be incredibly powerful and a great way to manipulate images and experiences within Web browsers. We’re building fun Web 2.0 experiences, that don’t feel like static Web pages, doing things in JavaScript that we used to do in Flash.

So as more and more of our clients want iPhone and iPad supported services, we’re happy to say we have a pretty good answer for now. Good ol’ JavaScript.

Now the other thing that Flash does well, is encapsulate and play video. And that’s something that we still need HTML 5 for. So hang on, it's coming soon. And I’ll save my thoughts for the future of video online for an upcoming blog.