I'm a lead developer at a company that creates highly-specialized training tools using Flash. We have an enormous library of content built over the last 10 years that we intend to support into the future. Adobe seems to be considering HTML5 as an alternative/addition to the Flash Player. There's a lot of conflict in the industry about Flash/HTML5, and Adobe is appeasing both sides by continuing to develop the Flash Player while investigating HTM5 export, acquiring and developing prominent HTML5 tools, etc. This is fantastic.
Do you have any recommendations for teams with lots of Flash-based content, to prepare for the transition to an HTML5 environment? Can we continue creating Flash content as we always have, trusting that Adobe will provide a means to migrate/recompile our existing FLAs or SWFs to HTML5 when the time comes? Or should we take any preparatory action to ease the transition? For instance, authoring our graphics using SVG, writing our code in an intermediate scripting language that may be compiled to ActionScript or JavaScript, etc?
I realize you might not be the best person to ask about this, but in your position it seems probable that you'd be aware of the roadmap for Flash. I realize the roadmap is confidential, but any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if you could recommend someone for me to talk to about this, I'd be grateful.
EDIT: Any sort of response would be great. There seem to be a lot of folks here who are interested in this issue.
Unfortunately I don't have the detail on our technical roadmap to give this the answer it deserves. I'll see if I can get someone from the Flash team to address this...
I have an email address in my profile if you (or anyone on the Flash team — Senocular, perhaps?) would like to take this conversation private. But I'm sure all the people up-voting my question would absolutely love an official, public answer.
And to clarify: I don't mean to imply that I think the Flash Player is going away. I'm just hopefully awaiting the day that my existing Flash-made content can run beautifully on the iPad and Win 8 Metro. Platform independence was the ideal that led me to choose Flash, and I'm excited about this ideal continuing into the future.
I just need to be sure that the processes I'm using today won't limit my options. My ever-growing library of resources — the result of a decade of hard work — depends on this.
Do you have any recommendations for teams with lots of Flash-based content, to prepare for the transition to an HTML5 environment? Can we continue creating Flash content as we always have, trusting that Adobe will provide a means to migrate/recompile our existing FLAs or SWFs to HTML5 when the time comes? Or should we take any preparatory action to ease the transition? For instance, authoring our graphics using SVG, writing our code in an intermediate scripting language that may be compiled to ActionScript or JavaScript, etc?
I realize you might not be the best person to ask about this, but in your position it seems probable that you'd be aware of the roadmap for Flash. I realize the roadmap is confidential, but any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if you could recommend someone for me to talk to about this, I'd be grateful.
EDIT: Any sort of response would be great. There seem to be a lot of folks here who are interested in this issue.