my very occasional musings

This could be very big.

Web developers know that Flash support is diminishing. This is thanks to devices by Apple & Microsoft (at least)** that don’t offer Flash support, and, more important, due to Adobe’s own elimination of support for Flash on mobile devices.

I’ve heard of a few tools so far to do interactive graphical Rapid Application Development (RAD) in HTML5 instead of Flash. However, this one caught my attention.

Zoe is a stand-alone application which significantly helps in converting existing SWF (“Shockwave” Flash) animations to Canvas+CSS. In other words, the work that’s already been done for some Flash applications can be translated to a standardized methdology available on an ever-increasing set of browsers. (Examples: Internet Explorer 10, Chrome.)

Zoe is even sponsored by Adobe itself (as is Edge, another HTML5 development tool which you should also check out).

As we get further and further from Flash viability on anything but current laptops/desktops, I believe there will even be a significant market for developers offering to convert existing websites’ Flash content to HTML5. Perhaps they will find Zoe and such tools useful.

As a real world example, it appears that Atari may have used Zoe to help with converting games to HTML5 for their new touch arcade. Zoe and some other tools are also mentioned if you explore the Developers section at that link.

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** Apple’s decisions about lack of support for Flash could take up an entire article.

As for Microsoft, its new Windows 8 operating system is extremely tablet-friendly, with at least a dozen tablets by various manufacturers slated to run on this OS by November. And the IE10 “touch” browser that comes native with Windows 8 will offer no Flash support at all (but full HTML5 support). While there is a browser included on most of these tablets that will still support Flash, I believe Adobe’s own actions prove that Flash is heading into the sunset, however slowly.