With the recent news that Adobe will be deprecating both their Mobile Flash and Flex development, this leaves application and content developers in a period of uncertainty and, most likely, having to duplicate work for the foreseeable future.
We think that most developers will move towards a dual-pronged effort for content creation: Flash will remain in the dominant position on the desktop for the short- to mid-term future, but mobile device constraints means that more and more work will migrate towards HTML5-based solutions.
There are currently a sizeable number of capabilities that the Flash environment provides that are just not possible to replicate with the current HTML5/JavaScript toolkit. Games, in particular, are not going to be easily portable, especially for the ones that make use of the more advanced features that Flash provides. Another area where Flash is by far the dominant platform is e-learning, where a sizeable infrastructure and community has built up.
We think that, just as print designers adjusted to the perceived lack of control when moving to the web, interactive designers will find workarounds and solutions to the current limitations in the HTML5/JavaScript toolkit. At the same time, JavaScript libraries will only increase in power and quantity, so we expect that Flash use for new content will begin to taper off within the next 12-18 months. It just doesn’t make sense for content creators to have that duplication of effort in the longer term, especially given the current economic climate.
From the point of view of a Localization Service Provider, the move towards HTML5 and related standards is a welcome change and something we look forward to. Having your content in an easily-accessible format means that it becomes possible to process the content for translation in a reliable, safe and cost-effective manner.
While the .swf file format has long been open and documented (allowing third parties to create or edit .swf files directly), the source .fla format has been much more of a ‘closed book’. This is understandable from a business point of view, but has made for some “interesting” times for us when attempting to localize Flash content where the source content isn’t always available, or where the original content creator hasn’t created their work in easily-reproducible ways. Moving to “open” (in a technical sense) file formats should reduce these types of issues significantly, and overall lead to a more productive localization environment.
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John has worked in Localization for a long, long time but remains true to his geeky origins. He knows enough about Unicode to stun a moose but can still converse with normal people, despite his apparent need to refer to himself in the third person. |
