Wassim Sidani

While a lot of tech-savvy people think that apple’s decision of locking flash out of its idevices might have been the biggest blow on the head flash has ever received, I tend to disagree and I think the biggest trouble Flash is facing is Adobe’s wrong decisions and strategies for the flash platform.

yes folks, Steve Jobs is not the Flash killer everyone thought he was, in fact Flash outlived Steve and outlived all other presumed Flash killers starting from Live motion and Live motion 2 and other similar self-claiming flash killers and not probably ending with JQuery or html5.

The biggest damage anyone has ever done to Flash came from Adobe itself, Adobe is killing flash by killing its reputation in the eyes of Flash most dedicated lovers:the flash community of developers.

- Here’s a couple of things to try, visit theflashblog.com what to do you see? Well you see this in the address bar http://www.leebrimelow.com/
Now why would Lee dump such a nice name as theflashblog while he’s a so called Flash Evangelist? The answer is obvious…

- Visit activeden what do you see? Unity 3D stuff alongside with Flash stuff which are btw not as merchantable as before.
How’s that I hear you say? Well let me give you the timeline of this programmed-flash-death:

Adobe acquired Macromedia while flash was in early stages of version 9, later on called Flash CS3 since it was incorporated in the so called Adobe Creative suit. ActionScript 3 was introduced in Flash 9 and it still is the latest version of ActionScript many years after its conception so basically ActionScript 3 is Macromedia’s last gigantic step in developing and pushing the flash platform forward.

The help files and documentation in Flash 9 were excellent, nicely integrated with the product and well written for beginners and pros alike.
Where are the documentation for Flash CS5.5 now? well its an Air application now called the Adobe Community Help and what a failure it is, I can’t even start telling you how much I hate it, and for a very good reason: it doesn’t work! it always nags for updates, never give you relevant search results not to mention the times it just refuses to launch or ask you to quit to perform an Air runtime update.

The stability and backward compatibility of the IDE was excellent too, I never had any unexpected crash while working with Flash 9 as opposed to tens of them every month while working with Flash CS5.5 which is the latest version of Flash at this time. Try saving a complex Flash CS5.5 as Flash CS4 file for a change and see the crap you get!

Then came Flex and then Flash builder but that’s a totally different story, the damage Flex and Flash builder made to the community is that it alienated the majority of Flash users and made them feel inferior in terms of data driven applications and connectors and all the cool stuff only available through Flash Builder, why would Adobe do such a thing and introduce fragmentation into the toolset of flash coders? Well mostly because they want to feed on Flash’s reputation by selling as many Flash related product as they can! Isn’t that what they did to Photoshop with the so called Lightroom that could be easily made as a feature or plugin to PS?

Flash used to have a very good reputation of being a cross-OS and cross browser platform, not very much now as Adobe announced that Linux will not get the much anticipated stage3D hardware acceleration everyone else get to experience and play with.

But nothing hurt Flash more than this last step, its repurposing into a gaming platform instead of RIA:

Adobe figured out that “the future of flash is 3D gaming and 3D gaming only” so that’s where Adobe is throwing the money and resources, a good example is the obvious re-purposing of Flash by having people like Lee Brimelow sent to the gaming land to advertise flash there, the message is clear : “the money lays there waiting for you Flash developers to develop your killer flash game and have it sold on the app store and Android Marketplace!” and “Flash is sexy because you can make games with it and have them running on iOS and Android”

well I am not into making games or playing games so what’s in it for me as a flash developer for the last 12 years or so? Well the answer is simple: nothing! Go learn Javascript and jQuery or CSS3 if you want to do the usual stuff of building web apps with transitions and smooth animations, Flash is not for that anymore!

I had this issue where arabic text and french text retrieved from a mySQL database were not displaying correctly in my flash frontend, I was using amfphp to communicate and query the database. Needless to say that the text does display correctly in phpMyAdmin so it is correctly encoded in the database itself.

So here’s what I did to resolve the issue:

- Ensure that the mySQL tables where the text is stored are using the utf8_general_ci Collation.

- Set $gateway->setCharsetHandler( “none”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″ ) in the gateway.php file (in case you’re wondering, yes you should simply NOT use iconv or utf_decoder or mbstring or the like, just disable the setCharsetHandler conversion by using “none” as the conversion method).

- in your php service file, say it’s called permissions.php, use the following :

$rsConnectionID=mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_set_charset("utf8", $rsConnectionID);

Be sure to have these set before running your query or passing the results to flash.

This should resolve all the issues you’re having, of course you should not use the following actionScript : system.useCodepage = true; as this will tell the flash player not to use utf 8 as default encoding and will surely get you into troubles.

I think that by now everyone in the flash community knows about the “Slap in the face” we, as flash developers, received by Apple, in case you didn’t you can read all about it in the “Go screw yourself Apple” post.

A side effect of adobe’s announcement that flash CS5 will export to iPhone and iPod touch was encouraging thousands of flash developers to buy an iPhone or iPod touch to have the appropriate hardware to test and develop Flash-based ipa, at least that’s what I did…Now Apple should be grateful to this “free Marketing favor” Adobe inadvertently offered to say the least…

I already have a windows mobile powered HTC touch diamond phone and I invested in buying a 3rd generation 32 GB iPod touch for that purpose, if Apple continues its tight policy about 3rd party-built ipa, then I will either have to invest in an Android or just keep my ipas for myself! I might even have to jailbreak the iPod to be able to use my own built applications on my device! please correct me if I am wrong (should the device be jailbroken to install my own self-built ipas without having to kiss Mr Jobs ‘hand’ to get approval?)

Ok so we I had some good suggestions sent to my inbox, I am already improving and cleaning up some of the code of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart so It will be easy to integrate these new features. A full list of the new features will be published soon, meanwhile if you have any wish list, feel free to comment here.

So we’re in the process of adding some cool new features to make competitors look small, these will be revealed very soon once we make sure no other cart includes the same features or even come close! You can expect things that will surely add to the usability of the
actionscript3 flash shopping cart and will satisfy even the most demanding users.
If you have any feature you would like to see implemented in the actionscript3 flash cart, please drop us a line.
We know what designers and developers want, and we have the right package for each, more to come in the near future.