One Millionth Tower Interactive Documentary & Death of Flash
Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 6:33 pm
From the National Film Board of Canada, One Millionth Tower is an interactive documentary written with new web technologies like HTML5 and WebGL. It's probably the most ambitious use of HTML5 on the web today. You'll need to watch it on a relatively up-to-date browser like Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Really cool, check it out:
http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_webgl.php
It's also another nail in the coffin for Adobe's Flash in a series of what-you-can-do-HTML5-can-do-better. Adobe recently announced that as part of their restructuring (including layoffs) they are discontinuing development of Flash for mobile devices and focusing more on HTML5 and their core products - something they should have done years ago but tunnel vision prevented them from seeing this happening. Steve Jobs was right about Flash sucking on mobile devices and Adobe finally realized this and threw in the towel. Blackberry still says they'll continue to support Flash on their Playbooks (but only because Flash is their one and only selling feature).
Adobe still wants to rely on Adobe AIR, which I think they need to kill as well, but I suspect they are only doing this temporarily until they can transition to focus on HTML5. Flash development on computers is unaffected but it's only a matter of time before this is dead as well. I think Adobe needs to focus on integrating their current tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver to help with HTML5 design and deployment rather than outputting to their own proprietary modules and I hope that's what they have planned during their restructuring.
Here's the article about discontinuing Flash on mobile devices:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mobiledia/2 ... e-devices/
Seriously, I picked up Macromedia Flash about 10 years ago when it was all the rage and people were putting up interactive websites with excessive annoying sound effects and flashy vector animations, and after a month of working with it I decided that it was pretty shitty and a fad that didn't bring much value to the web. If we look back at Flash's legacy for the internet, it has added streaming video for millions of emos on YouTube and annoying banner ads, both of which everyone hates.
http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_webgl.php
It's also another nail in the coffin for Adobe's Flash in a series of what-you-can-do-HTML5-can-do-better. Adobe recently announced that as part of their restructuring (including layoffs) they are discontinuing development of Flash for mobile devices and focusing more on HTML5 and their core products - something they should have done years ago but tunnel vision prevented them from seeing this happening. Steve Jobs was right about Flash sucking on mobile devices and Adobe finally realized this and threw in the towel. Blackberry still says they'll continue to support Flash on their Playbooks (but only because Flash is their one and only selling feature).
Adobe still wants to rely on Adobe AIR, which I think they need to kill as well, but I suspect they are only doing this temporarily until they can transition to focus on HTML5. Flash development on computers is unaffected but it's only a matter of time before this is dead as well. I think Adobe needs to focus on integrating their current tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver to help with HTML5 design and deployment rather than outputting to their own proprietary modules and I hope that's what they have planned during their restructuring.
Here's the article about discontinuing Flash on mobile devices:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mobiledia/2 ... e-devices/
Seriously, I picked up Macromedia Flash about 10 years ago when it was all the rage and people were putting up interactive websites with excessive annoying sound effects and flashy vector animations, and after a month of working with it I decided that it was pretty shitty and a fad that didn't bring much value to the web. If we look back at Flash's legacy for the internet, it has added streaming video for millions of emos on YouTube and annoying banner ads, both of which everyone hates.