CivieBlog

Earlier this year I questioned why there was Still No Flash on the iPhone and iPad. It’s become quite clear that Apple (Steve Jobs) is going to block putting Flash on these platforms.

Today the big news is Scribd Switches to HTML5; Adobe To Make Tools for HTML5.

As a Part-Time CTO, I am continually making choices about what platforms to use, what do we build for, how do we integrate with social networks, etc. And just like a few years ago when it became clear that you shouldn’t build desktop applications anymore, I think we are hitting a tipping point where you have to question building anything that uses Flash as the delivery mechanism.

Scribd today announced that they are going to be changing their Flash player to be based on HTML5.

"We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page," Scribd co-founder and CTO Jared Friedman told TechCrunch.

This comes at the same time as Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch: We’re Going To Make The Best Tools In The World For HTML5. Kevin doesn’t say that they are moving away from Flash – rather that they will support Flash and HTML5 as output. But it’s pretty clear that even Adobe sees the problem here.

What does this mean in practice? Well Captivate will produce HTML5 so that it can be run on an iPhone, iPad and everywhere else.

Right now, I believe this is a tipping point moment. It’s the beginning of the long slow death of Flash.

The only question is my mind is how long/slow it will be.

Oh and if I'm predicting relative to the big question this month: Learning Technology 2015 then my prediction is that we won't be building for Flash delivery in 2015.