CivieBlog

About a year ago, I wrote about the Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash. I pointed to Scribd switching from Flash to HTML, and pointed to their CTO Jared Friedman saying:

"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."

Yesterday, I saw what Rapid Intake is doing with their tools to allow authoring of Mobile Learning - what they call mLearning Studio. By way of background, Rapid Intake provides tools that allow you to very rapidly input content that is composed into courses. The mobile version allows you to compose mobile learning courses using the same authoring system. You choose templates, add text, images, audio, video and quizzes, then publish for web and mobile. It can play back on iPhone, iPad, and Android with support for Blackberry coming soon.

The look of the course is slightly different on the different form factors. For example, you use next and back in a browser, swipe in an iPhone. Table of contents is persistent on the iPad and is a pop-up on the iPhone. Etc. And yes, the mobile version is SCORM conformant. If you want to find out more, you can see a video via the link above.

But here's where it gets interesting...

Rapid Intake's web player is Flash-based. The mobile version is HTML 5.

They've basically been forced (because mobile doesn't play Flash) to go with a completely different technology for their mobile player. The really nice thing for them is that they are a form-based authoring tool (much like an LCMS). That has made their transition to mobile much easier that other authoring tools that are much more closely tied to Flash (and I think you know who I mean).

The death of Flash is continuing.