Steve jobs wrote an open letter about Apple’s lack of support for Flash on their mobile devices. I’m not a huge fan of Adobe anymore. I used to be, but I think they’ve gotten too big. Dreamweaver is garbage (and I think any designer that would choose Dreamweaver over Textmate or Coda is either a glutton for punishment or needs to brush up on their skill set). Flash is a nightmare, it’s the last software I have where I need to save every 5 minutes. Flash CS4 is incredibly clunky and flakey. CS5 looks a little better, but that hasn’t shipped yet, I’m anxiously awaiting my copy, looks like they might have introduced typography into Flash.

However, the point is, should we forego Flash entirely for Javascript? I’m usually in agreement with Apple on stuff like this, but in this case, I’m not sure. In the letter Steve Jobs wrote, it sounds like Flash is just games and video (he was generous and didn’t point out that a lot of Flash is just advertising). If it were just games and video, I wouldn’t care. Games have better options for a platform and video really should be done in HTML 5 if that were possible. But a lot of the Flash designers use Flash in ways that don’t fall into those categories.

You can use Flash to make great portfolios (javascript works, but Flash still seems to be a better tool here, I love slideshowpro), more interactive navigation systems, and utilities on your site where doing it in javascript may be possible, but also very cost prohibitive versus Flash.

So, while I’d love to put Flash in the trash, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet. Hopefully Adobe has patched that particular Frankenstein and it’s a little less horrid in CS5.

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A note on HTML 5, it’s all well and good to talk about HTML standards, but IE is still the largest percentage of browsers used, and (surprise!) Microsoft doesn’t fully support HTML 5 yet. So, while I can’t wait for HTML 5, I’m also not going to build sites that demand it yet. I’d be more than happy to write websites that didn’t support Microsoft products, but oddly enough, nobody wants to have a site only visible by 20-30% of the market. : )

Also, Microsoft users are notoriously slow to update their software, even when it’s free. Given Microsoft’s reputation for software, that kind of makes sense, but keep in mind that even if IE 9 will support HTML 5, you’ve still got a HUGE market share using IE 6, so it doesn’t matter what IE 9 will and won’t support. Something has to happen. I suspect that very soon the design and development community will (with Microsoft’s blessing) stop supporting old versions of IE.