What I find most unfortunate about the so called demise (which is more like a character assassination) of the Flash Player, is that Flash is such a fantastic platform for a unified and consistent user AND developer experience in the midst of so many competing and wildly incompatible platforms. It can be an island of sanity in the ocean of corporate cutthroat competition, where there’s so little co-operation.

Really, the ball is so in Adobe’s court. I hope they will really do what it takes to push the Flash platform forward. They’ve got a tremendous product here, but they really need to be more aggressive and innovative, because for too long, Flash has really lagged behind in the mobile arena.

Ironically, I’m doing what I’ve always done. If anything, I’m discovering the bits that I really enjoy (designing user experiences) and concentrating on that. I’ve also focused on making apps on what I feel is currently the best platform for creating beautiful user experiences (iOS). Especially as an independent developer/designer, I feel that that focus is essential.

I’ve also been doing talks on user experience to get people to understand that in this commoditized industry, user experience is the differentiating factor and that creating beautiful (even emotional) experiences requires lots of focus. As such I’ve been fortunate enough to speak at a number of very varied conferences including doing the opening keynotes at the PHP UK conference, Kings of Code, Frontend2010, and Over The Air. I’m also speaking more at design conferences like Visuelt (Norway) and will be doing an opening keynote at Future of Web Design in New York in November.

I’m also very passionate about the role that open technologies, web standards in particular, can play in education and in the past few months I’ve spoken to groups like Education International on the importance of not raising a new generation of secretaries trained in Microsoft Office and not tying the next generation to proprietary software.

So, as you can imagine, my interests in user experience and open technologies and standards have meant that my focus has drifted from the Flash platform. This was a gradual process that probably began when Adobe bought Macromedia. I see Adobe as a company with a split personality (with its enterprise and consumer divisions having conflicting interests) and lack of focus. And I see too much of an old boys club having formed in the Flash community and around the corporate entity that is Adobe. I’ve been one for kissing corporate ass so that put me off too. Beyond that, I simply feel that Flash has had its day. It’s not dead. Not even dying. But it’s not exciting for me any longer (your mileage may vary, and that’s totally cool). It was exciting ten years ago when it was the platform on which you could build the best user experiences around (at least on the web). That’s no longer true outside of certain niches (like 2D games, and deeply experience-based sites) and other technologies have begun to offer compelling alternatives to bits of functionality that were previously in the Flash domain (whether its HTML5 on the low-end or Unity3D on the high-end).

So, all in all, I’m doing well and working on what I’m passionate about (user experience/experience design and open technologies/standards and education) and concentrating on trying to make beautiful experiences. Hope you guys are doing well too and – most importantly – creating, having fun, learning, and growing.

What do you guys think about Apple allowing the Flash Player on it’s mobile Safari? Is that going to happen at all?