AS3 vs the world
Over the past few days there's been an ongoing discussion around AS3 and future of Flash. I'm not going to get much into what's been said here and instead point you to Flashden where they've compiled the major starting points in the conversation.
What I'm seeing in this discussion is surely something that Adobe is struggling hard with and to which I think Flash Catalyst is probably part of the answer. The success of Flash has been due to the huge user community it has developed. Initially it wasn't apparent that there were vastly different users in this group. AS1, AS2 and the Flash Players and IDE's that went along with them kept everyone on a fairly level playing field. As it become apparent that Flash could be something much more powerful, the hardcore developers in the group pushed for more and Adobe obliged, seeing the opportunities that RIA's presented for getting into the enterprise. We ended up with AS3 and Flex, a long way from the simplicity (arguable I know) of AS1 and putting things together on the timeline.
On the extreme to one side we have developers like Joa and Nicholas who spend as much time figuring out the inner workings of the Flash Player itself and how to make it better to suit their needs and on the other side you have the thousands of people using Flash to do nothing more than banner ads. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. They aren't submitting their own bug fixes for the Flash Player but they are doing some very sophisticated work with AS. We also have the tinkerers who build experiments and push the technology.
Sadly it's in the tinkering group where the problem is most apparent. The numbers of people experimenting with Flash have declined greatly. Events like Iron Flash that we use to run at FITC aren't really possible any more. Creating something in AS3 is vastly more complicated than things were back in the timeline days. Only those keen on learning the ins and outs of a more sophisticated scripting language moved on to push the limits while others were left behind, unable to find the time or interest to become better programmers in order to pursue their creative interests with Flash.
The challenge Adobe faces now, is how to make AS and Flash more accessible again without taking away the power of raw AS3 and while still offering a decent transition path for people to grow as they become more comfortable with coding. We talked about this quite a bit last year at FITC's unconference session at MAX with Richard Galvan. There are a number of ways to solve this problem and it's challenging to decide which is best. They can provide more sophisticated tooling that will write the code behind the scenes as user's create with a GUI (see Flash Catalyst) or they can introduce a higher level scripting interface for AS3 that removes some of the complexity and strictness of the language.
What I don't like seeing in this discussion is one side or the other saying it has to be their way or nothing. I really like it's possible for everyone to get what they want. Adobe need some time to get it all in there though. The community is large and responding to the needs of all those people is a daunting task I'm sure. Personally, I was happy to see that they've delayed the release of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 so that they could take more time to implement community feedback. This is clearly a better approach than putting out products that aren't quite right and don't meet the needs of the users.
I also suspect that internally the biggest challenge Adobe is facing right now is bringing their various technologies together. As mobile devices become more powerful it's now apparent that they are capable of running the full Flash Player on them and we won't need things like Flash Lite anymore. And AIR has a home on mobile as well, it seems like the logical way to allow Flash dev's to build apps that can leverage native device capabilities like GPS and multi-touch while leaving the Player to run web content in the browser. Bringing all these independent development streams together is surely a challenge.
There's no doubt there are problems, but I've also got no doubt that Adobe will fix many of the issues that have been raised and will still manage to innovate and drive the industry forward in the process.