Wallaby: Adobe's way of admitting defeat without admitting defeat

> Adobe says that the main goal with Wallaby is to produce output that has the best combination of performance and quality on iOS. This objective betrays Wallaby’s immediate purpose: allowing advertisers to create rich ads that display correctly on the iPhone and iPad. The lack of Flash on iOS impacts both banner advertising on the Web, and ads embedded into applications using Apple’s HTML5-powered iAd. Wallaby allows designers to migrate their designs and hence reduce the costs of supporting these non-Flash platforms. As far as I’m concerned, this is a tacit admission of defeat by Adobe. Basically, they are acknowledging that if they don’t offer a non-Flash alternative to making web-based ads, someone else will take this authoring market away from them.

The issue is that Adobe is still trying to fulfill this ridiculous promise of “write once, run everywhere.” Business-minded technology execs have been chasing that unicorn for ages now, and it’s never panned out.

And the sad part is, we’re closer than ever to being able to write web content that can truly be written once and run anywhere. It just can’t be done with Flash.

If you want to make ads that run on iOS devices AND on desktop web browsers, don’t write them in Flash and then translate them poorly over to HTML5. Just write them in HTML5 in the first place.

Seriously, any “developer” who complains that he or she wants to keep using Flash to author his or her content is not worth a paycheck. It’s not like Adobe doesn’t completely change the entire Flash scripting language and user interface every year or two, anyway; instead of learning the next version of Flash, just learn how to code Javascript and CSS 3 instead.

A career in technology requires a constant updating of one’s knowledge base. You can’t simply learn to program one language and expect the world to stop moving forward.

Meanwhile, Adobe, get some good authoring tools into Dreamweaver for NATIVE HTML5 creation. If you’re not putting the emphasis of your development time for CS6 on this, you don’t deserve to survive the decade.

Oh, and Ads? The increased desire of content producers to bombard us with ads, coupled with the decreased tolerance of most users for viewing ads is going to lead to a major bubble burst in the near future. But that’s a topic for another day.