[TriLUG] Flash, was Re: first post: looking for basic Linux course

[Jack Hill]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:38:32 -0400
Tim Jowers <timjowers at gmail.com> wrote:

> *Hi Jack,*
> *
> *
> *In short, "yes, for animation apps". Flash is faster
[citation needed]

> and can be
> designed as video strips. Adobe just purchased PhoneGap. PhoneGap
> allows one to write mobile apps using js and html. (The remainder was
> open sourced as Apache Cordova but I think PhoneGap will stay the
> brand name for Adobe.). Flash is probably still much better for
> making animation-centric apps than is js. But there's lots of
> momentum building for js (node.js and other serverside technolgies
> are another example.) You can use native code for game apps or do
> things in Flash or in js gaming/graphics libraries. Check out
> abcmouse.com for one example of a very successful Flash app.* *

I guess that I don't see why animation-centric apps are that
interesting. From the abcmouse.com screenshot it looks like a fairly
typical early childhood edutainment (please forgive my use of that word
☺) application; it looks like it could be implemented on many
development platforms. That's not saying anything about the ease of
development (which is hard to evaluate since I can’t find the source to
abcmouse.com on their site). Do I understand you correctly that the
thing people like about Flash is the development tools rather than the
runtime (as I understand it the Flash scripting language is actually
quite similar to JavaScript). I think this is good news for Free
software since I imagine it is easier to create better development
tools for JS/HTML JS/GNOME JS/RUBY/PYTHON/QML/Plasma (all technologies
that the community controls) than the moving target that is Flash.

Jack