R.I.P. Adobe Flash

The time has come! Adobe Flash is officially dead!

The date is really emotional to me: in my first job as a web designer (thanks to Fred Siqueira hooking me up at CESAR), I was tasked by Sílvio Meira to design my own website in Flash in a week! I was really impressed with simplicity of it: Designers could finally do animations with little (or no) programming! Those were the days of NRG, 2advanced, and Joshua Davis‘ Praystation!

That first week ended up defining the next decade of my career: on my next job as an Art Director at icorp (thanks to Maurício Carvalho and Caio Correia), I was asked to create a Flash-only version of the website, and the brief was “how far can you push this?”

We really pushed the Macromedia (which eventually was acquired by Adobe) Flash there — with the help of Eduardo Fernandes, Ricardo Costa, Bruno Palermo, Flávia Lacerda, and Fernando Jorge! ActionScript reminding me of my days with #AppleBasic.

A lot of people think the beginning of the end for Adobe Flash came when Steve Jobs decided that iOS was not going to support it. Jobs was right, by the way: Abode never invested in optimising Flash for mobile — or for anything for that matter! It was a memory hog!

To me, the beginning of the end came earlier, when Jakob Nielsen famously declared that Flash was 99% bad for usability! I remember being really upset with the Usability Guru attacking something it was so dear to me! But — in the end — Nielsen was right too!

Not to be missed, but never forgoten!