I admire Grant Skinner for his playfulness, insight, ability to deliver engaging talks and his contribution to the community. Almost to the point where it makes me pity myself for not being as skilled as he is. Now, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m being very honest here. The industry is changing right on my desk and I’m still doing all-Flash websites. The clients are more aware of the technology paradigm shift that’s going on and even my family are becoming worried about my future. The Flash/HTML5 debate has reached the headlines it seems and everyone’s invited.

I’m a developer who became one from a self taught background in graphic design, via web design, through a detour in HTML/CSS, into Flash over 10 years ago, then through the inevitable “deviner” phase, and finally now as a full blown developer. I suspect I’m not the only one with this path behind me in the Flash community. But three days of sessions at FOTB, gave me a lonesome feeling. You see I’m a developer with all my eggs in one basket; Flash is the only thing I know. I’m being slightly humble here. I know HTML/CSS pretty well, and developing with ActionScript has given me tremendous insight that enables me to understand many other languages pretty well. When I say AS is the only thing I know, I mean that it’s the only discipline that will earn me a living besides basic HTML/CSS-stuff.

To put it bluntly: At FOTB I would say the majority of the sessions were on mobile devices and screensavers. Mobile being the topic that has the most hype applied to it, for good reasons. This creates a growing demand for a different skillset than the one I possess. Mostly because of Apple. This causes a great deal of anxiety in the community, I suspect because of people like me. There was a substantial amount of grudge in the Flash and the “open” web trenches from way back already, but Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Flash, and the subsequent reply from Adobe’s Lee Brimelow kind of legitimated the flame war that followed.

Now to the part where I confess. I’ve been a fanboy all my life. My first recollection of taking side like this is when I decided Sega made so much better gaming consoles than Nintendo back in the 80′s. Naturally, when I got my first Mac 12 years ago I did it again. Then came the awesomer-than-all-Flash and I was consumed yet again. That lead to a conflict of interest of course, but earlier in the course of the Flash/HTML debate, I even advocated Apple’s stance. And given the same set of circumstances, I still agree with myself.

Grant Skinner says it like many others in the Flash community. In summary, Flash is just another kid on the block. He can do and he can not, depending on the task at hand. For now he can do more than what he can’t, but what will change is the competition. Many refuse to call this a competition, but I don’t see how it’s not. I get the sense that Grant also sees that aspect as irrelevant, and I can’t blame him. He’s a very talented guy who tinkers with a lot of stuff. He’ll just move on, come time to retire Flash. I find it a little harder to phrase myself like that, but I’d like to think I could move on too.

The trouble is that I love Flash so much. And the thought of it being obsolete makes me scared. Not of tomorrow, but maybe in a few years I’m unable to rely on ActionScript as my primary livelihood. Grant wrote “I completely lack empathy for people who get so emotional about technology”. I admit to being emotional, both because of my love for Flash and that scary fact that I don’t really know anything else. So I do understand that people get emotional over technology, it’s OK to me. But I will refrain from being emotional when discussing it.

In the end, I have realized that I need to broaden my horizon. But part of what scares me the most about having to leave ActionScript for special occations is the alternative for doing websites. I absolutely loathe JavaScript. Working with AS has probably spoiled me a bit, because as a front end web technology it has matured beyond what many could imagine only 5 years ago. What I see is that Flash developers in general tend to move towards even stricter languages an development frameworks when they decide to get another basket for their eggs. Not many “downgrade” to doing front end development with JavaScript and PHP, simply because of the dynamic nature of these languages.

During FOTB I was fortunate to have a conversation with Richard Lord. He’s really a marvellous man. He can work productively in 14 different languages and he’s taught himself another 20 just for fun and out of interest. He told me his favourite language is C#, but he has a special place in his heart for ActionScript because of the immediacy of it. I guess he shares that opinion on ActionScript with many of his peers in the community, at least with me.

Richard is really the kind of inspiration I need. I cannot imagine teaching myself 34 programming languages, but at least I will pick one more for now and do it properly. I believe that once you learn to differentiate two languages, learning the third will be easier than the second. So I picked Objective C for doing iPhone apps and I’m working my way through this book at the moment. It’s totally different and not much fun yet, but I’ll get there. But it was a hard process, deciding to do this. It wasn’t an urge that drove me, it was a need. So please bear with me if I get a little emotional from time to time. But I won’t flame your blog comments.

The Old Ship Hotel bar filled to the limit with beer-loving flash developers

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who ran and attended Flash On The Beach ’08 in Brighton. I had a great time! Here’s a photo I wanted to share. It’s from the Old Ship Hotel bar tuesday night after The Honey Club ran out of beer in just one hour. It was taken with my camera phone, so please excuse the quality.

After the conference I got to kill a few hours in London, so I went to Hamleys to buy the mandatory travel gift for my son. And man do they have some fascinating stuff there. This is a 23 carat gold plated model of a Mercedes SLK which was explicitly stated “Not for sale”. Check it out:

I checked the FOTB site about a week ago and it seems I might have misunderstood the message there about ticket sales not being open. Or maybe tickets were in fact not yet for sale at that point. Either way, those tickets must have been ripped away pretty fast and here I am without one. Actually I’m two tickets short because there are two of us who wanted to be there from my agency.

If anyone has a couple of tickets to spare please let me know because I’m buying! (as you can see from the tags to this post…)