We spoke to Danny Winokur, VP and GM, Platform, Adobe Inc. a while ago. (Edit: Post this insightful interaction, there were a couple of developments we've been closely following. Among them, Adobe Flash support would cease from Jelly Bean beginning August 15. The rationale behind these decisions have been explained in the conversation below.)

Realizing the growing presence of HTML5 in the web, Adobe has pulled back on its Flash development slightly. Rather than focussing on developing Flash for multiple platforms, Adobe is trying to better integrate Flash with desktop web browsers. Flash development though cannot be ignored completely in favour of HTML5, as there still are a few things that can be done better and faster with Flash. However, two areas where Flash is seeing an increased adoption is in the areas of advanced gaming and premium video. Many Chinese gaming companies have invested heavily to create Flash-based games that run inside browsers, and these games are just as stunning in terms of their visual quality and graphics as a native game on a console like the XBox.

At Max 2011, we had communicated that we were focusing from an interactive and platform perspective around both Flash and HTML5, and enabling choice for the developer-designer work flow. In the time that followed, we've made a number of changes as a follow up on that. We announced the acquisition of Nitobi and TypeKit and brought them to the Adobe portfolio. We made some changes on what we were doing on Flash, pulled back from the focus we had on the Flash player on devices. This was to enable us to focus instead on the in-browser experience with the PC and the application experience on mobile devices using AIR as the packaging technology. Also, from a future investment perspective, we also have really begun to focus our innovation with Flash around two particular areas that we believe Flash has the greatest opportunity to innovate out ahead of the natural pace of the browser and the HTML ecosystem. These are in the areas of advanced gaming and premium video!

So, those are the two innovation themes in which we are continuing to invest with Flash because we believe that there are a number of reasons why with even our best efforts and the best efforts of the rest of the web community and the browser vendors, it is going to naturally take a quite a while before HTML5 and associated technologies are able to do all that can be done with Flash. So we are focusing Flash more narrowly than we were in the past, on specific opportunities and at the same time we are working very aggressively with HTML5 across a number of different areas in order to make it the richest possible and most capable top form for both developers and designers.

For all kind of other general purpose use cases, Flash used to be the only way to do things. Now HTML5 is able to do some of these tasks just as well. However, there is still a small gap left to polish in order to finish up and so we're seeking to really accelerate that last little bit of work across many different areas in HTML5 to really make it as rich, expressive and capable as possible and also to make sure that there is world class tooling, and services integrations capabilities explored as well. So, we've been doing that across a number of fronts. We have been doing it at the base platform level, meaning the run time itself (WebKit) and also to standards of W3C. We have invested significant engineering resources into both of those open efforts: W3C and associate standards into the web project and we have been focusing on three themes of our work and our standards and our WebKit to really enhance the core platform itself. One of those is around expressivity, making the web able to as expressive as the imagination of the designer which is something that really goes into the core competence that we as a company have throughout our history and we wanted to bring that to the web and contribute that to the web community.

We obviously are continuing to drive forth our investments in PhoneGap which we have opened source through the Apache foundation, (now called Apache Cordova). We continue to invest significantly to improve those tools. We’ve also been doing some interesting work around some JavaScript frameworks that we think are quite promising. One of them is the CreateJS framework. This helps bridge the gap between the HTML5 and Flash communities. CreateJS provides a Flash-like set of interface that allows traditional designers, who are comfortable with Flash Pro, to target the HTML5 browser runtime instead of the Flash player runtime using familiar tools and animation capabilities that they already have in Flash Pro. In fact, with the tool kit that we have introduced for Create JS and CS6 with Flash Pro, you are already familiar with and can explicitly target the browser and write little snippets of JavaScript code in Flash Pro. As expected, we're continuing to invest in Flex at the framework level more on the Flash side than on the HTML5 side. And we're doing that through Apache similar to PhoneGap. It’s open source and we're continuing to work in the community and driving private and open source contributions to Flex.

Coming to tooling, which is the HTML side, we're doing a number of things. We obviously have continued to invest and brought further innovations into Dreamweaver CS6. Things such as Fluid grid layouts and other capabilities that are kind of equipped with responsive design, integration or application packaging – PhoneGap in particular support for, the new PhoneGap build service which makes it very easy to have application packaging from multiple different mobile target which occurred in the cloud. So you don’t have to set up all the different tool chains on your local machine and go through that process. We invest there. We have seen that Dreamweaver continues to be the leading product and very well positioned for a class of web developers who are really sort of producers who prefer a complete all in one tool. It lets them do much of all what they want to do in the all in context of that single Dreamweaver tool.

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