As some may have heard already, Adobe, the current owners of Flash software, have decided to stop support for Flash in 2020. Browsers have already started to stop supporting of Flash. Microsoft have said that’ll stop Flash support for Edge and Internet Explorer in 2019, with ‘full removal’ from Windows in 2020. Google and Mozilla will phase it out in the next few years.. Apple are just idiots so we won’t talk about them.. What does this mean for projects like this which use Flash? Bugger all. When Adobe brought Flash from Macromedia, there has been a number of good things they did, but a large number of bad things.. alot of limited and bad support and mismanagement.. the full software name of ‘Shockwave Flash’ was cut into two parts.. Shockwave was the ‘Desktop’ bit (at one point called Macromedia Projector) and ‘Flash’ was the online web-access version. SWF, though, would still ‘Shockwave Flash Files’ (or Shockwave Files). Adobe and partners have mis-managed the flash plug-ins for browsers and make getting the desktop projectors even harder to get hold of.
SWF will still be accessible and useable for quite some time. I see no problems on that front. either via Flash directly or third party programs (I greatly recommend Northcode SWF Studio), SWF files can be compiled with the Project build in to make windows binary EXE files. That has always been an option. Since adobe make such a hash about even explaining stuff, this doesn’t say if AIR files will end support. IF not, then the possible Android APK versions of my games are also still valid. While i don’t use Macs or Linux run stuff, I do keep an eye out for compilers that compile swf with projectors for other Executable file types..
Of course, when Adobe decided to be stupid and do all this ‘cloud’ stuff where you don’t own the software in any way, you just keep paying each month to access it or be damned, i could tell the way Flash was going..
So.. No worries here ^_^
