As a man with a good social sensitivity, i`m not interested to take sides when two giant incorporation are fighting. I will never feel any sort of an emotional sympathy with any corporation,especially when we are talking about two entities that work as much as possible against the principles of open source (apple is the best at it).

When people started talking about HTML 5 and the huge success of the iPhone and ipPad they talked about the end of flash as platform for creating web apps. Then a war was announced between the two when apple decided not to include support for flash in its new products.

Here are some examples of the war. Even from one of the most impressive flash people Lee Brimlow.

I (yes the mini version of a man) do not wish to tag along to any burial parade, but i must say that flash is facing indeed a great challenges.

first: one of the most popular uses of flash is video on the net (YouTube is the most important example for that). According to many articles on the net HTML 5 is able to present video in a more integral way in a web page. That is important since flash has issues with search engines and you need a plugin to play it.

Second,flash is used to make animation in web pages. Well today css3 and Jquery let you create animations and even css 3. Granted, they cannot make complex animations as flash but most web pages do not use very complex animations. And again, with HTML 5 and jquery you do not need a plugin and you have no issues with search engines.

The thirst point is that of the search engines. On the one hand flash file are like a closed box and so it will look the same on any platform, On the other hand,because they are a closed box they are not that accessible to search engines. Yes you can work around it in several ways but it is tedious.

Recently i had an experience with flash that started good but left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

i have played a bit with flash builder 4 and flash catalyst. My first reaction was: that is amazing, so easy and make rapid development easy.

Flash builder 4 let you communicate easly with the database by using zendAMF. and writing code itself is a much better experience.

Flash catalyst make the design process so much better. you can create components easily from a Photoshop or illustrator file. so you can turn a graphic file into a workable flash builder file very fast and very easy.

But after these first reactions i stayed with a bad taste. why?

Why create three different software instead of improving flash itself? Why not improve the code writing ability within flash and make it connect with the database like in builder?Why create flash builder to make things that flash itself need? Why not let flash convert graphics to components? (obviously i talk about the software here and not the technology).

It seem like financial consideration made those decisions,and this take advantage of the users. Another thing is: Why use flash and not the other two software?

To close this short opinion, i do not know if flash is dying or not but it is surly in a cross road. Things will be interesting in the next few years.