Steve Jobs:
"Hey, remember when I said that netbooks aren't good at anything and that they're just cheap laptops?

Well... I fixed the cheap part!"

Talk to me again in 5 years when Flash is dead. That's the only way to settle this debate. Honestly, until then, all these hostile flame wars are just speculative pissing contests.

Hope everyone becomes standards-compliant by then.

For those who want to live a little more dangerously, you should try Shenzhen, right beside Hong Kong. It's the new Akihabara and all the new bleeding edge mix & match gadgets the rest of the world hasn't seen before is there. It's now also the electronics manufacturing hub of the world since Everything now's made in China :)

Check these sites out for some of the goodies:
http://shanzai.com
http://micgadget.com
One of the most interesting non-knockoff gadgets to come out of there last month is the Apple Peel, a smart jacket you can slip over an iPod touch that turns it into an iPhone.

Not everything over there is fake knockoffs and Shenzhen China's Shanzhai garage hardware hacking & remixing culture is very interesting.

You should also check out the blog of Andrew "bunnie" Huang, said to be the first guy outside Microsoft to hack the X-Box & wrote the book on it. He co-founded & created the Chumby (open source hackable hardware gadget) and his adventures in Shenzhen are pretty cool.

Stop repeating that FUD troll statement. Flash was made precisely for touchscreen kiosks from the outset back in the 90s. You're talking about hover events and Flash is no less friendly than any other language out there (Like Javascript for hover dropdown menus).

Moreover, Flash 10.1 now supports native multitouch & gesture recognition (pinch, zoom, etc), which is more than you can say for HTML5/Javascript w/ o the aid of 3rd party libraries.

Thanks.

No. The main problem with Flash Lite was that it was always 1 or 2 generations behind the desktop version and it was a real headache as this left Flash Lite crippled in functionality (Flash Lite 1.x had no arrays - frikken arrays man! wtf?, Flash Lite 2.x had no cacheAsBitmap which would speed up performance, etc) and because of the different implementations, this left the mobile landscape very fragmented, and it was a real headache. I still get a lot of trauma flashbacks when I think of Flash Lite 1.x

Now, since the desktop and mobile versions of Flash are essentially the same, this is no longer as bad a problem.

As I mentioned before, you'd get optimal performance results on native code, but depending on the needs of your App, Flash should be enough. The Eco Zoo, a really cute and impressive full-3D Flash site with N64-level polygon graphics (built by Masayuki Kido aka ROXIK on his custom Sharikura 3D Engine) runs pretty fast on the Google Nexus One (and this is surprising because it wasn't targeted at mobile at all! See what real optimization can accomplish? Those Japanese coders are really crazy good!). This videoblog review by Thibault Imbault will show you actual Flash 10.1 performance on the Nexus One.

Also, you mentioned you're doing this in the context of K-12. You can't go wrong with Flash then as it's the de facto standard for building multimedi animated and interactive e-learning content.

Learn Flash/Actionscript3/Adobe AIR. It will simply run everywhere. (cue Flash vs HTML5 flame war. off-topic, IE9 ain't coming to XP so screw that -- I'm sick of all the "this will only work on Safari" or "this will only work on Chrome" HTML5 demos. As someone who actually builds stuff for clients instead of just blogging about these technologies, this is a dealbreaker and ***FORWARD*** compatibility headache as Windows XP will never go away for the near future. The original reason I learned Flash coding was because of the bloody headache of cross-browser compatibility.)

Back on topic, Flash is coming to every single smartphone platform (and even TV set top boxes). 19 of the top 20 mobile manufacturers are already part of the consortium Adobe Open Screen Project and they're working to get Flash running on their respected platforms. Only Steve Jobs didn't sign up for whatever his reasons. Flash is now out on Android, Symbian, Maemo, coming to WinMo 7 (Flash Lite is already out on older versions of WinMo), Blackberry & Palm, definitely on Meego (Nokia Maemo + Intel Moblin).

Flash CS5 can now be used to make native iPhone apps legally again as per App Store policies (the process is the same as making an Adobe AIR app). Here's a refresher on exporting your AIR project into iOS: Packager for iPhone Refresher.

There's some surprising current statistics to fix one's perspective on the death of Flash by the iOS gadget crowd. Currently 97% of the internet is Flash capable and iOS only has 1.1% share. Of course, the iOS share will increase as more customers buy them, but think of that when building stuff with the widest reach possible. Also, currently, devs seem to be monetizing the most on iOS, but the App store is now *so* *so* *so* saturated that it's hard for a new app to get noticed amidst all the noise.

Flash 10.1 is already out on Android Froyo (2.2) and AIR for Android is currently in public beta and should come out soon http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/ so Flash is already good to go if you want to target Android.

Another thing to consider is that Android market share has now overtaken iOS and since there's not enough decent content on the Android and Adobe AIR marketplaces compared to the Apple App Store, if you build a good app on any of those platforms, it's easier to pull in a user base since there isn't much competition yet.

Your Flash apps would run on Symbian^3 devices which are already out (N8, C3, etc) as they have all Flash Lite 4.0 (A slightly stripped down version of Flash 10 which already runs AVM2 AS3 swfs). In fact, Nokia just launched the $10million Calling All Innovators N8 app contest and Flash is one of the formats you can enter in.

Not only will your apps run on mobile devices if you build 'em in AIR, they will also run on Desktop Linux, Mac & Windows and that is the biggest plus for me. For complaints about the cost of Adobe tools, you can build SWFs and AIR apps from completely Open Source tools. The Flex SDK is FOSS and you can build apps just with your .AS3 sourcecode + a command line just like with the JDK for Java (or pick any appropriate IDE of your choice to make your life easier). Oh, btw, the commercial Flash Builder is free for students & teachers + developers who're hit by the economic crisis and are currently unemployed -> apply here for license.

Of course, please don't forget to *optimize* *optimize* *optimize*. Flash is not a slow platform. The terrible content you see out there is due to abusive content creators who don't know how to optimize for CPU, memory & bandwidth and especially for mobile.

Of course learning Native Android or iPhone dev will give you the best understanding and performance for the Platforms you're targeting, but if you're short on time & resources and need to deploy on multiple platforms, this is the way to go.

Well, better than having a sole impostor owning your name, no?

Y'know, one thing to come of this is that it's probably a good idea to create accounts in social media/networking sites even if you'll never use them just to "reserve" your identity and to deter impersonators a bit, kinda like reserving domain names before cybersquatters bag them. Use a separate "throwaway" email account for them.

That way, if someone creates a fake account in your name, if people see that there's more than one account which has your name, it will give them cause to suspect that one of them is fake, making them more wary against fake accounts.

mod parent up.

Uh. What are you talking about? Yes they do. May I redirect you to the $10 and below section of the games sold at Steam? There's a ton of gems in there.

May I also redirect you to the Mega-Love Indie Bundles: which pack in these excellent indie casual games: Aaaaa! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Brainpipe, Captain Forever, Cogs, Saira, Space Giraffe or And Yet It Moves, Auditorium, Aztaka, Eufloria, Machinarium & Osmos for $19.99 or all 12 games for $29.99?

Finally, check Steam Game Sales which lists all the recent promos/sales/discounts on Steam, Direct2Drive, EA & Impulse, updated daily. Look! Stuff's up to 85% off right now!

Plants vs. Zombies? Machinarium? Canabalt? Bookworm? Desktop Tower Defense? Portal 2D? All these games kick ass. Don't knock the genre because of the wannabe-clone-"me too" knockoff garbage. There's been more innovation in the casual gaming scene than there's been in the big-budget 3D hardcore gamer scene this past decade.

Actually it's the big game development studios that have been destroying the game development industry. Because there's so much risk involved with their formulae which requires millions and millions of dollars to develop a title, they keep sticking to old formulae and pump out crap like Madden NFL games year after year to avert "risk".

The rise of casual games has brought about a new indie gamedev golden age. It's really nice knowing that 3-5 guys can pump out really fun games loved by many players just like back in the 80s on the PC.

In general, that is what has been plaguing the entire gaming industry since the late 90s: graphics over gameplay. That being said, the rise of casual games these past few years has been a welcome change over shiny 3D graphics with dull repetitive gameplay formulae.

I second that with Flash. Being an intergrated hybrid illustration/animation tool, it'd be the easiest to teach fine arts students with.

You can easily make a lot of games just relying on "gotoAndStop();", "gotoAndPlay();" and just button click events for code

Why do most slashdot geeks always think "3D" when thinking game development these days? Most of the fun casual games available today are in 2d.

Plus, you don't have to do any coding to do animation and sprite objects in Flash. There's a reason there's so many amateur Flash games on the web today. It's the friendliest environment for non-coder art-oriented people.

wtf... Am I in the right website here? Is this Slashdot? Where's the rabid Flash bashing? It's like I stepped into a bizarro parallel universe!

Testing for slower systems & lower CPU has become a big problem w/ us right now, especially since access to older "obsolete" machines is very very difficult now.

How do you guys do this? I mean with the only off the shelf PCs available running over 1GHz these days, how do you test for a 200-500MHz platform these days? Personally, I used nested VMs running a la Russian Dolls or matrix within a matrix within a matrix for you geeks who don't know what a VMs are. I was running Puppy Linux & DamnSmallLinux inside Ubuntu inside WinXP

Virtualbox is very idiot friendly compared to VMWare and rockses sockses :)