The Future of Flash - a talk by Seb Lee-Delise

Today I attended a talk organised by the Digital Media students at the University of Brighton, presented by Seb Lee-Delise, a Flash/Javascript/Interactivity guru.

Seb Lee-Delise inspiring his audience to keep on learning

For a considered opinion on the demise of Flash and the rise of HTML5 read this post by Adam Yeats (who co-organised the talk today).

Seb was a highly engaging speaker, taking us through the highs and lows of Flash over the last 10 years. He demonstrated the demand for Flash and actionscript coders (15 times LESS than HTML and javascript programmers at the moment) with stats from real job listings. I particularly liked the way Seb used his tweet stream to engage with his audience, responding to the tweets and identifying the tweet authors in the room. 

So, what is the future of Flash? Is it dead? No, according to Seb, it's not dead. Tomorrow somebody could write the next in-browser multiplayer game to replace World of Warcraft using Flash and suddenly demand could change completely. On the other hand, maybe they won't, and Flash will fade away, left only for specialist applications where video is involved and it really is the best solution. We're in flux. We just don't know what's around the corner. And that links to Seb's leaving remarks - as illustrated in the photo above. We can't stand still, Flash one day, HTML5 the next, who knows what tomorrow! Love learning and experiment and it will be an exciting ride.