Adobe Flash is dead. On Monday, Adobe Systems renamed Adobe Flash Professional to Adobe Animate in its commitment to "evolve to support multiple standards," especially with HTML5 and developing more Flash capabilities like animated graphics, premium video and refined typography.
Wired, in its report, said that with Adobe Animate launched early next year, new features will be introduced like new vector art brushes, easy access to high-quality stock art, and the ability to rotate the canvas 360 degrees from any pivot point.
The report added that associating the new name, Adobe Animate, to the development tool has something to do with the negative associations that surround the brand and that Adobe has "to make room for the future."
"They [Adobe Systems] understand that there's a slow transition to HTML5 going on," said Forrester research principal analyst Jeffrey Hammonds. "At some point you have to embrace the change. The rebranding is a visible sign of that, but the internal focus on supporting technologies like HTML5 has been going on a while."
CNet, on the other hand, points out that while there are good reasons to eliminate Adobe Flash including browser makers' comments of it being a top sore spot for security, performance and shorter battery life, it will certainly take years to transition away from a widely used tool as Flash and pronouncing it dead, at this time, may be yet too premature.
"There are hundreds of thousands of developers and designers that continue to use Flash, which means the technology will be there for some time," said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "That HTML5 is not yet up to every capability of Flash is clearly a factor."
CNet, in its report, highlighted that although Flash has declined in usage, it is certainly not dead. Of the 482,000 websites the HTTP Archive monitors, 21 percent still uses Flash as of mid-November.
Adobe Flash started becoming popular in the late 1990's among browser makers and programmers for its interactivity and design. However, in 2009 through 2010, just when Adobe started bringing Flash Player to smartphones, Steve Jobs eliminated it from iPhones. In 2011, Adobe started cancelling Adobe Flash from mobile devices as new web standards like the HTML5 have emerged. The years after that saw Google including YouTube, Microsoft and Netflix added copy-protection technology such that Flash is not anymore necessitated.
