why so tedious adobe?

Adobe's flash player for mobiles has lost the support of the industry, Adobe themselves have decided to abandon development after the next version.

Thankfully for me that doesn't make much of a difference because the flash games i work on get exported as AIR apps (for android atleast) am not too concerned about the other platforms right now.

Flash on the desktop however is here to stay.. for a while anyway. There are fringe groups and various anti flash movements that keep cropping up now and again.. extolling the virtues of HTML5 and how it can replace flash .. but most serious rich media web creatives know that flash is not going to go out without a fight on this platform.

It doesn't help that after all these years Adobe still hasn't simplified the flash plugin update procedure.. infact its actually gotten even more tedious since they switched to the AIR based installer. note the screenshots below:

when an update is available, this is what pops up first:

then when you click "install" you go to this

most people assume that its installing now.. especially since it usually takes a good 3-4minutes on even the fastest machines. whats actually happening is that its downloading and extracting installation files.. after which you get this

unfortunately most people like me arnt going to sit and watch one progress bar crawl by, so we start working in another app or browser or something.. and when we do notice this screen we.. or atleast i absentmindedly almost click the "quit" button, assuming theat the process has finished. of course its not even started yet. You have to tick off that License Agreement to enable the real "install" button.. and then you get this

takes another few minutes to get done.

heres what i propose Adobe, just give us one screen that looks like this

and clicking the "install" button - downloads, extracts and installs all in one go..
and you see this

please, please, please.


off topic note: for those web designers like me who need a WYSIWYG editor to design anything.. and would like to try their hand at HTML5, try Adobe Edge its quite good(and free for now). Its a lot like working with flash when we used to do stuff in AS2 with timeline based events and actions..


am currently using it to build a html5 version of the Flip Site