I’m a fan of both Apple and Adobe, which puts me in rather an odd place at times. Apple makes the hardware and operating systems I like best. Adobe makes some software that I can’t live without. Up until now, a lot of what I create with Adobe Captivate won’t play on the iPhone and iPad, since Apple sees HTML5 as the future and doesn’t support Flash on its mobile devices. 1
Following Microsoft’s recent announcement that Internet Explorer 10 will not support plugins (including Flash) when running in its new Metro style, opting, as Apple has done, to embrace HTML5 as the future, the question becomes, where does Adobe fit into all of this?
I’ve long thought that the way forward for Adobe is to retool its apps to support HTML5 output. With respect to Adobe Captivate–the tool I use most in my work–I’m happy to say they’ve made substantial strides in this direction. For the past few weeks, I’ve been beta-testing Adobe’s Captivate-to-HTML5 converter. And the initial testing has been so promising that Adobe is now offering it on Adobe Labs so it can reach a wider testing audience. Is it perfect? Of course not. But I do like it and I’m very happy that Adobe is heading this direction, because I like building things in Adobe Captivate and Flash Professional.
[Updates:]
The Adobe Captivate Blog has a post about the HTML 5 converter and some samples of converted projects.
Notes:
- I feel that Apple has both good and bad reasons for not supporting Flash, but that’s a topic for another post, and probably one that will never get written, as it has become something of a moot point. ↩
Hi James,
i just talked yesterday to an PGi (Premiere Global) associate. Adobe is on the run for making their tools HTML5-ready. There is even a Adobe Connect version in the pipeline.
Kind regards
Marc