Shock horror Flash doesn't work on the iPhone or the "magical" iPad. Steve Jobs has declared its death, and decreed that it's not worthy of inclusion in Apple's market leading mobile platform. Dropping Flash in favour of HTML5 is akin to replacing floppy drives with CD-ROMS we are told. You don't need it, you will be better off without it, it's time to stop living in the past and embrace the future. Naturally Adobe (the makers of Flash) aren't too happy about having the door slammed in their face. Adobe tried launching a campaign online but were forced to accept they have lost the battle. However the war is only just heating up; Google's latest phones support both HTML5 & Flash.

The controversy has been fodder for bloggers, sparked flame wars between fans, and led to an awful lot of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt) being spread online. This puts many of us in the industry in an odd position. For years Apple and Adobe have been the pillars of the creative industries. As developers and designers we have a love hate relationship with both companies. Designers need photoshop to get their work done, yet vent about it online. Developers love apple hardware, but have a hard time accepting the App Store's restrictions on how they can write their apps.

Which side are you on?
Despite what you read online I don't see a major split in the web community between HTML5 and Flash or between iPhone and Android for that matter. On the contrary, I see lots of overlap. In our industry it pays to have multiple disciplines. Lots of the popular games for the iPhone are written by people who are also Flash game developers. The people doing the cool 3D demos in HTML5 are often the same people who pioneered 3D in Flash. Those of us working on the cutting edge do not erect walls between technologies, we tear them down.

Flash has a long history of bringing innovations to the browser: animation, fonts, audio, video, 3D, and networking to name just a few. Recently we have noted interest and momentum building behind HTML5. It's about time browsers had native support for many of the things Flash has supported for years. The 4 "modern" browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) are competing against each almost daily to take the crown as being the fastest, and most feature complete implementation. Competition is a good thing, after years of stagnation it's an exciting time to be working in the web. If you are stuck using a "legacy" browser (hint: the one with a blue e) do us all a favour and upgrade today, I promise you won't regret it.

Unfortunately outside of cutting edge Mobile web it's hard to fully utilise all the advances offered by these "modern" browsers. The elephant in the room remains every web developers pet hate; Internet Explorer with it's stubborn 50% market share. Even if Microsoft were to support full HTML5 and CSS3 in IE9 (unlikely), we won't see IE7 and IE8 disappear for years to come. Many sites are only just getting around to phasing out IE6. The key strength of Flash has always been that it's cross browser; unencumbered by the incompatibles and quirks that have plagued browsers. With penetration rates hovering close to 100% and a fast upgrade cycle driven by automatic updates it's no wonder Flash has become the de-facto standard for delivering video and rich experiences online.

So where does this leave HTML5 and CSS3?
Some features lend themselves to progressive enhancement, enabling HTML5 drag and drop file uploads or offline storage for those with capable browsers is an easy win. Using the latest CSS3 properties to render nice UIs while still degrading gracefully to support IE can be tricky, but is doable. It doesn't have to be pixel perfect, it just needs to work in older browsers. This leaves those features that you can't degrade gracefully without falling back to an alternative such as Flash. This category includes the much hyped video tag and canvas element.

Video support in HTML5 is still a bit of a minefield, there are 3 different codecs (H264, WebM, and Vorbis) that may or may not work in your browser, some with critical hardware acceleration, others lacking. In order to provide the best experience on the web and mobile you need to encode and deliver the video in multiple formats as well as providing a Flash version for those without HTML5. There are other rough edges too, such as fullscreen support; which depending your browser works differently or may not be supported at all. My advice to clients is to do what YouTube is doing and give users the choice to pick what works best for them.

This brings me to canvas element, a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. Many of the demos show it being used for amazing Flash like experiences. Unfortunately there are problems here too. when you do a lot of animation and graphics processing you are going to burn CPU. Lots of it. Technology can always be abused at the expense of your CPU, those annoying battery draining banner ads can be rendered using canvas on the iPhone too. Recently Flash player added code to throttle down processing on browser tabs that are not active. I expect a similar feature will have to be added to browsers to control canvas abuse. Then there is the legitimate concern of accessibility, while it can be a challenge to create truly accessible Flash, it is at least possible.

In conclusion
Despite all the challenges I think it's our duty to push for the adoption of the latest web standards. While I may not agree with Steve Jobs reasons for banning Flash from iOS, I'm grateful that the controversy has put the spotlight on HTML5. I take issue with the assertion that Flash is a dead technology, on the contrary I see Adobe continuing to innovate and evolve Flash for many years to come. When noise generated by all the bloggers and fanboys has died down, it will be left to us humble web designers and developers to make all these technologies work for users.

There are 2 things that you want to avoid when a user lands on your site; firstly scaring them off with too much copy, secondly not giving them enough information to enable them to use your website or even understand what you do. 

A video is a great compromise; it can explain your proposition in seconds whilst simultaneously increasing accessibility and engagement. Creating, producing and editing a professional quality video seems like a daunting task but in reality, with the right tools, it isn’t as hard as you might think.

We’re going to give you an overview of why video is a valuable asset for any site, and why we believe After Effects is the best product for the job.

The Importance of Video

Why a video? From information-lead films to arty stop motions, video allows direct, fluent and human communication. It could be shown on the landing page of your website and allow you to present your business in an instant. It can also be used to reach out from your site to create buzz around your marketing campaigns. 

Why After Effects?

Improving your video 
There are a myriad of tools that After Effects gives us. It allows us to remove all evidence of camera shakes, increase contrast, modify luminosity to bring out gorgeous colours and so much more. Visual and matting effects can also be applied to improve the look and feel you want to give to the video. Alternative video editing programmes, Premiere or Final Cut can handle most of these improvements just as well but what makes After Effects better is that it doesn’t stop there...

Tracking function, total symbiosis
We can create a multi-layer composition by integrating other videos, photos, texts or vector graphics into your video. Notice I said "integrating", beware, adding is one thing, integrating is another. Thanks to the tracking function, we can follow a point moving on the 'master' video and apply this movement to the new item we have layed on top. From this comes the impression of symbiosis, graphics follow the movement of the camera perfectly, they really feel part of the video.

The Third Dimension
After Effects now takes your video production to the third dimension. The 3D mode allow you to create a virtual camera over your composition, to allow you to change your point of view. You have complete control over this virtual camera, being able to configure the lens length, image area size, and aperture. This powerful tool makes it quick and easy to incorporate several lights with shadows and define their intensity, all of which will take your video new level of dynamism.

High Quality Manipulation 
With After Effects, time can be stretched and/or reversed. But crucially it will also smooth out the jerkiness usually associated with this sort of effect when it is applied with Final Cut or Premier. 

After Effects is integrated
After Effects works seamlessly with other Creative Suite software such as Illustrator, Photoshop (including it’s 3D layers), Flash, Premiere Pro and other QuickTime-based software. You can even import and manipulate audio files and render them in high quality in real time. It is even possible to export the composition from After Effects to Flash, to then make it interactive. Whatever the project needs, this level of integration gives you the flexibility to port your content across different software.

Fit the Web

Be versatile & be connected
After Effects contains an export module which will optimise your video for the web. With a couple of clicks you can export your film to web-friendly formats like QuickTime, AVI or MPEG-4, making it easy to put your video onto your website, blog, Youtube, Vimeo etc.

Mobile accessibility 
The latest version of After Effects integrates mobile-device authoring into its workflow and multi-device previews for most phones and PDAs. With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones, thinking about how to reach people on their mobiles is becoming a close second to reaching people on their PC's.

Video is a fantastic and popular way to reach and engage with people and any tools that help us do that better get the Codegent seal of approval!