Adobe has long played a leadership role in advancing interactivity and creative content – from video, to games and more – on the web.
But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.
Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
The full excerpt of this announcement is available here – https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html
If you are an Adobe customer creating eLearning content, here is a quick guide to understanding what it means for you:
– Will Flash content stop working on our content in production now?
While Adobe has announced the end-of-life of Flash, the distribution of the Flash Player will only end in 3 years from now. This date is contingent to our browser technology partners supporting it.
– Are eLearning users adopting HTML5?
67% of Adobe Captivate Users have tried the HTML5 format both for mobile and desktop browsers. The adoption curve has grown from a 15% to 67% in the past 3 years.
How can you migrate your existing content to HTML5?
You can migrate your existing content using Adobe Captivate using your existing project (.cptx) files . You can choose HTML5 as the output format and re-publish them to HTML5, which would work for both desktop and mobile browsers. This will work across previous product versions that have support for HTML5 output.
If you have any queries or concerns, do write to us at Captivatehelp@adobe.com
Based on a discussion with one of my befriended ACP’s, I just wanted to add that often the Flash application itself (formerly Flash Builder, now labeled Animate CC) is confused with the Flash Player. It is the player for which EOL is announcec, whereas the application continues to deliver most of all games, animations on the web. Moreover Adobe also has the AIR run technology. It is used on mobile Connect. Flash will ‘never’ be dead, only the Flash player.
Yes, thank you Akshay. I am getting ready to start a project involving the creation of six e-learning courses. Seeing as how the courses they created had a shelf-life of about seven years, I really need to include this in the output settings as part of the design document.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the heads up, Akshay. Your numbers about 67% havig ‘tried’ HTML5 are relevant, but a lot of work has to be involved in converting existing SWF-courses to HTML5, especially if they were created with older versions of Captivate. I really hope the learing departments will create a conversion plan ASAP, 2020 is not that far away 🙂
Lieve,
There is SO much output out there in Flash. 2020 will be here before we know it. I agree that conversion plans are an urgency! On the bright side, it could mean some additional opportunities for contract e-learning developers and companies!
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