As the U.S. economy struggles to emerge from a deep recession, neither Adobe nor many of those who employ its software are willing to admit that it is over for Flash. Apple announced it would not be supporting Flash in iPods or iPads, ever, back in April of this year, but the real kicker came in June when Apple announced it had sold three million iPads in just eighty days. While a smaller showing than the over twenty five million iPhones sold in 2009 alone, these iPads should be a major concern to any business running Flash based ads or running Flash based sites. Simply put, people will surf more with this device. It's got a bigger screen, and since it can't run anything but apps from Apple's store, it is not exactly going to be a work machine. So, what advertiser would want millions of people not to be able to see their banner ads?

All this has not seemed to matter to The New York Times which was running a Flash ad for The Cleveland Clinic today. Nor did the Boston Globe's Boston.com think twice before serving up a Flash video about interns and CEOs switching office space. Even my local paper, the Gloucester Times, was still running ads done in Flash, as well as well as two content areas.

Why is this happening? I feel there are a few reasons why. First, many ads were produced before and are being reused. Secondly, there is not a clear substitute for flash ads. After all, if you were selling ad space you got a single file to put up on your site. That is much easier to manage than having to deal with HTML code and separate image files. Finally, many designers have invested countless hours of their lives learning the intricacies of Action Script, which is what advanced Flash designers use to create complex effects and animations. If you have a real computer, it still looks great. However, It's just a dead blank space on millions of other devices. These guys are not telling anyone what has happened, and they sure hope that their clients won't notice. To be fair, newspapers have been adding mobile versions of their sites, but in the case of the Gloucester Times it is a spartan affair with no photos, videos or ads. Some might like it better.

Less understandable are the large ad agencies that are still pumping out whole sites done all in Flash. Many of the same reasons apply. It's about the workflow and the perceived importance of enhanced interactivity provided by Flash, but what good is that if you can't see the site? Even before all this happened with iPods, iPads, and the many other devices that can't use it, Flash was the wrong way to do a whole web site. That is because the text content of a Flash file is not searchable by Google, only the Meta title and description of the HTML page it sits in get picked up and those have character limits as far as Google is concerned. HTML 5 does solve a lot of these issues involving enhanced interactivity, but maybe those big agencies already laid everyone off who might know how to do that.

So, designers, ad agencies, and online publications all have a lot to answer for. Then there are Adobe and Apple to deal with. For it's part Adobe has invested a great deal into Flash Catalyst, which is available à la carte for $399 or as part of the $1,899 Adobe Creative Suite 5 Premium package. This product allows designers to more easily create interactive projects. I think that it is rather a moot point, unless Adobe and Apple can agree on a new file format that Flash could export to, any such projects are already digital dodos. As for Apple, the iPad itself is a bit of a disappointment. It could have been a real computer with a real processor and thus one hell of a portable graphics tool, with a pressure sensitive pen. Artists could have drawn and painted with it. Photographers could have edited images with it, on the fly and in the field. It could have been a sort of bastard child of the Mini and the Airbook. Instead, it's an oversized iTouch.