Can I use flash without any doubt of it being obsolete? I am not very sure about Adobe’s stand on flash platform. What if Adobe abandons flash and declares that they are going for web standards.
It’s really reassuring to see BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook OS uses Adobe AIR extensively. AIR seems to be a core part woven into their system. The WebWorks SDK which allows devs to write apps in JS really runs it using AIR (awesome!). So that’s making me to re-evaluate my thought on flash as a platform. BB has both flash player and AIR. (Now I am a fan of BlackBerry :D)
I know that the VM and the compiler are free and open source. So what parts exactly are closed? I am okay with HTML/CSS/JS (here after referred as web standards) advancing. I am of the opinion that both can co-exist. I still finds it developing games with web standards very dumb, mainly because of tooling. Nothing replaces Adobe Flash Professional when it comes to game development.
Also, we could develop apps and games for iOS using AIR without any performance penalty right?
Search engines can index text contents within flash, so the argument of SEO is irrelevant, I guess. But it limits the audience. No Apple and Android uses.
Finally, how good is flash from a career stand point? There is opportunity in gaming industry, and may be some enterprise maintaining flex projects. Other than that, where do we see it getting used?
It would be great to see ActionScript 3.0 running on the server side. Okay we have projects like redtamarin, but it still seems very rudimentary, no DB access. (However I am okay with using Java technology stack for the server, like Groovy & Grails).
I have to say that even with HTML5 and the newer web standards, it is really painful to work with browsers. I think the browser incompatibility will never go away.
I <3 Flash 
