Flash used to be the hallmark of ubiquity at a time. With Adobe’s strong backing and the universal acceptance of the flash player, developers could develop applications/games/animations once and deploy on all browsers, all platforms . But recently, the pervasiveness of flash technology was challenged by Steve Job’s bizarre decisions for barring flash from apple mobile platforms.

This was a disappointing moment for the huge developer-base across the world which swore by Adobe technologies. Plus, these decisions were seen by many as parts of crooked business strategies and blogs around the globe overflowed with discussions on a  multitude of obscure implications  and consequences.

While on one hand, several html purists, and a new generation of developers who take  pride in html5 and css3 technologies which provide rich multimedia functionality, hardware acceleration and vector graphics support saw this as an oppertunity and speculations about whether in future flash would be superseded by these open source technologies began to float around all over the websphere. But a different group of innovative programmers took this opportunity to an all new level . Enters smokescreen.

Smokescreen is a revolutionary innovation – an implementation of the open source swf specification in javascript ! Bizarre as it may seem … the developers at smokescreen have made possible something that on one hand tears through the draconian restrictions of apple platforms and on the other hand shows the light of the day to flash evangelists who leave no opportunity to point out the flaws and weaknesses in javascript. It is indeed an exemplary approach toward unification of technologies.Quoting from  the about page of smokescreen website :

Many people still want to use their existing Adobe tools for developing ads, and retooling to support a single platform seems silly.  As an ad network, we believe that dynamic, interactive ads are much more fun than boring static ads and thus, we were faced with two options:  live in a dark, desolate world of boring mobile ads or do something about it.

SO WE DID IT! AND NOW YOU’RE HERE – WELCOME!

The smokescreen website shows some very promising demos. Although the technology is not a complete replacement to the flash browser plugin because the JavaScript implementation is inherently slower than the Adobe plugin … but still it is an excellent fall-back for the platforms where flash is not supported. Although the project is in nascent stages currently, the future is promising and we can actually expect Adobe to support (maybe acquire ? ) the team . Lets wait for the best .