Flash is a bad deal technically. It is the most straightforward solution for the kind of things you describe which cements its place for a while just by itself, but you should see some reasons for it to die.<p>It's a proprietary blob that Adobe controls. They can and have dropped support for non-conventional platforms in the past. You can't see what the Flash Player is doing. Adobe can at their leisure impose any kind of crazy restrictions on Flash content (because they control the Flash Player, which is required to watch Flash content, and its terms of distribution).<p>Flash is an ugly marr upon the otherwise open standards needed for a rich web experience, because its fate is completely controlled by Adobe's interests. Adobe has far too much ownership for the kind of reach Flash has, it is dangerous and should depart.<p>Flash Player itself is a behemoth and a hog. It spins up CPUs to full power without any need and in so doing causes heating issues, battery-life issues, and other bad things. It is inefficient and sad and not good. You should hope it dies so that you can actually watch full-screen video on non-Windows or non-x86 platforms at more than 15 FPS.<p>Flash is not like After Effects; AE sits on one side of the production process and its results play on regular cinema projectors, DVDs, and many other formats, including open, non-proprietary formats (anything that can save and playback video, including hard disks).<p>When you make something in Flash, you impose Flash Player upon all of its potential consumers (ignoring Gnash and others because they can't play very much). They have no choice but to allow the non-free Adobe blob on their machine if they want to consume your content. This is bad.<p>Flash is bad all around in the long-term. It's a convenient tool for designers to get the effects clients want, which is why it pervades so deeply, and I agree that Flash will stay in the game until a better tool emerges (HTML5 advocates, this means you should be working on an HTML5 IDE that will replace the Flash IDE and provide an easy transition path for current Flash users), but Flash is not a good thing. It needs to die.