If someone 3 months ago would have said to me, do you see any reason why you would stop devoting so much time to Flash/Flex in the next year. I would have said not a chance. I love interactive content on the web and more specifically interactive 3D within a browser. I have long history with AS3 and the only other “competitors” (Silverlight and HTML5)  aren’t capable of what I would need them to do.

My world got turned upside down the day I was shown the Unity Web Player. I froze, my jaw dropped, this was amazing. I had seen demos of Unity before in presentations about iPhone development, but this was different, this was in a browser. Most importantly it meant I could program full 3D in C# for the web.  So I went back to my original list of reasons why I was not interested in Unity the first time I saw it. Firstly it was really for iPhone and Wii development at the time, but now it’s also for the web.  The next reason being, I didn’t own a Mac. After doing some reading I realized that sure enough the Unity guys have dealt with that, the editor was now available for Windows. My last reason was price, but since this tool is so great I could deal with the price. In theory I would be in, but there was one other reason that hadn’t occurred to me. What about the thousands of hours I’ve put into AS3 development. Separation anxiety, going from a place where I know so much, to a place where I know nothing.

After a week of thought on the topic, I decided that Unity3D development was what I had to do. This was what I was waiting for, it just didn’t come in the form of a new Flash Player release. It has been roughly a month since the shift in my spare time over to Unity3D and I couldn’t be happier, the power and the opportunities are incredible.

So this is why there has been a little drought in examples on this blog, Unity3D has stolen my free time. This does not mean nothing new is coming, I’m actually finishing up some JigLibFlash stuff as I write this (so clearly Unity3D hasn’t stole all my free time). I am also hoping in the coming months that I will have some Unity3D examples to put up on this blog.

If you haven’t already done so please go check out Unity3D now.

I have one final comment and it is for Adobe: I know your plan is to unify the mobile player with the web player. In doing this you are slowing down the advancement of the web player to a point that by the time you have them ready to unify, there might not be anything left to unify.