My conclusion is rooted in experience being a web developer for the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. First project handed to me was the Great Lakes Water Level Dashboard, which after some research earlier this year, was fairly quickly developed using Adobe Flex, and had an initial launch in May. That version is here. Over the past month, only after much brainstorming since June and ~recent developments, I have drafted an HTML5 version which works pretty nicely on my iPad and I believe most modern desktop browsers. It resides here.
Listing what I was able to emulate from the Flash version:
- Buttons, checkboxes and fields have been around for a while, so that's nothing noteworthy.
- Sliders... they work fine on a desktop browser, not on the touch pad so much
- Closeable pop up info windows, powered by jQuery, pretty simple.
- Vertically oriented text does not show up in IE quite well.
- Stacking charts: kind of had to roughly emulate the Flex vGroup behavior in a non-flexible manner...
- Snapshot with dialog: a cross-browser compatible version seems elusive.
- Fullscreen mode: inadequate for now... and user friendly cross browser zoom buttons aren't really on the table. (searching for more recent queries is resulting in nothing...)
- Color options for series and chart/plot/graph backgrounds. I'll get to them eventually.
So what am I saying: I have developed the same product for two different platforms - Flash and HTML 5 with varying results. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Flash is not going away.
