The Future of Feathers UI

joshtynjala

EDIT: Don't miss this followup post: The Future of Feathers UI: Part 2 — Haxe and OpenFL

Flash community,

In late 2012, Adobe started generously providing me with financial support to develop my open source UI component library, Feathers UI. For the last six years, I've had the privilege of interacting with, being inspired by, and sharing my work with the Flash community. Additionally, collaborating with Daniel Sperl — the creator Starling — has been a major highlight of my career. Daniel is intelligent, kind, and one of the best developers that I've ever worked with. This time of my life will be one that I always look back on and smile.

This year, Adobe has chosen to stop funding my work on Feathers UI. As you know, Adobe will also stop updating and distributing Flash Player in 2020. Later this year, most web browsers will disable the Flash Player plugin by default. There's no specific word on the future of AIR yet, but I think we've all noticed that AIR updates have been getting smaller and smaller lately. Things are winding down in the Flash world, but it's been quite a wild ride!

Last week, I released Feathers 4.0. While I'd love to continue building new UI components and adding new features, I expect that this will be one of the final updates that Feathers receives. Without a sponsor like Adobe, I need to find different sources of income, and I won't be able to dedicate very much time to this project anymore. I hope to release at least one more update by the end of 2019 that includes the latest bug fixes, and I'll try my best to remain active in the forums.

Hire Josh!

If you'd still like to see any new features or components added to Feathers, I'm available for hire. Please visit the Bowler Hat LLC website, and submit a proposal through the contact form.

Or, if your company has invested heavily in Feathers already, and you want to keep using Feathers when you switch to a new platform, please contact me about becoming a sponsor. I'd love the chance to keep working on Feathers for years to come!

Additionally, I am also available to work on projects where you have a Flash application (especially those built with either Flex or Feathers!) that needs to be migrated to HTML/CSS/JS. Over the last year, I've started working with React and TypeScript, and I ported a large Apache Flex web application to React. This migration went really well, and you can read about my experiences on my blog:

Once again, if you'd like to hire me, please visit my company website and let me know a little bit about your project.

Thank you, community, for the years of enthusiastic support and insightful feedback. I couldn't have kept at it this long without you all, and my heart is overflowing with joy from all of the great memories.

Happy coding!

Josh Tynjala

Feathers

Jeff

Quality software, quality developer and quality person! All the best Josh!

joshtynjala

Thank you, Jeff! Your bug reports and feedback in the early days were so important to me, when things in Feathers weren't completely nailed down yet. I remember fondly those days when I would push some commits in the afternoon, and your name would pop up in my inbox within an hour or two with some thoughtful comments.

randalfien

I already migrated to Unity, but I miss the clean and simple API of your UI library! Thank you for your service 🙂

alevys

I was very happy used Feathers UI for last 5 years. It’s amazing UI lib, and Josh amazing developer! Thank you for your Great work! I will miss.

Pointless

Wow that's disappointing Adobe have decided to do that. All the best Josh. What you've achieved on Feathers is amazing.

clozertou

All the best Josh,
Please consider porting FeathersUI to Unity, You can get a huge userbase willing to pay for it.

Nilpointer

All the best for you - I am sure a talented guy like you will be nobody we have to worry about.

I hope to hear from new projects you start in the future, bringing your knowledge and experience to nowadays standards and technologies.

Daniel

Josh,
I still remember when "Foxhole", as Feathers was called at the beginning, first showed up in the Starling forum. Your Q&A thread quickly turned out to be one of the biggest and most active, and it didn't take long for Thibault to reach out to you and get you on board! Starling would never have gained any real-life relevance without your framework.

Look at the number of posts Josh has made in this forum, guys. This level of support is simply amazing. Unheard of. Use any other software product (yeah, one of those with a big subscription price), and you're often happy to get *any* reply at all. For years, Josh was always here, with the patience of a Redwood tree, guiding developers along, always friendly, always respectful, and not closing a thread before the problem was actually solved. Thousands of times.

All of that besides creating an amazing, easy to use, incredibly extensive, well documented user interface framework. For what you did all alone, other companies need dozens of programmers and team leaders and CTOs and support personnel.

I bow before you, my friend! From all my heart, thanks for your help and support and guidance over the years. It has been a privilege working with you.

All the best for your upcoming challenges! I'm sure we'll keep hearing from you. 🙂

Daniel

[Side note:]

Before someone asks: at the time of this writing, there's no more financial support from Adobe for Starling, either. Like Josh, I'm incredibly thankful for all the years of their sponsorship – this collaboration was a privilege only few developers are granted in their lifetime, and I loved every minute of it. It still makes my day when somebody posts a new game or app they've made with the help of our frameworks.

[BTW: being an optimist, I'm not ruling out a smaller follow-up contract by Adobe yet. That's entirely in Adobe's hands.]

I don't want to take over Josh's thread, but I know this question would have come up sooner or later. I promise I'll keep working on Starling as long as AIR is still running and people are using it – this has always been a labor of love, after all. However, of course I'll also start working on something else in parallel. It shouldn't come as a suprise to anyone that there won't be any revolutionary changes anymore – but I don't think that's necessary with the current code base, anyway. What we need is stability (and working around potential problems in the AIR runtimes, I guess). 😉

Cheers!

esDot

Thanks for all the hard work Josh! Sad to see Flash & AIR slowly getting phased out like this, but man, 2019 and she's still stable and strong, I'm not sure many would've believed that 5 yrs ago. I have to give some Kudos to Adobe for keeping it funded as long as they did.

Good luck on everything going forward!

denisgladkiy

Sad news guys .. Thank you for the wonderful work!

denisgladkiy

What do you think, what to do with current projects? Where to transfer them? When will the air support be stopped?

therobby3

Wow, well this is pretty horrible news. I feared I would see something like this happen sooner rather than later. =[ I thank you for Feathers! And even more so, for all the help and activity on the forums. You really are always quick to help and answer posts, and very knowledgeable. Seeing as Daniel posted the end of Starling funding, I could say the same for him as well, for sure. You both are always super helpful and quick to respond and fix bugs, I'm very thankful!

Maybe it'd be best left for a separate topic, but to me this is really sounding like Adobe is planning to end AIR support (not just flash player). Am I wrong, and this isn't as horrible as it sounds? Man would I really hate to have to leave AIR/Starling/Feathers and migrate my game to a new platform. =[

FlashJonas

Thanks for a great framework Josh, I had great use of it and enjoyed learning a new way of building interfaces with it.

rodrigo

Yep, AIR will die soon

denisgladkiy

Which platform to go after air?

leokan23

Sad to hear this. Thank you Josh for Feathers and all the help in support. It is indeed terrible news, but I think it was going to happen sooner than later. I hope that at least we get some updates to keep things running in AIR, Starling and Feathers till migration.

mistergreen

Thanks for the hard work and millions lines of code.

clozertou

@denisgladkiy
I moved to Angular and Unity, both are amazing and feel right fit.