Please don't editorialize titles like this. Even Adobe themselves didn't call this "awesome," but if they had, it would have been preferable to remove that kind of fluff.

I would call this objectively awesome. :)

Ok, I changed it.

Decent try, but still, using the hashbang? Using the history API would seem appropriate if you're demoing HTML5.

This demo supports IE9 and Firefox 2 which don't have support for the html5 history API.

This was posted a month ago already.

Is this really happening? Are they really giving up on Flash and supporting open standards?

Adobe, at its roots, has always been a company that builds toolsets that allow people to create content. What they haven't built, they've bought, e.g. Macromedia.

Internally Flash has been their flagship media platform product. Consider that one of the reasons Flash gained such massive popularity and install base was that for the longest time, the Flash runtime in browsers was really the only way to do advanced graphics and interactions on the web.

Fast forward to the last couple of years and we've seen the advantages of Flash being eroded by advances and standardizations of HTML5 technologies. This has been boosted by the marginalization of Internet Explorer by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Only since IE9 has Microsoft made a serious attempt to play catchup. Flash was almost always needed to get earlier versions of IE to do anything approaching advanced.

I would propose that what we're seeing now is simply Adobe adapting to the marketplace. While they will continue to try and push Flash, it seems that at least some groups inside of Adobe feel the wind shifting and are working on the next generation of content creation toolsets for modern CSS3, javascript, and HTML5. Whether people will actually use their authoring tools will depend on how good they are and how easy to use. Notice I didn't mention price. People will pay big money for superior tools. If their new tools aren't doing the job developers need, they won't buy.

So no, I don't believe Adobe is giving up on Flash. As for open standards, I think its more a matter of them following where the market is heading rather than taking a stance.

Looks like it. Seems like it's a war where everybody wins.

EDIT: But yeah, I don't think they're giving up completely on Flash, considering we'll still need it for some things until pure HTML5 doesn't cover all corners.

why can't they do both?

Seems odd to use 1px png background images for the nav instead of rgba colors. They're already using modernizr-style classes on the html element, so browser compatibility isn't the (only) reason.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone know what isometric js engine they're using?

adobe reinvented minecraft? :)