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I feel as though the author missed talking about Flex, which really took flash to the next level. It was short-lived, as it came a few years before the end of

I feel as though the author missed talking about Flex, which really took flash to the next level. It was short-lived, as it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it - but it was a great way to build sophisticated SPA's before the javascript ecosystem was able to catch up. Thanks Flash!

nneonneo 9y ago
I taught an introductory UI programming course using Adobe Flex - very easy for beginners to pick up and start building functional UIs with minimal code complexity. Too bad it isn't used more in the real world - it really is a fantastic prototyping tool.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it I forgot about that. Does anyone have any info about this? I didn't pay much attention at the time, but in retrospect it seems like it was one of the main reasons everyone stopped using flash. Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? The excuse Steve made at the time was that it was too CPU intensive to run flash. I'm not sure how true this was, except for the earliest iPhone models. I've always wondered what the real reasons were. It was certainly a good decision in retrospect, but it's an interesting bit of history.
- dangerbird2 9y ago
  > Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? Aside from security issues others have mentioned, Early iPhones employed HTML5 as the only 3rd party app API: no flash, no java, not even native Objective C apps. The only reason Apple opened up the Cocoa API to 3rd party developers was because HTML at that time was insufficient for powerful offline experiences (only recently has tools like services workers made deploying offline apps via browser HTML possible). Many would argue Apple's exclusive embrace of modern HTML on its phone was pretty helpful in ensuring HTML5's success accross all platforms.
- jugg1es 9y ago
  Flash is a security nightmare. It's a 3rd party application that opens up the device up directly into the OS if compromised. Jobs blocked it because it would make iPhone vulnerable to attacks they couldn't control. I don't blame him for blocking it honestly, even though it meant we had totally change tech stacks.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Also, Jobs probably realized flash apps could circumvent his app store model.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      The app store wasn't opened until just over a year after the original iphone release (a day before the 3GS was available). Initially, you were supposed to build "web 2.0" apps using the safari engine. Flash didn't work then either.
      - eli 9y ago
        Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. My understanding is they just didn't have the app store and the sdk ready in time.
        kbenson 9y ago
        > Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. That was almost two years after the opening of the app store, and almost three years after the release of the iphone. I'm unsure whether they really had a fully thought out app store strategy initially, or whether they stumbled into it sort of by accident. Even if an app store was planned, I'm not sure they really knew what to expect. I seem to recall them initially saying you didn't need native apps, and then finally realizing the demand was so great (and performance too poor with Safari) that they needed to open one so scrambled to do so. That may just be a narrative I latched onto and remember though...
- dieterrams 9y ago
  Combo of poor performance and battery usage. I'm sure the unstated reasons included that it generally made for poor UX across the web.
- rodorgas 9y ago
  Steve Jobs detailed his reasons on the open letter Thoughts on Flash (https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/).
  - adamredwoods 9y ago
    In his biography, he didn't get along well with Adobe. That's the reason he did it. For all other technologies, Apple creates their own competing product. Why didn't they just do that for Flash (creation side and delivery side)?
    - stephen_g 9y ago
      The writing was already on the wall for 'applet' based web content I think. It was clear HTML/JS was going to take over on the Web, and Apple were trying to push native apps for as much as possible too.
- original_idea 9y ago
  Horrible performance on the iPhone/iPad. Killed the battery. And security risks.
- dilap 9y ago
  I think the bad mobile perf argument was legit – android made a big deal of “hey, we’ll have flash, unlike iphone,” and then ended up dropping it too, when it performed badly and killed battery life.
- eli 9y ago
  Flash had already peaked and most people knew it. Apple just hastened its demise. (Also the performance was atrocious on the early Android phones that supported flash) It was like when the Mac eliminated the floppy drive. Seen as gutsy (or arrogant) at the time, but no one really doubted that's where we were headed.
- acdha 9y ago
  Beyond the security issues, Adobe was just terrible as a platform maintained. Flash was the largest source of crashes in every browser until they moved it to a separate process, there were endemic performance issues even in core features (e.g. video playback was significantly more CPU intensive, and general code was well behind native speed), and most of the toolchain was in a state of obvious neglect, from the library inconsistencies (e.g. fonts rendered differently in some controls in the standard library and many of the method/property names didn't match), to the wrong or missing documentation, the many crashing bugs in the IDE, and the debugger which couldn't even pause on a breakpoint reliably. Nothing ever got fixed because their resources went into new features but the support people would reliably ignore tickets until sending a message telling you that it might be fixed in the next paid upgrade - could you buy it and let them know? Had Adobe shown even the slightest sign of responsibility it might have been a different call but at any point after maybe 2002 it was pretty obvious that you shouldn't depend on Flash because Adobe was just milking the customers.
  - Marazan 9y ago
    At the point that Jobs wrote his lie filled "Thoughts on Flash" Flash Player was vastly more performant at HTML5y things like animations, video and music playing than doing it in the browser. I'm not going to defend the quality of the flashplayer architecture and implementation (due to it's crapness) but it was perfectly fine performance wise - it was a 'resource hog' because of the terrible, terrible code that people wrote for punch the monkey flash apps.
    - acdha 9y ago
      At no point did I benchmark playback of H.264 in Flash being anywhere near native speed - huge deal on battery powered devices, or simply playing >15fps without dropping frames. WebM's software playback was roughly as slow but nobody used it and Google did optimize it over time, which is the kind of maintenance which Adobe was uninterested. Similarly, the fact that Flash was competitive with IE5 is the problem: browser vendors invested heavily in making that platform faster and richer. Adobe executives thought they had a monopoly and did not.
    - 9y ago
superasn 9y ago
Adobe Flex really took things to the next level. AS3 is still one of my favorite programming languages, at least until it used mx components (I think that spark thing really messed it up). Everything was event driven, async, first time I learned about Bindings and 100% OO. I think AngularJS still can learn a few things from AS3 (like Binding event, etc). Yeah.. thanks flash, big time!

nneonneo 9y ago

I taught an introductory UI programming course using Adobe Flex - very easy for beginners to pick up and start building functional UIs with minimal code complexity. Too bad it isn't used more in the real world - it really is a fantastic prototyping tool.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it I forgot about that. Does anyone have any info about this? I didn't pay much attention at the time, but in retrospect it seems like it was one of the main reasons everyone stopped using flash. Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? The excuse Steve made at the time was that it was too CPU intensive to run flash. I'm not sure how true this was, except for the earliest iPhone models. I've always wondered what the real reasons were. It was certainly a good decision in retrospect, but it's an interesting bit of history.

dangerbird2 9y ago
> Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? Aside from security issues others have mentioned, Early iPhones employed HTML5 as the only 3rd party app API: no flash, no java, not even native Objective C apps. The only reason Apple opened up the Cocoa API to 3rd party developers was because HTML at that time was insufficient for powerful offline experiences (only recently has tools like services workers made deploying offline apps via browser HTML possible). Many would argue Apple's exclusive embrace of modern HTML on its phone was pretty helpful in ensuring HTML5's success accross all platforms.
jugg1es 9y ago
Flash is a security nightmare. It's a 3rd party application that opens up the device up directly into the OS if compromised. Jobs blocked it because it would make iPhone vulnerable to attacks they couldn't control. I don't blame him for blocking it honestly, even though it meant we had totally change tech stacks.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Also, Jobs probably realized flash apps could circumvent his app store model.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    The app store wasn't opened until just over a year after the original iphone release (a day before the 3GS was available). Initially, you were supposed to build "web 2.0" apps using the safari engine. Flash didn't work then either.
    - eli 9y ago
      Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. My understanding is they just didn't have the app store and the sdk ready in time.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        > Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. That was almost two years after the opening of the app store, and almost three years after the release of the iphone. I'm unsure whether they really had a fully thought out app store strategy initially, or whether they stumbled into it sort of by accident. Even if an app store was planned, I'm not sure they really knew what to expect. I seem to recall them initially saying you didn't need native apps, and then finally realizing the demand was so great (and performance too poor with Safari) that they needed to open one so scrambled to do so. That may just be a narrative I latched onto and remember though...
dieterrams 9y ago
Combo of poor performance and battery usage. I'm sure the unstated reasons included that it generally made for poor UX across the web.
rodorgas 9y ago
Steve Jobs detailed his reasons on the open letter Thoughts on Flash (https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/).
- adamredwoods 9y ago
  In his biography, he didn't get along well with Adobe. That's the reason he did it. For all other technologies, Apple creates their own competing product. Why didn't they just do that for Flash (creation side and delivery side)?
  - stephen_g 9y ago
    The writing was already on the wall for 'applet' based web content I think. It was clear HTML/JS was going to take over on the Web, and Apple were trying to push native apps for as much as possible too.
original_idea 9y ago
Horrible performance on the iPhone/iPad. Killed the battery. And security risks.
dilap 9y ago
I think the bad mobile perf argument was legit – android made a big deal of “hey, we’ll have flash, unlike iphone,” and then ended up dropping it too, when it performed badly and killed battery life.
eli 9y ago
Flash had already peaked and most people knew it. Apple just hastened its demise. (Also the performance was atrocious on the early Android phones that supported flash) It was like when the Mac eliminated the floppy drive. Seen as gutsy (or arrogant) at the time, but no one really doubted that's where we were headed.
acdha 9y ago
Beyond the security issues, Adobe was just terrible as a platform maintained. Flash was the largest source of crashes in every browser until they moved it to a separate process, there were endemic performance issues even in core features (e.g. video playback was significantly more CPU intensive, and general code was well behind native speed), and most of the toolchain was in a state of obvious neglect, from the library inconsistencies (e.g. fonts rendered differently in some controls in the standard library and many of the method/property names didn't match), to the wrong or missing documentation, the many crashing bugs in the IDE, and the debugger which couldn't even pause on a breakpoint reliably. Nothing ever got fixed because their resources went into new features but the support people would reliably ignore tickets until sending a message telling you that it might be fixed in the next paid upgrade - could you buy it and let them know? Had Adobe shown even the slightest sign of responsibility it might have been a different call but at any point after maybe 2002 it was pretty obvious that you shouldn't depend on Flash because Adobe was just milking the customers.
- Marazan 9y ago
  At the point that Jobs wrote his lie filled "Thoughts on Flash" Flash Player was vastly more performant at HTML5y things like animations, video and music playing than doing it in the browser. I'm not going to defend the quality of the flashplayer architecture and implementation (due to it's crapness) but it was perfectly fine performance wise - it was a 'resource hog' because of the terrible, terrible code that people wrote for punch the monkey flash apps.
  - acdha 9y ago
    At no point did I benchmark playback of H.264 in Flash being anywhere near native speed - huge deal on battery powered devices, or simply playing >15fps without dropping frames. WebM's software playback was roughly as slow but nobody used it and Google did optimize it over time, which is the kind of maintenance which Adobe was uninterested. Similarly, the fact that Flash was competitive with IE5 is the problem: browser vendors invested heavily in making that platform faster and richer. Adobe executives thought they had a monopoly and did not.
  - 9y ago

superasn 9y ago

Adobe Flex really took things to the next level. AS3 is still one of my favorite programming languages, at least until it used mx components (I think that spark thing really messed it up). Everything was event driven, async, first time I learned about Bindings and 100% OO. I think AngularJS still can learn a few things from AS3 (like Binding event, etc). Yeah.. thanks flash, big time!