29 ms·

“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

1213 points by mintplant 9y ago

Samuray 9y ago
Good thing I spent so much time learning and using Flash. Never again, Adobe.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  There was a time that was a great career path. However, you never can predict how well a technology will perform, especially if it's tied to a closed platform. I suppose this speaks to the power of open source. Then again, Animate CC should allow you to use those skills for the various platforms it supports.
- nathanm412 9y ago
  When was this? They've been trying to discourage people from using flash for years now. https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-and-open-web-standards.html https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-an...
- reboog711 9y ago
  Because all that knowledge is now useless and does not apply to any other technology or approach to development?
- j45 9y ago
  Actionscript is nearly identical to forms of Javascript, so I'm not sure what you find about learning your time with Flash that wouldn't be transferrable. Adobe Animate CC is the new version of Flash Pro that builds for HTML5, and if that doesn't float your boat, there's a wealth of JS libraries like pixi and p5.js that look extremely inviting.
sqeaky 9y ago
I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?
- lj3 9y ago
  Not since they bailed on stage3d. That was the beginning of the end.
  - Someone 9y ago
    I thought this was the beginning of the end: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
    - omg_ketchup 9y ago
      Only because Adobe decided to lay down and die after someone said something kinda mean and kinda true. They could have fixed most of it. Instead they were like "Nah, fuck it"
- draw_down 9y ago
  It used to be bundled with Chrome somehow so if you really needed it, you had it. Now I just don't use it. If something requires Flash then well, too bad for me.
  - zerocrates 9y ago
    Still is bundled with Chrome.
    - draw_down 9y ago
      Oh I see, it's behind a "click-to-play" thing. For some reason I thought it was gone.
      - orbitur 9y ago
        I can understand why, I feel like the Chrome team has announced 3 or 4 times over the last 5 years that Flash was going away, but the only change was that you had to click to play it, and the other announcements seemed useless.
ash_gti 9y ago
I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.
- hornbaker 9y ago
  A metric TON of them are.
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  Lots of games, but that's about it.
  - Will_Parker 9y ago
    It was a path to programming for a lot of artistic minded kids who enjoy learning things on their own. They could start by slowly adding programming to animations until it became a game they could share with their friends. A lot of these people grew up into development jobs. I think if the barrier to learning was picking up ES6 and React or Unity before being able to make a functional game, a lot of them would not have gotten started. This is not a small thing.
    - rocky1138 9y ago
      This is why they should open source it if they aren't planning to do anything with it.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        They are doing something with it, they renamed it to Animate and made it export to HTML5. They're just killing the format.
  - xanderstrike 9y ago
    Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... Flash is one of the best workflows for animators ever. This is equivalent to Photoshop being EOL'd because Apple doesn't like the pictures you can make with it.
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
Good.
seanalltogether 9y ago
> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way to slow for most content.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port anything considered important to something else.
  - gpawl 9y ago
    Meanwhile, DOS programs from 1986 still run in DOSBox.
    - itomato 9y ago
      Given enough demand, the same will be true for Flash thirty years hence.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those concerned with abandonware? Companies that want people to pay for new porting work? The majority of content that is still in flash and active use probably won’t get ported... the iPhone 10 years ago set that trend.
    - richardwhiuk 9y ago
      The flash player won't stop working when Adobe declare it EOL....
- Simon_says 9y ago
  > Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? Hopefully in their quieter moments they'll be reflecting on the wisdom of building on top of closed-source systems.
cpncrunch 9y ago
What about Adobe Connect? They have been talking about moving to HTML5 for years, but nothing seems to happen. Then recently they announce that if you don't have Flash you can instead download an executable: https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html Could this be the end of AC, or will they pull something out of a hat at the last minute?
- vecinu 9y ago
  Connect is not going to die, is my understanding.
  - cpncrunch 9y ago
    Two options seem to be: - go to a downloadable .exe - move to HTML5 They appear to be moving towards the .exe path at the moment, which seems like a bad idea.
    - cpncrunch 9y ago
      Update here: http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-on-web-conferencing-open-standards-and-the-end-of-the-flash-player.html?scid=social_20170725_73428777&adbid=889951279211880452&adbpl=tw&adbpr=18230864 http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-on...
methodover 9y ago
I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that knowledge is useless. And there aren't even better tools to replace it. It could have been different. Too bad they let it fail.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  I wonder how hard would it be to recreate the Flash (application) for HTML5 webgl and JavaScript. I know that there are some converters and so on but from I gather the creator was what made flash easy to use. I see very few HTML5 games out there though. Maybe one of the drivers is that flash games were a single file that could be moved around easily?
  - whatever_dude 9y ago
    Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a single interface. Throw a bunch of elements onto the "stage", add some scripting, and you're done. In reality, though, serious applications or games seldom used the Flash IDE other than for designing/managing assets and packaging them (and sometimes not even for that). It was pretty bad in many ways for serious work. I used to create fully animated Flash websites and my work was 100% using FDT (an Eclipse plugin) and the external compiler (Flex SDK). It was way more sustainable. Stripping the Flash IDE itself (or whatever it's called today) down to the animation essentials and allowing it to export in a number of formats (SVG, GIF, etc) would be the best thing for the app. Not sure it's the direction they're going, however.
    - MattRix 9y ago
      Animate CC (the new name for the Flash IDE) can do what you're talking about these days(exporting multiple formats, creating animation texture atlases, etc).
AaronMT 9y ago
How is Shumway doing?
- phonon 9y ago
  More like "How is Mortar Project" doing? :-( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project
- camus2 9y ago
  Shumway isn't maintained actively.
- bsmedberg 9y ago
  Shumway is not under active development. The actionscript runtime itself is pretty good, but getting compatibility with the Flash API surface turned out to be practically unachievable.
yoodenvranx 9y ago
Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?
- donpdonp 9y ago
  The GNU Project wrote a version of Flash. That might be helpful in the preservation of flash animations. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
- ekianjo 9y ago
  there is gnash on Linux.
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    I've used it in the past. It works, sometimes. I wonder if it is still actively developed?
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      It's open source, so it can be developed at any point. I have not looked at it recently, though.
- larsiusprime 9y ago
  There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML5)-- Ahead-of-time conversion to a different format 3) Convert by hand -- Rewrite in JS/HTML5 -- Rewrite in Haxe using a library like OpenFL (Haxe compiles to JS/HTML5, C++, also Flash) There's a lot of options available, and a lot of useful primitives. Parsing and rendering Flash (SWF) content is basically solved (OpenFL has made particular strong strides in this area, Shumway is impressive too). The really big missing piece is ActionScript execution. There are in fact various open source ActionScript VM's out there, and there are ways to parse ABC (Action Script Byte Code) and convert it -- either ahead of time or at load-time -- to something else, whether that's directly to JS, or something like Haxe (which then compiles it to JS or C++ or whatever), but to my knowledge nobody has a working solution that as of today combines Rendering + ActionScript Execution + RigorouslyTestedConvenientUX. But all the pieces are there. You just need someone motivated enough and well funded enough to put it all together. Hopefully this news spurs that fire.
kfk 9y ago
I had my 10 seconds of panic today with this title as I misread Flash into Flask. Anywy, now I that I know it's Flash I am perfectly fine.
tandav 9y ago
It was EOL in 2010
marban 9y ago
Thumbs up if you have jaw-dropping memories of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c
Bahamut 9y ago
I wonder how long will browsers keep Flash around though? I doubt sites like Homestar Runner will just convert everything to HTML/CSS/JS.
- geofft 9y ago
  New episodes of Homestar Runner are already being distributed as normal videos, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU (which is incidentally about the death of Flash)
  - gpawl 9y ago
    Videos aren't interactive. Homestar Runner animations were interactive.
    - mikejmoffitt 9y ago
      More importantly, flash videos weren't riddled with 4:2:2 color compression and fixed resolution.
- bsmedberg 9y ago
  All of the browsers have published roadmap updates. Basically Flash will be disabled by default in mid-2019: Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-roadmap-flash-end-life/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-r... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap Google: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash... and https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap Microsoft (Edge+IE): https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...
  - eridius 9y ago
    That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.
samstave 9y ago
heh -- I read that as "Flash memory will be EOL by 2020"
msla 9y ago
There seems to be more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840
asavadatti 9y ago
I remember the Nike website being all flash even as late as 2009-2010. I'm glad this abomination is finally done with
hprotagonist 9y ago
I disabled flash on my browsers in 2014, and I have had to manually reenable it exactly twice in the last three years to get content I needed. Both times were for restaurant menus, of all things. I have fond memories of newgrounds and the real early explosion of browser games, but I'm not going to miss the lag, memory overhead, and security hell one iota.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Obligatory The Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website
Kenji 9y ago
Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement. Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for today's children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you can scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with code, just like that. And then publish it on the internet effortlessly.
- camus2 9y ago
  It was an incredible opportunity for programmers to work with graphic artists and sound designers. It was the best years of my life as a programmer. Flash was first and foremost a community where the goal was to further creativity with the "web" as a medium. No thanks to Elop who "Eloped" Macromedia.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Flash (the editor) wasn't killed, Adobe renamed it to Animate and now exports to other formats.
- dandare 9y ago
  Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to AS3. I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.
  - Kenji 9y ago
    I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other technologies because even back then, the end of flash was forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time to move on for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance concerns. Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at "Introduction to programming" asked in which languages we've programmed before and I said ActionScript and he said that is not a programming language :)
edko 9y ago
Does anybody know if this includes Adobe Air? There is nothing said in the press release.
camus2 9y ago
This is Adobe's fault. They could have open-sourced the player anytime they wanted, they didn't. I don't blame Apple, or Flash-haters or anybody else but Adobe and all its stupid policies. Adobe killed Flash. Nobody else did.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  I bet there's lots of third party tech in Flash that prevents them from open sourcing it.
givinguflac 9y ago
Good riddance.
LyalinDotCom 9y ago
As things like Flash and Silverlight due i can't help but think that there will be another one of these in-browser techs that is just bound to come back around. What's new is old and what's old is new :D
rocky1138 9y ago
> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats. Why not open source it and make Flash the open format instead?
- ivraatiems 9y ago
  That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of what most everyone in web development (and possibly on the web, period) wants.
  - Melanie_ 9y ago
    My last pay check was $9500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out. This is what I do, ========http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682 http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682
  - Eric_WVGG 9y ago
    I wonder if protecting Adobe Air isn't another reason.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    There are a lot of bad things about Flash, but it still has not been adequately replaced. AFAIK there is nothing web-centric that comes close to the developer experience it offered. Yes, things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much less efficient than a unified write-once, run-anywhere platform with an integrated development environment for all aspects of the content, which is what Flash offered. That meant that Flash didn't really do any one thing exceptionally well, but it provided a way to reason about the program as a cohesive whole, and from a very visual perspective. I think that opened doors for a lot of people and I think the simplicity made it a productive platform. I am no Flash fanboy, but there is a reason it was so popular, and we're ignoring that with the HTML 5 platform, which ultimately just leaves an opening for a new Flash imitator (Unity is the leading candidate, though it hasn't really broached web in a major way yet), which means we will repeat this cycle over the next 20 years.
gumby 9y ago
What a shame. Not installing flash used to be an excellent way of blocking shitty websites and annoying ads.
dave5104 9y ago
Anyone know of any command line tools available out there that can convert Flash assets to PNG assets? I have a large number of Flash assets that I will eventually need to (finally) convert over. Hoping there are some easy tools out there available.
- jle17 9y ago
  swfextract from the swftools package should be able to do it. `swfextract file.swf` should list resources in it, then `swfextract -p 12 file.swf` will get the PNG with id 12.
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  swf is just a generic container like a zip, so there's plenty of tools to actually extract the original resources from there (no "conversion" necessary, that is).
dalbasal 9y ago
What an epic case study. How hard it is to EOL anything. How non-standard standards can play a giant role. How important deign/dev tools can be. How hard it is to get designers to accept limits (there were all flash websites just for minor design capabilities)..
- tete 9y ago
  Yes and no. I agree that standards make things easier, but standards probably make it harder or at least not easier to really come to an EOL for dated technology. See how browsers still have to support non CSS styling and similar. What I meant with standards making it harder to EOL technologies is that a standard leads to more implementations, which is a good thing, but certainly not for EOLing a technology.
pier25 9y ago
The Flash player (which is really what's being killed here) was piece of crap, but the Flash ecosystem was amazing. There is nothing today that offers a similar level of accessible crossplatform development like Adobe Air. Qt is the only thing that comes close. Sadly Adobe decided to kill the Flash platform. I wrote a long rant here a couple of years back: https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-flash-for-good-cea84fe32393 https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-fla...
- thebouv 9y ago
  Exactly! The type of stuff I built with Flex and Adobe Air was so great. I was able to solve so many problems that I just couldn't have (easily) without it. And for that brief moment when I could turn Flex code into iOS/Android apps? Awesome.
  - reboog711 9y ago
    You still can turn Flex and Adobe AIR code into iOS / Android app...
    - thebouv 9y ago
      Really? Once Flex went to Apache and FlexDeveloper was killed, I just stopped paying attention.
      - reboog711 9y ago
        Yes, really. Adobe AIR has had supported for iOS and Android, practically since the beginning. There was a big stink around Jobs "Letters from Flash" and all AIR applications were put on indefinite hold in the app store review queue with no explanation. Adobe stopped development of their iOS stuff. Then after a few months all the apps were approved, Adobe resumed development, and no one had a problem since. What is FlexDeveloper? Do you mean Flex Builder [now Flash Builder]? It wasn't really killed, just abandoned, if there is a difference.
sashk 9y ago
Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- make3 9y ago
  I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are the best imho. The last part about the apps make Apple look like they only want to protect their financial interests in a sort of sketchy monopolistic way.
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".
    - melling 9y ago
      What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?
      - secstate 9y ago
        Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid. Then there's always Unity ...
        cjensen 9y ago
        I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it attempts to look as much as possible like a native app rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and feel" like Google has been doing lately. But it still feels wrong on the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't done" on the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on everything means that when MacOS alters or refines a UI element that Qt apps will still be doing things the old way.
amyjess 9y ago
As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm worried what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old Flash games and other stuff out there that has never been ported to HTML5 and have been abandoned by their creators. A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run this old content. We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and this is just going to make it worse.
- pera 9y ago
  I don't know if Adobe is planning to open source Flash, but there is GNU Gnash: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
- andrioni 9y ago
  It's actually pretty weird that would stop distributing it, especially since they still distribute a Shockwave Player, and well, Shockwave has been completely dead for long time now.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Even if they continue distributing it, newer operating systems and browsers may not be able to run it.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
    Shockwave Player is still supported. The latest version was released ~40 days ago[1] [1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes-shockwave-12.html https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes...
- nileshtrivedi 9y ago
  It's an expensive lesson to the society, not to rely on proprietary software for content creation. If we are willing to pay heed to it. Now let me go back to my open-source community discussions in Slack. ;-)
- criddell 9y ago
amyjess 9y ago
As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm worried what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old Flash games and other stuff out there that has never been ported to HTML5 and have been abandoned by their creators. A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run this old content. We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and this is just going to make it worse.
amitt 9y ago
End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.
- jmcdiesel 9y ago
  It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
  - baby 9y ago
    The web has become less interactive, and less animated. It's all about static pages now (literally, not as .html)
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > It was good for the time. So were java applets… It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible. [0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam) [1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
- omg_ketchup 9y ago
  Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that. It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.
otterpro 9y ago
Does this mean an end of all things related to Flash ecosystem or just Flash itself? I still have Adobe Air apps (as rare as it may seem) that I use regularly. Does anybody know the best way to migrate Adobe Air apps to HTML5? My guess is to use Adobe Animate CC, but it is not free..
WalterBright 9y ago
Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?
- macspoofing 9y ago
  I don't know about MS-Paint, but there are a number of licensing issues with simply open sourcing Flash.
  - KindOne 9y ago
    MS Paint is still going to be around. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa... Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    If the product is dead, that means the licencors are likely to no longer make any money off it it. This means they will likely be open to open sourcing the code for free or next to free. Open sourcing dead projects do have advantages for the licencors: 1. nobody likes the code they worked hard on to be dead 2. it's valuable free marketing for their brand name 3. they can charge for support
    - pm215 9y ago
      Flash player might be dead, but that doesn't mean $THIRD_PARTY_LIBRARY that it uses isn't still being profitably licensed by its original developers. Or maybe the player uses a library that Adobe have a perpetual binary license to, but the original company that owned that library went bust a decade ago and nobody knows who owns the copyright on it now to allow a relicense. Open sourcing things does have a cost, and a big chunk of that is in running down these legalities.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
samfisher83 9y ago
It seems like instead of programming for flash player you have to program for each browsers HTML/JS quirks. People trash flash, but these browsers also have security holes. Its hard to make any really complex piece of software completely secure.
jordache 9y ago
I would wager flash can still be used to develop movie set UIs, and other internalized use cases. However those can also be utilized outside the realm of web browsers. It's benefit is a powerful full featured scripting language, in conjunction with a canvas that is easy to achieve pixel accuracy.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
Long live Homestar Runner!
komali2 9y ago
>Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for Flash “in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.” What did they mean by this line?
- gpawl 9y ago
  China.
  - komali2 9y ago
    Why would China be interested in distributing out of date versions of Flash? And how would Adobe more aggressively ending life for these regions affect them if they're already out of date and unlicensed anyway?
k__ 9y ago
End of an era... I did my first project, when I was 14, with Flash, simple animated cartoon. Was super easy and fun. Today I read we would have Iron Man style UI if Steve Jobs didn't shot down Flash with the iPhone. The reasoning was, nothing we have today had such easy 2D/3D animation features, yes WebGL can do everything Flash can, but it's waaay more complicated. When I started programming, I liked the idea of Flex, but somehow that never cached on. Later in 2011, when I finished my CS degree, I moved to JavaScript because it was open and rapidly catching up. I liked the whole openness of JavaScript much more and like I said, the Web platform can theoretically do everything Flash can, but we need better tools. I can do rather much, because I'm a developer, but when I look at me 18 years ago, I didn't know anything about programming and still got things done with Flash. I also met a few people who build their whole career on Flash. Some media degrees here were basically 80% Flash content creation and I'm still working with people who got into IT by doing Flash, they miss it pretty much...
smaili 9y ago
For fun, here's the famous letter from Jobs himself on Flash - https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
mfabbri77 9y ago
It would be cool to see the Adobe Flash 2D vector graphics engine opensourced, to perform comparisons with similar engine all around: Agg, AmanithVG, Blend2d, Cairo, NanoVg, Skia, ...
FRex 9y ago
This is absolutely awful. There are thousands of great games on ArmorGames and Kongregate that are in Flash. I they consider open sourcing it or at least allowing open source alternatives to grow.
guessmyname 9y ago
I have a bad experience every time I have to declare taxes because the interface was built on top of Flash; many parts of the platform are broken (missing images, inconsistent styling in sub-pages, JavaScript exceptions) and I wonder what the government will do to overcome this change, three years is not much time by government standards.
oblib 9y ago
The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand why they care, but I don't. I decided not to invest in it back when Macromedia bought it because I knew it would be expensive and subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash" was great and had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's planned obsolescence and I hated the way Macromedia designed their UIs and thought they charged way too much for their products. I stopped using Adobe's plug-in on my Mac even before Jobs came out and complained about Flash. I considered it a form "spyware" and even if it wasn't it was constantly pestering me to update it and I seldom ever visited a site that used it. As I recall it was a bit of a pain to get rid of it too.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  >The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. And the ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few of my clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in the early 2000s. Every year I try to convince them that they need to switch, but they can't justify the cost.
  - omg_ketchup 9y ago
    Nobody "learned" Flash. You opened it up and you already knew what to do. That's the real value it provided.
    - oblib 9y ago
      That's a pretty big leap to make.
  - oblib 9y ago
    I've seen some beautiful work done in Flash but the costs were always very high for both producers and their clients.
- oblib 9y ago
  It's funny I got down voted for that comment. I'm not sure why they'd take offense with my opinions above. I didn't say they were wrong, I just whined and complained about why I didn't use it. And whining and complaining can have merit. For example, you can whine and complain to your landlord about your A/C not working and they may not want to hear it, or pay to fix it, but it won't get fixed until you do. If you ask me, I'll tell you this has been fixed.
cestith 9y ago
Flash Player is not Flash. Flash was the name of the media creation software. Flash Player is not end-of-life because it sucks (which it does) but because in the days of HTML 5, CSS 3, ECMAScript 6/7, Canvas, WebGL, etc a plugin to show that sort of media is redundant to the browser. The creation tool lives on, although rebranded.
TekMol 9y ago
I wonder if WebAssembly is facing a similar fate. Somehow, I always have a "flashy" feeling when reading about it.
cjensen 9y ago
I feel so bad for the Scratch language, which converted to Flash at exactly the wrong time.
- marcins 9y ago
  Scratch is in the process of a HTML5 rewrite with the help of Google, which makes sense given that it's the key component of their CS First program. https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0 https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0 Sounds like it should be ready by 2020!
  - NoGravitas 9y ago
    Honestly, I need it now. I tried to pull up Scratch for my child, and the "create" link went to a blank page without even an error message. Given that no browsers on my platform still support NSAPI plugins, there is literally no way for my child to use Scratch, and they are the perfect age for it.
stevenh 9y ago
Most actual developers currently using Adobe's products will only want to know whether Adobe AIR is safe. It is. https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772 https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772
TheRoccoB 9y ago
I made a celebration post! https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-of-flash-8a683767607f https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-of-flash-8...
drewlander 9y ago
What about homestarrunner? Will somebody think about homestarrunner!?
amelius 9y ago
This is exactly why we shouldn't rely on closed standards and closed viewers: at some point they stop to exist, and there will be content out there that we can't view any longer.
cbhl 9y ago
Rather than blaming Adobe, I hope some of you will be inspired to go out and build the next vector animation format/authoring tool for the web.
codedokode 9y ago
Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful. And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported on this platform.
- TheKarateKid 9y ago
  Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility. The time to move on was years ago.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    XP is still more popular than many Linux distributions. Should Youtube stop supporting them too?
    - ConfucianNardin 9y ago
      Important difference: you will get support for most of those Linux distributions "for free" just by targeting modern web standards.
  - j45 9y ago
    XP is still used in many countries around the world on older equipment for a variety of reasons.
BatFastard 9y ago
Flash is not dead, only the browser plug in is going away. AIR is still alive and well, for both desktop and Mobile
misticdeveloper 9y ago
Yes! HBO's lazy ass will finally be forced to get rid of their horrible Flash web player
Coffee_lover 9y ago
yeah rip haven't used it for at least a year by now, disabled or not installed in any system/browser
Marazan 9y ago
Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.
- Hasknewbie 9y ago
  >> Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable. "Adobesque"?
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  > Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an active developer community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and appear to work on Flex full-time. Unfortunately, it seems the developer community is focusing most of their efforts on FlexJS, an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I don't see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework space.
  - Marazan 9y ago
    If this had been Adobe's focus rather than chucking it at Apache then Adobe would be world leaders in JavaScript app development and we'd all be using their tools.
- liquidise 9y ago
  The Flex concept of variables being "observable" was about 8 years ahead of Backbone and later Angular, and now React-style UI updates from an event loop. It was surreal working in the Cairngorm Flex framework briefly in 2000s and then see Backbone and Angular pitched as groundbreaking years later. Only now are we getting to a similar level of elegance with loop-style UI updates.
- 5trokerac3 9y ago
  Still haven't had a better development experience than Flex with the CLI compiler. Built some of the first web based AR engines with it and alchemy. Built giant, 80"+ touchscreen, trade show interactives with it that nobody had a clue were Flash unless you told them. Was able to port just about anything to iPad with Air for Mobile and actually build IPA files on Linux. All they needed to do was cross compile to HTML5 and barely anyone would be using Angular or Bootstrap nowadays.
meerita 9y ago
I made a living with Flash. In fact, I first made Flash before making HTML, CSS.
baalimago 9y ago
I'm foreseeing someone finding a hole in flash security around 2022 forcing adobe to update it again anyway, sorta like wannadecryptor but rip all the flashgame websites (if there even is any left)
humptechtips 9y ago
Too bad. Mozzilla will not ask me to update flash player as it is literally gone now. I must there are too much memories with flash player as there was a time when you couldn't play a video on youtube without it. #ripadobeflashplayer
Itzcoatl 9y ago
The cross platform apps arguments can easily being applied to all the {"React native", "Xamarin", etc} bullshit. IMHO.
dandare 9y ago
> Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. Cringe! Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with Macromedia that invented them 10 year earlier.
- favorited 9y ago
  But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included Macromedia after the acquisition?
  - mulmen 9y ago
    That's disingenuous. Adobe didn't invent Flash, they bought the company that did. Adobe's strategy is based on them having resources to acquire, not create.
    - baby 9y ago
      This letter might have been written by one of the guy in the original Macromedia team.
  - redindian75 9y ago
    Actually Macromedia didnt invent it either. A small company called "FutureSplash" had a software called FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia bought it in the late 90s
  - thousande 9y ago
    The two companies kind of merged and Adobe continued to employ some of the original members from the Flash team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing) https://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation https://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation
baby 9y ago
This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao was just amazing to me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y). I did my fair share of games as well, there were so many of them and publishing a game on internet had never been so easy. Orisinal is beautiful (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/). Now where do people find such mini games? On mobile. The big mini-game market has shifted and we now have to pay, we now have to download each game individually. I understand Flash has had a bad track of security vulnerability, but the internet used to be magical, it's the end of an era. As methodover says it here: > The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.
- j79 9y ago
  While I agree, a lot of what you said isn't limited to the lack of Flash, but just trends in general. Websites could be more interactive, animated (even with sound, if desired...but please...no), and have some dimension. Unfortunately, everything looks/feels like Bootstrap-themes, because they are. I personally started off animating in Macromedia Director. I played around with Lingo. I moved to Flash / Actionscript and loved the change. In a similar fashion, I'm totally excited about the future of Animation / Games (and how Canvas plays into that). There have been some huge strides by vendors and developers to improve animation and gaming on the web, and I suspect that will continue before Flash is EoL. Flash being discontinued makes me sad, but purely in a sentimental way - I'm very excited about what comes next :)
- deedubaya 9y ago
  > interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions Interaction, animation, sound, and dimensions have their place in the web. That place is in a small percentage of websites. Very small. Flash was possibly a better tool for that small percentage of websites (games and something else I guess?). I, for one, am glad I can read a fucking blog article these days without it being rendered through an animated page flip which makes the shrill sound of paper tearing each time a page is "turned" with no way to mute. Yes, flat text suits me just fine.
partycoder 9y ago
The irony is that AS3 felt more Java-esque than JavaScript.
Girlang 9y ago
What about FrameMaker?
tomc1985 9y ago
What about Flash proper? I imagine sunsetting that would be devastating for the animation industry.
blondie9x 9y ago
RIP Steve Jobs https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
therethenthat 9y ago
up in heaven, Steve Jobs is smiling a bit more than usual today :)
tapsboy 9y ago
Interesting, that it will still survive in browsers till 2020. Co-incidentally, today at A+E Networks, we finally migrated all our web properties to HTML5 video playback.
xupybd 9y ago
Flash ads were terrible, a blight on the web. But Flex is so much more structured than any JS framework I've used. It wasn't super pretty but it did the job. RIP a major Flex project I support :(
digi_owl 9y ago
Now if only there were not a war of streaming protocols going on...
exodust 9y ago
Funny how they spruik their Creative Cloud applications in a message about EOL Flash. I'm guessing their marketing managers signed off on the message... "End with a positive note about how awesome we are, and how everyone can subscribe to our products and give us money on a regular basis no matter how infrequently they use the product." Adobe are so... creepy. I won't miss the pre-ticked "you want McAfee fries with that" box when updating Flash. I wonder how many people didn't see the checkbox and ended up installing McAfee unintentionally. I still use a browser extension to force Flash player on Youtube simply because it performs better than the HTML player, and provides more flexibility.
ipstas 9y ago
somebody still using this outdated pos? can they kill pdf too?
senthilnayagam 9y ago
I still don't understand why don't adobe open source the flash player, so that security team and browser teams can look into it and maintain a secure runtime.
VicYu 9y ago
I see, you already have Animate CC.
qxxx 9y ago
I installed Adobe Animate last week, it looks really similar to flash, they even use very similar concepts. I didn't try to write some code yet, but it looks like they use some kind of an action script.
- barbaricmelons 9y ago
  It's basically Flash, it just exports differently. Same program, different name to avoid confusion with the Flash platform. Basically the only thing that's going away for the typical Animate user is the swf, everything else will remain as Animate exports to html5 and js while using as3.
geekamongus 9y ago
And there was much rejoicing.
wooptoo 9y ago
That's quite a commitment for a company, to maintain a piece of software for 25-ish years. I have fond memories of using Macromedia Flash 4 and 5 many years ago to create animations and simple scripted pages. I loved how well integrated everything was. But I still believe that things are better as they are today: we have more choices in frameworks, better standards, and some great web services which work well on both mobile and desktop. That being said today I uninstalled the Flash plugin preemptively on my machines just because I am not needing it for any website I commonly use.
eadmund 9y ago
I miss Flash; it was nice to be able to browse the web normally, with Flash disabled, and then to enable it only for a single function on a single page. It was relatively rare, and it didn't destroy the web. With JavaScript, I basically have to enable it everywhere, as the web has been destroyed and I must now grant practically every site execute permissions on my computer in order to read content.
- rayvd 9y ago
  This. That and HTML5 autoplay is super annoying and there doesn't seem to be a bulletproof way to stop it (at least the various plugins I've tried).
thekevan 9y ago
I wonder what will happen to large Flash games sites like Kongregate.
- flohofwoe 9y ago
  Here's a recent Kongregate blog post about the topic. HTML5 game uploads have been growing steadily, and there are now more new HTML5 games uploaded than Flash games: http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/ http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/
  - thekevan 9y ago
    I should have done some more research before commenting. Also, there is the new effort to open source Flash.
mmmnt 9y ago
Noooo, whats next? The real player?
j45 9y ago
While Flash Player is meeting it's end, the transferability of existing investments in AS3 to a new endpoint is tough not to imagine due to the kinship of ECMAscript with both JS and AS3. If AS3 could compile to HTML5/JS endpoints, existing, or archival can in some part live on or be repurposed. The question will be how close it can get compared to existing solutions. There is likely several billions of dollars (likely more) of content that will need to be recreated, and not all of it will, or can be. With Flash Professional becoming Adobe Animate CC, it wouldn't be surprising if this transferability becomes more of a prominent format. Adobe has been at the core of a lot of rich media formats both online and files with PDF and Flash, and I expect them not to disappear in the world of the tooling to create such experiences. There is some stewardship and timing on this announcement from Adobe that says the right things to those those who are quietly very excited by WebAssembly, and now have Adobe and others starting to look at it the same way.
kensey 9y ago
I remember in 1993-1994 playing Cosmic Osmo on a Mac. All the old pre-Myst Cyan games (Manhole, Osmo, Spelunx) were basically HyperCard stacks, which didn't directly allow for any but the crudest animation. But Cyan had integrated MacroMind VideoWorks, which later became Macromedia Director, into Osmo. The effect over other HyperCard stacks was striking. You could actually play little minigames in the Osmo world. Then I went off to college the next year and found out about the whole "web" thing, and again everything was flat and mostly static. Then Macromedia Shockwave and Flash and Java came along, and it was just like Osmo vs. Manhole, only more so. For a long time, your browser install wasn't complete till you had Java, RealPlayer, Shockwave and Flash installed (and later, QuickTime). (For nostalgia purposes, Steam has all the Cyan games from Manhole on up as a bundle; you can also play the original Manhole/Osmo/Spelunx in the SheepShaver emulator if you can get hold of firmware plus OS and game discs.)
Great_Mogul 9y ago
I get that people hate Flash now, but for a long time, Flash was the cutting edge of interactive design. Honestly, I don't see that level of experimentation or creativity in interactive stuff these days..
Goodlooking 9y ago
There still isn't, as far as I'm aware, any software that combines an artwork pipeline and programming so seamlessly as Flash did. Also I'm not even sure if there's a mainstream vector graphics rasterizer out there that is even remotely as powerful as Flash's was/is. Initially HTML5 + JS was so extremely lackluster that I cursed Steve Jobs for instigating this crusade, but I agree it is necessary that Flash dies and we replace it with something completely open.
betatest 9y ago
Of course not. It was planed originally in 2012 to happen in 2015. HTML5 is STILL not ready. And it STILL won't be in 2025. All you haters can downvote me to oblivion new for saying THE TRUTH (drops mic)

1213 points by mintplant 9y ago

Samuray 9y ago

Good thing I spent so much time learning and using Flash. Never again, Adobe.

bdcravens 9y ago
There was a time that was a great career path. However, you never can predict how well a technology will perform, especially if it's tied to a closed platform. I suppose this speaks to the power of open source. Then again, Animate CC should allow you to use those skills for the various platforms it supports.
nathanm412 9y ago
When was this? They've been trying to discourage people from using flash for years now. https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-and-open-web-standards.html https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-an...
reboog711 9y ago
Because all that knowledge is now useless and does not apply to any other technology or approach to development?
j45 9y ago
Actionscript is nearly identical to forms of Javascript, so I'm not sure what you find about learning your time with Flash that wouldn't be transferrable. Adobe Animate CC is the new version of Flash Pro that builds for HTML5, and if that doesn't float your boat, there's a wealth of JS libraries like pixi and p5.js that look extremely inviting.

sqeaky 9y ago

I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?

lj3 9y ago
Not since they bailed on stage3d. That was the beginning of the end.
- Someone 9y ago
  I thought this was the beginning of the end: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
  - omg_ketchup 9y ago
    Only because Adobe decided to lay down and die after someone said something kinda mean and kinda true. They could have fixed most of it. Instead they were like "Nah, fuck it"
draw_down 9y ago
It used to be bundled with Chrome somehow so if you really needed it, you had it. Now I just don't use it. If something requires Flash then well, too bad for me.
- zerocrates 9y ago
  Still is bundled with Chrome.
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Oh I see, it's behind a "click-to-play" thing. For some reason I thought it was gone.
    - orbitur 9y ago
      I can understand why, I feel like the Chrome team has announced 3 or 4 times over the last 5 years that Flash was going away, but the only change was that you had to click to play it, and the other announcements seemed useless.

ash_gti 9y ago

I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.

hornbaker 9y ago
A metric TON of them are.
whatever_dude 9y ago
Lots of games, but that's about it.
- Will_Parker 9y ago
  It was a path to programming for a lot of artistic minded kids who enjoy learning things on their own. They could start by slowly adding programming to animations until it became a game they could share with their friends. A lot of these people grew up into development jobs. I think if the barrier to learning was picking up ES6 and React or Unity before being able to make a functional game, a lot of them would not have gotten started. This is not a small thing.
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    This is why they should open source it if they aren't planning to do anything with it.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      They are doing something with it, they renamed it to Animate and made it export to HTML5. They're just killing the format.
- xanderstrike 9y ago
  Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... Flash is one of the best workflows for animators ever. This is equivalent to Photoshop being EOL'd because Apple doesn't like the pictures you can make with it.

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago

Good.

seanalltogether 9y ago

> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way to slow for most content.

SkyMarshal 9y ago
I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port anything considered important to something else.
- gpawl 9y ago
  Meanwhile, DOS programs from 1986 still run in DOSBox.
  - itomato 9y ago
    Given enough demand, the same will be true for Flash thirty years hence.
- azinman2 9y ago
  Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those concerned with abandonware? Companies that want people to pay for new porting work? The majority of content that is still in flash and active use probably won’t get ported... the iPhone 10 years ago set that trend.
  - richardwhiuk 9y ago
    The flash player won't stop working when Adobe declare it EOL....
Simon_says 9y ago
> Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? Hopefully in their quieter moments they'll be reflecting on the wisdom of building on top of closed-source systems.

cpncrunch 9y ago

What about Adobe Connect? They have been talking about moving to HTML5 for years, but nothing seems to happen. Then recently they announce that if you don't have Flash you can instead download an executable: https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html Could this be the end of AC, or will they pull something out of a hat at the last minute?

vecinu 9y ago
Connect is not going to die, is my understanding.
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  Two options seem to be: - go to a downloadable .exe - move to HTML5 They appear to be moving towards the .exe path at the moment, which seems like a bad idea.
  - cpncrunch 9y ago
    Update here: http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-on-web-conferencing-open-standards-and-the-end-of-the-flash-player.html?scid=social_20170725_73428777&adbid=889951279211880452&adbpl=tw&adbpr=18230864 http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-on...

methodover 9y ago

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that knowledge is useless. And there aren't even better tools to replace it. It could have been different. Too bad they let it fail.

yoz-y 9y ago
I wonder how hard would it be to recreate the Flash (application) for HTML5 webgl and JavaScript. I know that there are some converters and so on but from I gather the creator was what made flash easy to use. I see very few HTML5 games out there though. Maybe one of the drivers is that flash games were a single file that could be moved around easily?
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a single interface. Throw a bunch of elements onto the "stage", add some scripting, and you're done. In reality, though, serious applications or games seldom used the Flash IDE other than for designing/managing assets and packaging them (and sometimes not even for that). It was pretty bad in many ways for serious work. I used to create fully animated Flash websites and my work was 100% using FDT (an Eclipse plugin) and the external compiler (Flex SDK). It was way more sustainable. Stripping the Flash IDE itself (or whatever it's called today) down to the animation essentials and allowing it to export in a number of formats (SVG, GIF, etc) would be the best thing for the app. Not sure it's the direction they're going, however.
  - MattRix 9y ago
    Animate CC (the new name for the Flash IDE) can do what you're talking about these days(exporting multiple formats, creating animation texture atlases, etc).

AaronMT 9y ago

How is Shumway doing?

phonon 9y ago
More like "How is Mortar Project" doing? :-( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project
camus2 9y ago
Shumway isn't maintained actively.
bsmedberg 9y ago
Shumway is not under active development. The actionscript runtime itself is pretty good, but getting compatibility with the Flash API surface turned out to be practically unachievable.

yoodenvranx 9y ago

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

donpdonp 9y ago
The GNU Project wrote a version of Flash. That might be helpful in the preservation of flash animations. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
ekianjo 9y ago
there is gnash on Linux.
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
  I've used it in the past. It works, sometimes. I wonder if it is still actively developed?
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    It's open source, so it can be developed at any point. I have not looked at it recently, though.
larsiusprime 9y ago
There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML5)-- Ahead-of-time conversion to a different format 3) Convert by hand -- Rewrite in JS/HTML5 -- Rewrite in Haxe using a library like OpenFL (Haxe compiles to JS/HTML5, C++, also Flash) There's a lot of options available, and a lot of useful primitives. Parsing and rendering Flash (SWF) content is basically solved (OpenFL has made particular strong strides in this area, Shumway is impressive too). The really big missing piece is ActionScript execution. There are in fact various open source ActionScript VM's out there, and there are ways to parse ABC (Action Script Byte Code) and convert it -- either ahead of time or at load-time -- to something else, whether that's directly to JS, or something like Haxe (which then compiles it to JS or C++ or whatever), but to my knowledge nobody has a working solution that as of today combines Rendering + ActionScript Execution + RigorouslyTestedConvenientUX. But all the pieces are there. You just need someone motivated enough and well funded enough to put it all together. Hopefully this news spurs that fire.

kfk 9y ago

I had my 10 seconds of panic today with this title as I misread Flash into Flask. Anywy, now I that I know it's Flash I am perfectly fine.

tandav 9y ago

It was EOL in 2010

marban 9y ago

Thumbs up if you have jaw-dropping memories of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c

Bahamut 9y ago

I wonder how long will browsers keep Flash around though? I doubt sites like Homestar Runner will just convert everything to HTML/CSS/JS.

geofft 9y ago
New episodes of Homestar Runner are already being distributed as normal videos, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU (which is incidentally about the death of Flash)
- gpawl 9y ago
  Videos aren't interactive. Homestar Runner animations were interactive.
  - mikejmoffitt 9y ago
    More importantly, flash videos weren't riddled with 4:2:2 color compression and fixed resolution.
bsmedberg 9y ago
All of the browsers have published roadmap updates. Basically Flash will be disabled by default in mid-2019: Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-roadmap-flash-end-life/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-r... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap Google: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash... and https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap Microsoft (Edge+IE): https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...
- eridius 9y ago
  That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.

samstave 9y ago

heh -- I read that as "Flash memory will be EOL by 2020"

msla 9y ago

There seems to be more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840

asavadatti 9y ago

I remember the Nike website being all flash even as late as 2009-2010. I'm glad this abomination is finally done with

hprotagonist 9y ago

I disabled flash on my browsers in 2014, and I have had to manually reenable it exactly twice in the last three years to get content I needed. Both times were for restaurant menus, of all things. I have fond memories of newgrounds and the real early explosion of browser games, but I'm not going to miss the lag, memory overhead, and security hell one iota.

theandrewbailey 9y ago
Obligatory The Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

Kenji 9y ago

Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement. Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for today's children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you can scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with code, just like that. And then publish it on the internet effortlessly.

camus2 9y ago
It was an incredible opportunity for programmers to work with graphic artists and sound designers. It was the best years of my life as a programmer. Flash was first and foremost a community where the goal was to further creativity with the "web" as a medium. No thanks to Elop who "Eloped" Macromedia.
icebraining 9y ago
Flash (the editor) wasn't killed, Adobe renamed it to Animate and now exports to other formats.
dandare 9y ago
Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to AS3. I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.
- Kenji 9y ago
  I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other technologies because even back then, the end of flash was forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time to move on for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance concerns. Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at "Introduction to programming" asked in which languages we've programmed before and I said ActionScript and he said that is not a programming language :)

edko 9y ago

Does anybody know if this includes Adobe Air? There is nothing said in the press release.

camus2 9y ago

This is Adobe's fault. They could have open-sourced the player anytime they wanted, they didn't. I don't blame Apple, or Flash-haters or anybody else but Adobe and all its stupid policies. Adobe killed Flash. Nobody else did.

theandrewbailey 9y ago
I bet there's lots of third party tech in Flash that prevents them from open sourcing it.

givinguflac 9y ago

Good riddance.

LyalinDotCom 9y ago

As things like Flash and Silverlight due i can't help but think that there will be another one of these in-browser techs that is just bound to come back around. What's new is old and what's old is new :D

rocky1138 9y ago

> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats. Why not open source it and make Flash the open format instead?

ivraatiems 9y ago
That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of what most everyone in web development (and possibly on the web, period) wants.
- Melanie_ 9y ago
  My last pay check was $9500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out. This is what I do, ========http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682 http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682
- Eric_WVGG 9y ago
  I wonder if protecting Adobe Air isn't another reason.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  There are a lot of bad things about Flash, but it still has not been adequately replaced. AFAIK there is nothing web-centric that comes close to the developer experience it offered. Yes, things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much less efficient than a unified write-once, run-anywhere platform with an integrated development environment for all aspects of the content, which is what Flash offered. That meant that Flash didn't really do any one thing exceptionally well, but it provided a way to reason about the program as a cohesive whole, and from a very visual perspective. I think that opened doors for a lot of people and I think the simplicity made it a productive platform. I am no Flash fanboy, but there is a reason it was so popular, and we're ignoring that with the HTML 5 platform, which ultimately just leaves an opening for a new Flash imitator (Unity is the leading candidate, though it hasn't really broached web in a major way yet), which means we will repeat this cycle over the next 20 years.

gumby 9y ago

What a shame. Not installing flash used to be an excellent way of blocking shitty websites and annoying ads.

dave5104 9y ago

Anyone know of any command line tools available out there that can convert Flash assets to PNG assets? I have a large number of Flash assets that I will eventually need to (finally) convert over. Hoping there are some easy tools out there available.

jle17 9y ago
swfextract from the swftools package should be able to do it. `swfextract file.swf` should list resources in it, then `swfextract -p 12 file.swf` will get the PNG with id 12.
whatever_dude 9y ago
swf is just a generic container like a zip, so there's plenty of tools to actually extract the original resources from there (no "conversion" necessary, that is).

dalbasal 9y ago

What an epic case study. How hard it is to EOL anything. How non-standard standards can play a giant role. How important deign/dev tools can be. How hard it is to get designers to accept limits (there were all flash websites just for minor design capabilities)..

tete 9y ago
Yes and no. I agree that standards make things easier, but standards probably make it harder or at least not easier to really come to an EOL for dated technology. See how browsers still have to support non CSS styling and similar. What I meant with standards making it harder to EOL technologies is that a standard leads to more implementations, which is a good thing, but certainly not for EOLing a technology.

pier25 9y ago

The Flash player (which is really what's being killed here) was piece of crap, but the Flash ecosystem was amazing. There is nothing today that offers a similar level of accessible crossplatform development like Adobe Air. Qt is the only thing that comes close. Sadly Adobe decided to kill the Flash platform. I wrote a long rant here a couple of years back: https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-flash-for-good-cea84fe32393 https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-fla...

thebouv 9y ago
Exactly! The type of stuff I built with Flex and Adobe Air was so great. I was able to solve so many problems that I just couldn't have (easily) without it. And for that brief moment when I could turn Flex code into iOS/Android apps? Awesome.
- reboog711 9y ago
  You still can turn Flex and Adobe AIR code into iOS / Android app...
  - thebouv 9y ago
    Really? Once Flex went to Apache and FlexDeveloper was killed, I just stopped paying attention.
    - reboog711 9y ago
      Yes, really. Adobe AIR has had supported for iOS and Android, practically since the beginning. There was a big stink around Jobs "Letters from Flash" and all AIR applications were put on indefinite hold in the app store review queue with no explanation. Adobe stopped development of their iOS stuff. Then after a few months all the apps were approved, Adobe resumed development, and no one had a problem since. What is FlexDeveloper? Do you mean Flex Builder [now Flash Builder]? It wasn't really killed, just abandoned, if there is a difference.

sashk 9y ago

Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

make3 9y ago
I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are the best imho. The last part about the apps make Apple look like they only want to protect their financial interests in a sort of sketchy monopolistic way.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".
  - melling 9y ago
    What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?
    - secstate 9y ago
      Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid. Then there's always Unity ...
      - cjensen 9y ago
        I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it attempts to look as much as possible like a native app rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and feel" like Google has been doing lately. But it still feels wrong on the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't done" on the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on everything means that when MacOS alters or refines a UI element that Qt apps will still be doing things the old way.

amyjess 9y ago

As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm worried what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old Flash games and other stuff out there that has never been ported to HTML5 and have been abandoned by their creators. A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run this old content. We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and this is just going to make it worse.

pera 9y ago
I don't know if Adobe is planning to open source Flash, but there is GNU Gnash: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
andrioni 9y ago
It's actually pretty weird that would stop distributing it, especially since they still distribute a Shockwave Player, and well, Shockwave has been completely dead for long time now.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Even if they continue distributing it, newer operating systems and browsers may not be able to run it.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
  Shockwave Player is still supported. The latest version was released ~40 days ago[1] [1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes-shockwave-12.html https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes...
nileshtrivedi 9y ago
It's an expensive lesson to the society, not to rely on proprietary software for content creation. If we are willing to pay heed to it. Now let me go back to my open-source community discussions in Slack. ;-)
criddell 9y ago

amyjess 9y ago

amitt 9y ago

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

jmcdiesel 9y ago
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
- baby 9y ago
  The web has become less interactive, and less animated. It's all about static pages now (literally, not as .html)
- masklinn 9y ago
  > It was good for the time. So were java applets… It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible. [0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam) [1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
omg_ketchup 9y ago
Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that. It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.

otterpro 9y ago

Does this mean an end of all things related to Flash ecosystem or just Flash itself? I still have Adobe Air apps (as rare as it may seem) that I use regularly. Does anybody know the best way to migrate Adobe Air apps to HTML5? My guess is to use Adobe Animate CC, but it is not free..

WalterBright 9y ago

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

macspoofing 9y ago
I don't know about MS-Paint, but there are a number of licensing issues with simply open sourcing Flash.
- KindOne 9y ago
  MS Paint is still going to be around. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa... Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225
- WalterBright 9y ago
  If the product is dead, that means the licencors are likely to no longer make any money off it it. This means they will likely be open to open sourcing the code for free or next to free. Open sourcing dead projects do have advantages for the licencors: 1. nobody likes the code they worked hard on to be dead 2. it's valuable free marketing for their brand name 3. they can charge for support
  - pm215 9y ago
    Flash player might be dead, but that doesn't mean $THIRD_PARTY_LIBRARY that it uses isn't still being profitably licensed by its original developers. Or maybe the player uses a library that Adobe have a perpetual binary license to, but the original company that owned that library went bust a decade ago and nobody knows who owns the copyright on it now to allow a relicense. Open sourcing things does have a cost, and a big chunk of that is in running down these legalities.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

samfisher83 9y ago

It seems like instead of programming for flash player you have to program for each browsers HTML/JS quirks. People trash flash, but these browsers also have security holes. Its hard to make any really complex piece of software completely secure.

jordache 9y ago

I would wager flash can still be used to develop movie set UIs, and other internalized use cases. However those can also be utilized outside the realm of web browsers. It's benefit is a powerful full featured scripting language, in conjunction with a canvas that is easy to achieve pixel accuracy.

TallGuyShort 9y ago

Long live Homestar Runner!

komali2 9y ago

>Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for Flash “in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.” What did they mean by this line?

gpawl 9y ago
China.
- komali2 9y ago
  Why would China be interested in distributing out of date versions of Flash? And how would Adobe more aggressively ending life for these regions affect them if they're already out of date and unlicensed anyway?

k__ 9y ago

End of an era... I did my first project, when I was 14, with Flash, simple animated cartoon. Was super easy and fun. Today I read we would have Iron Man style UI if Steve Jobs didn't shot down Flash with the iPhone. The reasoning was, nothing we have today had such easy 2D/3D animation features, yes WebGL can do everything Flash can, but it's waaay more complicated. When I started programming, I liked the idea of Flex, but somehow that never cached on. Later in 2011, when I finished my CS degree, I moved to JavaScript because it was open and rapidly catching up. I liked the whole openness of JavaScript much more and like I said, the Web platform can theoretically do everything Flash can, but we need better tools. I can do rather much, because I'm a developer, but when I look at me 18 years ago, I didn't know anything about programming and still got things done with Flash. I also met a few people who build their whole career on Flash. Some media degrees here were basically 80% Flash content creation and I'm still working with people who got into IT by doing Flash, they miss it pretty much...

smaili 9y ago

For fun, here's the famous letter from Jobs himself on Flash - https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

mfabbri77 9y ago

It would be cool to see the Adobe Flash 2D vector graphics engine opensourced, to perform comparisons with similar engine all around: Agg, AmanithVG, Blend2d, Cairo, NanoVg, Skia, ...

FRex 9y ago

This is absolutely awful. There are thousands of great games on ArmorGames and Kongregate that are in Flash. I they consider open sourcing it or at least allowing open source alternatives to grow.

guessmyname 9y ago

I have a bad experience every time I have to declare taxes because the interface was built on top of Flash; many parts of the platform are broken (missing images, inconsistent styling in sub-pages, JavaScript exceptions) and I wonder what the government will do to overcome this change, three years is not much time by government standards.

oblib 9y ago

The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand why they care, but I don't. I decided not to invest in it back when Macromedia bought it because I knew it would be expensive and subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash" was great and had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's planned obsolescence and I hated the way Macromedia designed their UIs and thought they charged way too much for their products. I stopped using Adobe's plug-in on my Mac even before Jobs came out and complained about Flash. I considered it a form "spyware" and even if it wasn't it was constantly pestering me to update it and I seldom ever visited a site that used it. As I recall it was a bit of a pain to get rid of it too.

tambourine_man 9y ago
>The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. And the ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few of my clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in the early 2000s. Every year I try to convince them that they need to switch, but they can't justify the cost.
- omg_ketchup 9y ago
  Nobody "learned" Flash. You opened it up and you already knew what to do. That's the real value it provided.
  - oblib 9y ago
    That's a pretty big leap to make.
- oblib 9y ago
  I've seen some beautiful work done in Flash but the costs were always very high for both producers and their clients.
oblib 9y ago
It's funny I got down voted for that comment. I'm not sure why they'd take offense with my opinions above. I didn't say they were wrong, I just whined and complained about why I didn't use it. And whining and complaining can have merit. For example, you can whine and complain to your landlord about your A/C not working and they may not want to hear it, or pay to fix it, but it won't get fixed until you do. If you ask me, I'll tell you this has been fixed.

cestith 9y ago

Flash Player is not Flash. Flash was the name of the media creation software. Flash Player is not end-of-life because it sucks (which it does) but because in the days of HTML 5, CSS 3, ECMAScript 6/7, Canvas, WebGL, etc a plugin to show that sort of media is redundant to the browser. The creation tool lives on, although rebranded.

TekMol 9y ago

I wonder if WebAssembly is facing a similar fate. Somehow, I always have a "flashy" feeling when reading about it.

cjensen 9y ago

I feel so bad for the Scratch language, which converted to Flash at exactly the wrong time.

marcins 9y ago
Scratch is in the process of a HTML5 rewrite with the help of Google, which makes sense given that it's the key component of their CS First program. https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0 https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0 Sounds like it should be ready by 2020!
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  Honestly, I need it now. I tried to pull up Scratch for my child, and the "create" link went to a blank page without even an error message. Given that no browsers on my platform still support NSAPI plugins, there is literally no way for my child to use Scratch, and they are the perfect age for it.

stevenh 9y ago

Most actual developers currently using Adobe's products will only want to know whether Adobe AIR is safe. It is. https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772 https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772

TheRoccoB 9y ago

I made a celebration post! https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-of-flash-8a683767607f https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-of-flash-8...

drewlander 9y ago

What about homestarrunner? Will somebody think about homestarrunner!?

amelius 9y ago

This is exactly why we shouldn't rely on closed standards and closed viewers: at some point they stop to exist, and there will be content out there that we can't view any longer.

cbhl 9y ago

Rather than blaming Adobe, I hope some of you will be inspired to go out and build the next vector animation format/authoring tool for the web.

codedokode 9y ago

Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful. And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported on this platform.

TheKarateKid 9y ago
Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility. The time to move on was years ago.
- codedokode 9y ago
  XP is still more popular than many Linux distributions. Should Youtube stop supporting them too?
  - ConfucianNardin 9y ago
    Important difference: you will get support for most of those Linux distributions "for free" just by targeting modern web standards.
- j45 9y ago
  XP is still used in many countries around the world on older equipment for a variety of reasons.

BatFastard 9y ago

Flash is not dead, only the browser plug in is going away. AIR is still alive and well, for both desktop and Mobile

misticdeveloper 9y ago

Yes! HBO's lazy ass will finally be forced to get rid of their horrible Flash web player

Coffee_lover 9y ago

yeah rip haven't used it for at least a year by now, disabled or not installed in any system/browser

Marazan 9y ago

Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

Hasknewbie 9y ago
>> Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable. "Adobesque"?
rhapsodic 9y ago
> Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an active developer community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and appear to work on Flex full-time. Unfortunately, it seems the developer community is focusing most of their efforts on FlexJS, an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I don't see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework space.
- Marazan 9y ago
  If this had been Adobe's focus rather than chucking it at Apache then Adobe would be world leaders in JavaScript app development and we'd all be using their tools.
liquidise 9y ago
The Flex concept of variables being "observable" was about 8 years ahead of Backbone and later Angular, and now React-style UI updates from an event loop. It was surreal working in the Cairngorm Flex framework briefly in 2000s and then see Backbone and Angular pitched as groundbreaking years later. Only now are we getting to a similar level of elegance with loop-style UI updates.
5trokerac3 9y ago
Still haven't had a better development experience than Flex with the CLI compiler. Built some of the first web based AR engines with it and alchemy. Built giant, 80"+ touchscreen, trade show interactives with it that nobody had a clue were Flash unless you told them. Was able to port just about anything to iPad with Air for Mobile and actually build IPA files on Linux. All they needed to do was cross compile to HTML5 and barely anyone would be using Angular or Bootstrap nowadays.

meerita 9y ago

I made a living with Flash. In fact, I first made Flash before making HTML, CSS.

baalimago 9y ago

I'm foreseeing someone finding a hole in flash security around 2022 forcing adobe to update it again anyway, sorta like wannadecryptor but rip all the flashgame websites (if there even is any left)

humptechtips 9y ago

Too bad. Mozzilla will not ask me to update flash player as it is literally gone now. I must there are too much memories with flash player as there was a time when you couldn't play a video on youtube without it. #ripadobeflashplayer

Itzcoatl 9y ago

The cross platform apps arguments can easily being applied to all the {"React native", "Xamarin", etc} bullshit. IMHO.

dandare 9y ago

> Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. Cringe! Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with Macromedia that invented them 10 year earlier.

favorited 9y ago
But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included Macromedia after the acquisition?
- mulmen 9y ago
  That's disingenuous. Adobe didn't invent Flash, they bought the company that did. Adobe's strategy is based on them having resources to acquire, not create.
  - baby 9y ago
    This letter might have been written by one of the guy in the original Macromedia team.
- redindian75 9y ago
  Actually Macromedia didnt invent it either. A small company called "FutureSplash" had a software called FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia bought it in the late 90s
- thousande 9y ago
  The two companies kind of merged and Adobe continued to employ some of the original members from the Flash team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing) https://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation https://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation

baby 9y ago

This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao was just amazing to me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y). I did my fair share of games as well, there were so many of them and publishing a game on internet had never been so easy. Orisinal is beautiful (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/). Now where do people find such mini games? On mobile. The big mini-game market has shifted and we now have to pay, we now have to download each game individually. I understand Flash has had a bad track of security vulnerability, but the internet used to be magical, it's the end of an era. As methodover says it here: > The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.

j79 9y ago
While I agree, a lot of what you said isn't limited to the lack of Flash, but just trends in general. Websites could be more interactive, animated (even with sound, if desired...but please...no), and have some dimension. Unfortunately, everything looks/feels like Bootstrap-themes, because they are. I personally started off animating in Macromedia Director. I played around with Lingo. I moved to Flash / Actionscript and loved the change. In a similar fashion, I'm totally excited about the future of Animation / Games (and how Canvas plays into that). There have been some huge strides by vendors and developers to improve animation and gaming on the web, and I suspect that will continue before Flash is EoL. Flash being discontinued makes me sad, but purely in a sentimental way - I'm very excited about what comes next :)
deedubaya 9y ago
> interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions Interaction, animation, sound, and dimensions have their place in the web. That place is in a small percentage of websites. Very small. Flash was possibly a better tool for that small percentage of websites (games and something else I guess?). I, for one, am glad I can read a fucking blog article these days without it being rendered through an animated page flip which makes the shrill sound of paper tearing each time a page is "turned" with no way to mute. Yes, flat text suits me just fine.

partycoder 9y ago

The irony is that AS3 felt more Java-esque than JavaScript.

Girlang 9y ago

What about FrameMaker?

tomc1985 9y ago

What about Flash proper? I imagine sunsetting that would be devastating for the animation industry.

blondie9x 9y ago

RIP Steve Jobs https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

therethenthat 9y ago

up in heaven, Steve Jobs is smiling a bit more than usual today :)

tapsboy 9y ago

Interesting, that it will still survive in browsers till 2020. Co-incidentally, today at A+E Networks, we finally migrated all our web properties to HTML5 video playback.

xupybd 9y ago

Flash ads were terrible, a blight on the web. But Flex is so much more structured than any JS framework I've used. It wasn't super pretty but it did the job. RIP a major Flex project I support :(

digi_owl 9y ago

Now if only there were not a war of streaming protocols going on...

exodust 9y ago

Funny how they spruik their Creative Cloud applications in a message about EOL Flash. I'm guessing their marketing managers signed off on the message... "End with a positive note about how awesome we are, and how everyone can subscribe to our products and give us money on a regular basis no matter how infrequently they use the product." Adobe are so... creepy. I won't miss the pre-ticked "you want McAfee fries with that" box when updating Flash. I wonder how many people didn't see the checkbox and ended up installing McAfee unintentionally. I still use a browser extension to force Flash player on Youtube simply because it performs better than the HTML player, and provides more flexibility.

ipstas 9y ago

somebody still using this outdated pos? can they kill pdf too?

senthilnayagam 9y ago

I still don't understand why don't adobe open source the flash player, so that security team and browser teams can look into it and maintain a secure runtime.

VicYu 9y ago

I see, you already have Animate CC.

qxxx 9y ago

I installed Adobe Animate last week, it looks really similar to flash, they even use very similar concepts. I didn't try to write some code yet, but it looks like they use some kind of an action script.

barbaricmelons 9y ago
It's basically Flash, it just exports differently. Same program, different name to avoid confusion with the Flash platform. Basically the only thing that's going away for the typical Animate user is the swf, everything else will remain as Animate exports to html5 and js while using as3.

geekamongus 9y ago

And there was much rejoicing.

wooptoo 9y ago

That's quite a commitment for a company, to maintain a piece of software for 25-ish years. I have fond memories of using Macromedia Flash 4 and 5 many years ago to create animations and simple scripted pages. I loved how well integrated everything was. But I still believe that things are better as they are today: we have more choices in frameworks, better standards, and some great web services which work well on both mobile and desktop. That being said today I uninstalled the Flash plugin preemptively on my machines just because I am not needing it for any website I commonly use.

eadmund 9y ago

I miss Flash; it was nice to be able to browse the web normally, with Flash disabled, and then to enable it only for a single function on a single page. It was relatively rare, and it didn't destroy the web. With JavaScript, I basically have to enable it everywhere, as the web has been destroyed and I must now grant practically every site execute permissions on my computer in order to read content.

rayvd 9y ago
This. That and HTML5 autoplay is super annoying and there doesn't seem to be a bulletproof way to stop it (at least the various plugins I've tried).

thekevan 9y ago

I wonder what will happen to large Flash games sites like Kongregate.

flohofwoe 9y ago
Here's a recent Kongregate blog post about the topic. HTML5 game uploads have been growing steadily, and there are now more new HTML5 games uploaded than Flash games: http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/ http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/
- thekevan 9y ago
  I should have done some more research before commenting. Also, there is the new effort to open source Flash.

mmmnt 9y ago

Noooo, whats next? The real player?

j45 9y ago

While Flash Player is meeting it's end, the transferability of existing investments in AS3 to a new endpoint is tough not to imagine due to the kinship of ECMAscript with both JS and AS3. If AS3 could compile to HTML5/JS endpoints, existing, or archival can in some part live on or be repurposed. The question will be how close it can get compared to existing solutions. There is likely several billions of dollars (likely more) of content that will need to be recreated, and not all of it will, or can be. With Flash Professional becoming Adobe Animate CC, it wouldn't be surprising if this transferability becomes more of a prominent format. Adobe has been at the core of a lot of rich media formats both online and files with PDF and Flash, and I expect them not to disappear in the world of the tooling to create such experiences. There is some stewardship and timing on this announcement from Adobe that says the right things to those those who are quietly very excited by WebAssembly, and now have Adobe and others starting to look at it the same way.

kensey 9y ago

I remember in 1993-1994 playing Cosmic Osmo on a Mac. All the old pre-Myst Cyan games (Manhole, Osmo, Spelunx) were basically HyperCard stacks, which didn't directly allow for any but the crudest animation. But Cyan had integrated MacroMind VideoWorks, which later became Macromedia Director, into Osmo. The effect over other HyperCard stacks was striking. You could actually play little minigames in the Osmo world. Then I went off to college the next year and found out about the whole "web" thing, and again everything was flat and mostly static. Then Macromedia Shockwave and Flash and Java came along, and it was just like Osmo vs. Manhole, only more so. For a long time, your browser install wasn't complete till you had Java, RealPlayer, Shockwave and Flash installed (and later, QuickTime). (For nostalgia purposes, Steam has all the Cyan games from Manhole on up as a bundle; you can also play the original Manhole/Osmo/Spelunx in the SheepShaver emulator if you can get hold of firmware plus OS and game discs.)

Great_Mogul 9y ago

I get that people hate Flash now, but for a long time, Flash was the cutting edge of interactive design. Honestly, I don't see that level of experimentation or creativity in interactive stuff these days..

Goodlooking 9y ago

There still isn't, as far as I'm aware, any software that combines an artwork pipeline and programming so seamlessly as Flash did. Also I'm not even sure if there's a mainstream vector graphics rasterizer out there that is even remotely as powerful as Flash's was/is. Initially HTML5 + JS was so extremely lackluster that I cursed Steve Jobs for instigating this crusade, but I agree it is necessary that Flash dies and we replace it with something completely open.

betatest 9y ago

Of course not. It was planed originally in 2012 to happen in 2015. HTML5 is STILL not ready. And it STILL won't be in 2025. All you haters can downvote me to oblivion new for saying THE TRUTH (drops mic)