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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 b

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).
  - Joeri 9y ago
    I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage, one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations) was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing abilities locked into a compromised platform.
    - omg_ketchup 9y ago
      Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components were nice.
- deleted 9y ago
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seanalltogether 9y ago
Flash/Flex had amazing tooling. I still pop open Flash from time to time to make animated gifs. For building custom interfaces, Flex was way better then what iOS and Android currently provide.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I haven't worked with Flex that much but from what I remember their tooling was pretty nice. I think if they had rendered HTML instead of flash applets they could have done something better than whatever a lot of the modern JS frameworks are.
petre 9y ago
> And there aren't even better tools to replace it. Haxe? http://haxe.org/ http://haxe.org/
- Nav_Panel 9y ago
  This seems to have very little to do with "tools for 2D animations and games". For starters, it seems to be a "toolkit" and the first example is a piece of code. In Flash, you can open up the program and make an animation without knowing any code whatsoever. I can guarantee a site like Newgrounds would never have existed if all those teenage flash animators needed to understand object-oriented programming paradigms first.
- Drakim 9y ago
  Haxe is an awesome programming language, but that's not really what he was talking about: > The tools for 2D animations and games
- pier25 9y ago
  I think Haxe (the language) is awesome, but the toolkit as a whole has too many moving pieces. I tried to do some stuff with OpenFL back in 2014, and sometimes the problem was in the C++ backend, sometimes in OpenFL, sometimes in Lime... It sounds nice on paper: write in Haxe and the magic will convert it to any target, but when each piece of a build chain that sustains the toolkit is maintained and developed independently (sometimes by a single dev) you really don't have assurances about long term support.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    The standard library is also very limited so you end up writing language/target specific code that you can't just recompile for a different language or target without a rewrite.
threeseed 9y ago
They should've open sourced it and invested heavily in security, stability and performance. People blamed Apple back in the day for not including it on iOS but given that how many critical bugs have been found in the time since then you can't blame them.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  They still have time. There's nothing stopping them from doing this. It would certainly help archival efforts and benefit people who do animations.
  - sushisource 9y ago
    Not much money in it, though.
    - gameshot911 9y ago
      Vs all the cash in EOLing it? Unless the idea is to push people to buy a newer product?
    - toyg 9y ago
      A company like Adobe, constantly struggling with accusations of greed and carelessness, should consider this as a PR exercise and budget accordingly. My guess is that they won't do it because there might be proprietary stuff they don't own, in the codebase. Macromedia wasn't that huge a company, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they embedded 3rd party components here or there. At that point, untangling legals might become very hard.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    I wish they'd just come up with Flash X (sub X for whatever), where the tooling was flash in a flash interface, and geared towards react in a flex-like (flashbuilder) interface. Where the output was a directory with assets that could run directly in a browser/iframe, and svg for vector assets.
- problems 9y ago
djsumdog 9y ago
A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web app platform than Java applets. Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)
- zwily 9y ago
  Looks dead, but https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon
  - RussianCow 9y ago
    More up to date, but still looks dead: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway
  - bsmedberg 9y ago
    Shumway was a followup to this. Flash -> Gordon -> Shumway ;-) But they're all dormant/dead. Compatibility is really hard.
    - Melanie_ 9y ago
      I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do, ========http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682 http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.
cpeterso 9y ago
Flash also made distribution very easy: all the code and assets could be bundled in one compressed SWF file. Now we have lots of js files that are minimized and bundled and other loose asset files.
- ivm 9y ago
  And the size was great – we were keeping many games with art, animations, music, and effects under 1.5 megabytes.
- pzone 9y ago
  This is the biggest letdown of Flash being discontinued. How can an artist distribute interactives as a single file now? How can a gallery site host user-uploaded interactive animations without allowing its users a platform to inject arbitrary javascript? (At least .swf provides an attempt at sandboxing.)
simion314 9y ago
And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  Not sure I agree. If you use some of the good transpiling languages that output JS, the syntax is far better than what AS3 had. In TypeScript/Flow, for example, you get "real" generics syntax while in AS3 you had the magic Vector<> stuff and that's it. And on top of that you have union types, dynamic interfaces, etc. And thanks to JavaScript VM performance, running the same code is ahead of what the Flash VM could do. AS3 was way ahead of its time when introduced, but browsers have moved past it since it stopped evolving. Flex vs frameworks is more of a matter of preference and contextual requirements so I can't comment on that.
  - simion314 9y ago
    I do not disagree, but the comparisons are not fair,first though , I am not advocating of people building new stuff with Flash so I am not trying to convince you to use it in present day. -comparing a new language TS with the old AS3 is not fair, when AS3 was around TS was not yet here, also AS3 is compiled and in theory games that are well coded in AS3 should be faster -comparing new js frameworks and libraries that are not built-in to the platform with built in Flash/Flex feature is not fair, we should compare the built-in stuff in the browser vs built-in stuff in Flash/Flex , and if we add frameworks for html/js then there are frameworks that people used for Flash/Flex. P.S. If I had a choice in what tools to use in a new SPA I would chose today TS and React(or something like react), if you have experience with React are there good components already built, I mean good that are not buggy(dropdowns going offscreen, or if you have more then one component things go crazy), sometime back when I checked there were only basic stuff and wrappers for jQuerry quality ones.
    - whatever_dude 9y ago
      > comparing a new language TS with the old AS3 is not fair Sure, but that's the comparison invited when one says that AS3 is still better than what's out there today.
GuiA 9y ago
Not uncommon for these kind of giant step backwards in the world of computing. I was in a plane the other day sitting next to an elderly gentleman who saw me using Apple products. He then proceeded to tell me how he's been on mac since 1984, and absolutely loved Apple products before, but now he's stuck on OS X 10.6 because it's the last version that supports AppleWorks, a tool he's been using for over 20 years. No currently supported tool gives him the flexibility and power he had with Apple Works - embedding multiple documents of different types (spreadsheet, word processing, etc) within one another, not to mention the thousands of AppleWorks documents he's accumulated over the years. However, most websites and new products don't work on 10.6, so he has another modern computer just for browsing the web. (George R R Martin similarly has an old computer sitting around just to use his favorite 20 year old word processor of choice) Flash is similar - I have animator friends who maintain an old copy of Windows XP because they love Flash's interface and no other tool comes close. The news yesterday about MSPaint potentially going away (I think MS back pedaled on it?) falls in the same category - powerful tools that pretty much can't be improved upon that get randomly EoL'd. Another thing that happens pretty often - tools randomly losing functionality in an update because the developer felt that it should be removed for whatever reason. Maybe there would be a niche for a minimal Linux distro that comes with a set of powerful, minimalistic creation tools (office documents, multimedia manipulation + viewing, etc - whatever covers the computing needs of 90% of the population) that gets updated with security updates etc but has 1) backwards compatibility and 2) a user interface that mostly never changes as primary goals.
- zippergz 9y ago
  My experience is that the "whatever reason" to remove features is that they're a pain to maintain (often in ways that aren't obvious to the end user) and only a tiny number of people use them. It sucks for the people who do use them (and believe me, I have been in that position myself), but it also sucks to not have new development happen because all of the resources are being consumed maintaining something that 10 people care about.
- ianai 9y ago
  You can chalk that up to a market failure. Those products you mentioned all "won" the market and enjoyed monopolistic power. Had the economy allowed for more variety then their EOLs wouldn't be fragmenting.
dalbasal 9y ago
Failure is a bit strong, IMO. Flash played a role, and now it is done. Meanwhile, it was (as you say) years ahead of standards and the most ubiquitous non-standard standard on the web. In early years it let web designers expirement. Most of those expirements went badly, but many ulitmately preceded and shaped the web of the "future." Animated interactive UIs, video, audio, rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first and challenged html+ to keep up (with the better parts). We've all been talking s--t about flash for years. But ultimately it was in use because it was useful and the web may have turned out worse without it. On tools, this is inevitable. Tools don't last forever and professional these days need to retool periodically. As flash exits left, there is room for new entrants into the 'tools for ex-flash designers' segment.
- baby 9y ago
  > rounded corners I don't see this as being a flash thing. You could do that in paint, photoshop or fireworks or ...
  - exodust 9y ago
    Rounded corners as in on the fly rounded corners, as in vector rounded corners. Flash was first on the web for rounded corners that weren't pre-created bitmaps. It's not a big deal, but it's a fact.
    - baby 9y ago
      Fireworks and illustrators were vector based graphic softwares as well. I don't think you're right.
- Someone 9y ago
  "rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first" I doubt it. The Mac had rounded corners in may 1981 (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...), and the OS had windows with rounded corners when it shipped in 1984 (for an example, look at the calculator in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History)
BLanen 9y ago
Adobe now has "Adobe Animate" though.
- TheCoreh 9y ago
  Yeah, the Flash creation tools will remain in development, simply rebranded as "Animate". The plugin is no longer needed, since Animate can export to HTML/JS/SVG or to video files. This is by far the best outcome: We get to keep the awesome creation tools, but it exports on free/open formats.
  - exodust 9y ago
    You're forgetting that Flash had a lot more than animation at heart. What about the components? They were very useful for both animators and casual developers to easily create interactive animation - which was the whole point. Static animation was only the beginning. The best Flash was interactive. A huge variety of components from the Flash community. You were presented with an interface within Flash where you could configure the component's options, and very little code was needed to get professional results quickly. Adobe Animate has nothing like that, and besides Adobe only makes their CC stuff available by subscription which is unappealing to a lot of people.
ovulator 9y ago
It was also a scapegoat as a conduit for obnoxious ads. Nothing about the technology made ads worse, the technology was easy to use so people used it. Ads are as shitty as ever in HTML5.
- laumars 9y ago
  You need to remember that at the time HTML5 wasn't around so if a developer wanted something more "multimedia" then it meant resorting to Flash. This meant that Flash ads had a lot of annoying traits like audio effect which you wouldn't get with HTML+JPEG/GIF ads. Plus even back then Flash had a tendency to grind modest hardware to a halt (particularly if you were running OS X or Linux). So Flash definitely made ads worse. However whether you want to blame Flash or the developers for that is really just a philisophical question. But suffice to say the most annoying adverts around that time wouldn't have been possible without Flash.
emehrkay 9y ago
I agree with you. Before working with flash I scoffed at it, but after I realized just how good the IDE was/is. Just how good the resulting executable were (without the browser). Everything that HTML5/CSS3 is trying to be, Flash has been for years. Yeah it is closed and buggy, but it filled a gap that pushed the web forward. And having to learn AS3 allowed me to easily get into the newer JS stuff later
- kbenson 9y ago
  You know, it's pretty easy to make a fast, responsive fun car to drive if you ignore all the safety precautions required to make it street legal. As a bonus, when all you have is a steel tubing chassis and no body panels, working on the car and adding new components is really easy. That doesn't mean we should all drive that type of car, or allow them on the public roads.
deleted 9y ago
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tareqak 9y ago
Why can't they make Flash better and open like other people did with JavaScript? e.g. emScripten, WebAssembly, and WebGL I left this question intentionally vague / and possibly wrong in order to give the person responding some leeway and the opportunity to dispel some myths that people might have about JavaScript technologies and the history of both JavaScript and Flash e.g. me.
- reboog711 9y ago
  Flash player, by definition, is a browser plugin. Most browsers are closing [or have closed] their plugin APIs so this makes sense. I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    > I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps". That appears to be the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400
talmand 9y ago
No, the animation tools live on in Adobe Animate. The announcement concerns the Flash Player.
notatoad 9y ago
The tools still exist as "Adobe Animate CC". It exports HTML5 and video files now instead of *.swf. This is only the death of the player software, not the toolkit.
- fragsworth 9y ago
  Adobe's marketing team dropped the ball on this one, and now it seems like there's a ton of FUD about what they're doing. In 2020 the Flash player shouldn't be needed any more, because HTML5 will hopefully be good enough in every browser by that point. All the rest of their tools are still going to be useful. Why they didn't make this clear to everyone just baffles me.
egypturnash 9y ago
So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to scratch the itch to make something move. The SWF format, and the plugin that plays it, is going away. The program that started life as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, is not going away. It got rebranded as Adobe Animate last year. Animators working on stuff for Youtube or TV probably haven't touched a .SWF in years. You export a .MOV and post that to Youtube. Or you drop it in a video editor along with the .MOVs of all your other scenes for this project. The Los Angeles TV animation industry still uses Flash for some projects; check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... sometime, you'll probably recognize a few shows you or your friends love. If you're using it to make interactive content? You can export to HTML5 now. And to WebGL and WebAssembly. I haven't ever done that myself, I dunno how much hassle it is to convert an old Actionscript/.SWF project to those platforms. I would assume that the 'Animate' rebranding coincided with Adobe feeling that the HTML5 capabilities for interaction were on par with .SWF's; they've been working on that ever since Jobs refused to let the Flash plugin onto iThings. .SWF is dead, and good riddance. Its plugin was a CPU-hogging binary blob that needed regular updates. It was amazing back in 2000 when it was all we had; it's a lot less amazing now. The program that compiled a bunch of art and code into .SWF files will live on. The penultimate sentence of Adobe's press release? "...we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC...". The tool ain't going nowhere. The tool's just distancing itself from its now-much-loathed first export format. But I would bet money that Animate's file format - the .PSD to its Photoshop - is gonna continue to be called .FLA for the next ten years.
- striking 9y ago
  You can use this handy tool to convert your SWFs to transparent MOVs without importing to Adobe Animate/Flash: https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen You won't get audio from it, but a lot of other stuff works.
- prodikl 9y ago
  yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I hope it still gets developed. i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR
mikestew 9y ago
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. One can say that about a lot of things. FoxPro made me a good living for probably 6-7 years, and it got me in the door at Microsoft. I would also argue that for creating a data-centric LOB application, there are not better tools to replace it (even to this day). But times changes, technology moves on, yada, yada. Now I do other stuff with other tools. I miss that little smirking fox logo, I miss slapping together a CRUD app in no time at all, but FP had it's shortcomings, too, so I try not to get too nostalgic about how it was better in the old days. As for Flash, well, I try to stay away from web dev, but I won't miss it taking down my browser on a regular basis. In fact, I miss it so little that I haven't had Flash installed on a machine in years (and promptly rip it right the hell off there if a client's policy sticks it on the machine they hand me).
zackbrown 9y ago
> The tools ... in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. Very much this. The next-closest tech, HTML5, offers the same multimedia capabilities and runtime ubiquity as Flash— but no native tooling for designers/animators. Instead, every design and interaction must be funneled from design tool through code, handed off from designer-brain to engineer-brain, across each and every iteration. Productivity and creative expression are a couple of the casualties of this "hand-off" workflow. > There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Have you seen Haiku? https://haiku.ai https://haiku.ai (I'm on the Haiku team.) We're young but we've got some funding, a functional product, and some big-brand early users. We're going squarely after "modern Flash without the plugin," integrated deeply with modern design/dev tools & workflows. It's a hard problem we're tackling, and we've still got some work ahead of us—but each of us on the team believes so strongly in the need for a solution (as you outlined here) that we're doing something about it.
shmerl 9y ago
No one stopped Adobe from open sourcing those tools, and making them produce JavaScript / WebAssembly instead of Flash.
greggman 9y ago
I don't have any numbers but my impression is the number of people making games in unity dwarfs the number of people who ever made games in flash. it's ridiculously easy now. any coffee shop I visit I see several people in unity.
- exodust 9y ago
  Yet try to find Unity games on the web to play right now, and you won't find many, and oh look you need to download a plugin to play them.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
I'm not so sure Adobe failed. It was ahead of it's time, and the slowly but surely the market caught up. And then Jobs put the nail in the coffin. Some technologies are meant to come, leave their mark, and then go. That's just the way it is sometimes. But that doesn't mean Adobe failed.
deleted 9y ago
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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).
- Joeri 9y ago
  I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage, one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations) was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing abilities locked into a compromised platform.
  - omg_ketchup 9y ago
    Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components were nice.
deleted 9y ago
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seanalltogether 9y ago

Flash/Flex had amazing tooling. I still pop open Flash from time to time to make animated gifs. For building custom interfaces, Flex was way better then what iOS and Android currently provide.

maxxxxx 9y ago
I haven't worked with Flex that much but from what I remember their tooling was pretty nice. I think if they had rendered HTML instead of flash applets they could have done something better than whatever a lot of the modern JS frameworks are.

petre 9y ago

> And there aren't even better tools to replace it. Haxe? http://haxe.org/ http://haxe.org/

Nav_Panel 9y ago
This seems to have very little to do with "tools for 2D animations and games". For starters, it seems to be a "toolkit" and the first example is a piece of code. In Flash, you can open up the program and make an animation without knowing any code whatsoever. I can guarantee a site like Newgrounds would never have existed if all those teenage flash animators needed to understand object-oriented programming paradigms first.
Drakim 9y ago
Haxe is an awesome programming language, but that's not really what he was talking about: > The tools for 2D animations and games
pier25 9y ago
I think Haxe (the language) is awesome, but the toolkit as a whole has too many moving pieces. I tried to do some stuff with OpenFL back in 2014, and sometimes the problem was in the C++ backend, sometimes in OpenFL, sometimes in Lime... It sounds nice on paper: write in Haxe and the magic will convert it to any target, but when each piece of a build chain that sustains the toolkit is maintained and developed independently (sometimes by a single dev) you really don't have assurances about long term support.
- imtringued 9y ago
  The standard library is also very limited so you end up writing language/target specific code that you can't just recompile for a different language or target without a rewrite.

threeseed 9y ago

They should've open sourced it and invested heavily in security, stability and performance. People blamed Apple back in the day for not including it on iOS but given that how many critical bugs have been found in the time since then you can't blame them.

rocky1138 9y ago
They still have time. There's nothing stopping them from doing this. It would certainly help archival efforts and benefit people who do animations.
- sushisource 9y ago
  Not much money in it, though.
  - gameshot911 9y ago
    Vs all the cash in EOLing it? Unless the idea is to push people to buy a newer product?
  - toyg 9y ago
    A company like Adobe, constantly struggling with accusations of greed and carelessness, should consider this as a PR exercise and budget accordingly. My guess is that they won't do it because there might be proprietary stuff they don't own, in the codebase. Macromedia wasn't that huge a company, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they embedded 3rd party components here or there. At that point, untangling legals might become very hard.
- tracker1 9y ago
  I wish they'd just come up with Flash X (sub X for whatever), where the tooling was flash in a flash interface, and geared towards react in a flex-like (flashbuilder) interface. Where the output was a directory with assets that could run directly in a browser/iframe, and svg for vector assets.
problems 9y ago

djsumdog 9y ago

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web app platform than Java applets. Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)

zwily 9y ago
Looks dead, but https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon
- RussianCow 9y ago
  More up to date, but still looks dead: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway
- bsmedberg 9y ago
  Shumway was a followup to this. Flash -> Gordon -> Shumway ;-) But they're all dormant/dead. Compatibility is really hard.
  - Melanie_ 9y ago
    I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do, ========http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682 http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682
wlesieutre 9y ago
I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.

cpeterso 9y ago

Flash also made distribution very easy: all the code and assets could be bundled in one compressed SWF file. Now we have lots of js files that are minimized and bundled and other loose asset files.

ivm 9y ago
And the size was great – we were keeping many games with art, animations, music, and effects under 1.5 megabytes.
pzone 9y ago
This is the biggest letdown of Flash being discontinued. How can an artist distribute interactives as a single file now? How can a gallery site host user-uploaded interactive animations without allowing its users a platform to inject arbitrary javascript? (At least .swf provides an attempt at sandboxing.)

simion314 9y ago

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

whatever_dude 9y ago
Not sure I agree. If you use some of the good transpiling languages that output JS, the syntax is far better than what AS3 had. In TypeScript/Flow, for example, you get "real" generics syntax while in AS3 you had the magic Vector<> stuff and that's it. And on top of that you have union types, dynamic interfaces, etc. And thanks to JavaScript VM performance, running the same code is ahead of what the Flash VM could do. AS3 was way ahead of its time when introduced, but browsers have moved past it since it stopped evolving. Flex vs frameworks is more of a matter of preference and contextual requirements so I can't comment on that.
- simion314 9y ago
  I do not disagree, but the comparisons are not fair,first though , I am not advocating of people building new stuff with Flash so I am not trying to convince you to use it in present day. -comparing a new language TS with the old AS3 is not fair, when AS3 was around TS was not yet here, also AS3 is compiled and in theory games that are well coded in AS3 should be faster -comparing new js frameworks and libraries that are not built-in to the platform with built in Flash/Flex feature is not fair, we should compare the built-in stuff in the browser vs built-in stuff in Flash/Flex , and if we add frameworks for html/js then there are frameworks that people used for Flash/Flex. P.S. If I had a choice in what tools to use in a new SPA I would chose today TS and React(or something like react), if you have experience with React are there good components already built, I mean good that are not buggy(dropdowns going offscreen, or if you have more then one component things go crazy), sometime back when I checked there were only basic stuff and wrappers for jQuerry quality ones.
  - whatever_dude 9y ago
    > comparing a new language TS with the old AS3 is not fair Sure, but that's the comparison invited when one says that AS3 is still better than what's out there today.

GuiA 9y ago

Not uncommon for these kind of giant step backwards in the world of computing. I was in a plane the other day sitting next to an elderly gentleman who saw me using Apple products. He then proceeded to tell me how he's been on mac since 1984, and absolutely loved Apple products before, but now he's stuck on OS X 10.6 because it's the last version that supports AppleWorks, a tool he's been using for over 20 years. No currently supported tool gives him the flexibility and power he had with Apple Works - embedding multiple documents of different types (spreadsheet, word processing, etc) within one another, not to mention the thousands of AppleWorks documents he's accumulated over the years. However, most websites and new products don't work on 10.6, so he has another modern computer just for browsing the web. (George R R Martin similarly has an old computer sitting around just to use his favorite 20 year old word processor of choice) Flash is similar - I have animator friends who maintain an old copy of Windows XP because they love Flash's interface and no other tool comes close. The news yesterday about MSPaint potentially going away (I think MS back pedaled on it?) falls in the same category - powerful tools that pretty much can't be improved upon that get randomly EoL'd. Another thing that happens pretty often - tools randomly losing functionality in an update because the developer felt that it should be removed for whatever reason. Maybe there would be a niche for a minimal Linux distro that comes with a set of powerful, minimalistic creation tools (office documents, multimedia manipulation + viewing, etc - whatever covers the computing needs of 90% of the population) that gets updated with security updates etc but has 1) backwards compatibility and 2) a user interface that mostly never changes as primary goals.

zippergz 9y ago
My experience is that the "whatever reason" to remove features is that they're a pain to maintain (often in ways that aren't obvious to the end user) and only a tiny number of people use them. It sucks for the people who do use them (and believe me, I have been in that position myself), but it also sucks to not have new development happen because all of the resources are being consumed maintaining something that 10 people care about.
ianai 9y ago
You can chalk that up to a market failure. Those products you mentioned all "won" the market and enjoyed monopolistic power. Had the economy allowed for more variety then their EOLs wouldn't be fragmenting.

dalbasal 9y ago

Failure is a bit strong, IMO. Flash played a role, and now it is done. Meanwhile, it was (as you say) years ahead of standards and the most ubiquitous non-standard standard on the web. In early years it let web designers expirement. Most of those expirements went badly, but many ulitmately preceded and shaped the web of the "future." Animated interactive UIs, video, audio, rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first and challenged html+ to keep up (with the better parts). We've all been talking s--t about flash for years. But ultimately it was in use because it was useful and the web may have turned out worse without it. On tools, this is inevitable. Tools don't last forever and professional these days need to retool periodically. As flash exits left, there is room for new entrants into the 'tools for ex-flash designers' segment.

baby 9y ago
> rounded corners I don't see this as being a flash thing. You could do that in paint, photoshop or fireworks or ...
- exodust 9y ago
  Rounded corners as in on the fly rounded corners, as in vector rounded corners. Flash was first on the web for rounded corners that weren't pre-created bitmaps. It's not a big deal, but it's a fact.
  - baby 9y ago
    Fireworks and illustrators were vector based graphic softwares as well. I don't think you're right.
Someone 9y ago
"rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first" I doubt it. The Mac had rounded corners in may 1981 (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...), and the OS had windows with rounded corners when it shipped in 1984 (for an example, look at the calculator in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History)

BLanen 9y ago

Adobe now has "Adobe Animate" though.

TheCoreh 9y ago
Yeah, the Flash creation tools will remain in development, simply rebranded as "Animate". The plugin is no longer needed, since Animate can export to HTML/JS/SVG or to video files. This is by far the best outcome: We get to keep the awesome creation tools, but it exports on free/open formats.
- exodust 9y ago
  You're forgetting that Flash had a lot more than animation at heart. What about the components? They were very useful for both animators and casual developers to easily create interactive animation - which was the whole point. Static animation was only the beginning. The best Flash was interactive. A huge variety of components from the Flash community. You were presented with an interface within Flash where you could configure the component's options, and very little code was needed to get professional results quickly. Adobe Animate has nothing like that, and besides Adobe only makes their CC stuff available by subscription which is unappealing to a lot of people.

ovulator 9y ago

It was also a scapegoat as a conduit for obnoxious ads. Nothing about the technology made ads worse, the technology was easy to use so people used it. Ads are as shitty as ever in HTML5.

laumars 9y ago
You need to remember that at the time HTML5 wasn't around so if a developer wanted something more "multimedia" then it meant resorting to Flash. This meant that Flash ads had a lot of annoying traits like audio effect which you wouldn't get with HTML+JPEG/GIF ads. Plus even back then Flash had a tendency to grind modest hardware to a halt (particularly if you were running OS X or Linux). So Flash definitely made ads worse. However whether you want to blame Flash or the developers for that is really just a philisophical question. But suffice to say the most annoying adverts around that time wouldn't have been possible without Flash.

emehrkay 9y ago

I agree with you. Before working with flash I scoffed at it, but after I realized just how good the IDE was/is. Just how good the resulting executable were (without the browser). Everything that HTML5/CSS3 is trying to be, Flash has been for years. Yeah it is closed and buggy, but it filled a gap that pushed the web forward. And having to learn AS3 allowed me to easily get into the newer JS stuff later

kbenson 9y ago
You know, it's pretty easy to make a fast, responsive fun car to drive if you ignore all the safety precautions required to make it street legal. As a bonus, when all you have is a steel tubing chassis and no body panels, working on the car and adding new components is really easy. That doesn't mean we should all drive that type of car, or allow them on the public roads.

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tareqak 9y ago

Why can't they make Flash better and open like other people did with JavaScript? e.g. emScripten, WebAssembly, and WebGL I left this question intentionally vague / and possibly wrong in order to give the person responding some leeway and the opportunity to dispel some myths that people might have about JavaScript technologies and the history of both JavaScript and Flash e.g. me.

reboog711 9y ago
Flash player, by definition, is a browser plugin. Most browsers are closing [or have closed] their plugin APIs so this makes sense. I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  > I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps". That appears to be the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400

talmand 9y ago

No, the animation tools live on in Adobe Animate. The announcement concerns the Flash Player.

notatoad 9y ago

The tools still exist as "Adobe Animate CC". It exports HTML5 and video files now instead of *.swf. This is only the death of the player software, not the toolkit.

fragsworth 9y ago
Adobe's marketing team dropped the ball on this one, and now it seems like there's a ton of FUD about what they're doing. In 2020 the Flash player shouldn't be needed any more, because HTML5 will hopefully be good enough in every browser by that point. All the rest of their tools are still going to be useful. Why they didn't make this clear to everyone just baffles me.

egypturnash 9y ago

So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to scratch the itch to make something move. The SWF format, and the plugin that plays it, is going away. The program that started life as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, is not going away. It got rebranded as Adobe Animate last year. Animators working on stuff for Youtube or TV probably haven't touched a .SWF in years. You export a .MOV and post that to Youtube. Or you drop it in a video editor along with the .MOVs of all your other scenes for this project. The Los Angeles TV animation industry still uses Flash for some projects; check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... sometime, you'll probably recognize a few shows you or your friends love. If you're using it to make interactive content? You can export to HTML5 now. And to WebGL and WebAssembly. I haven't ever done that myself, I dunno how much hassle it is to convert an old Actionscript/.SWF project to those platforms. I would assume that the 'Animate' rebranding coincided with Adobe feeling that the HTML5 capabilities for interaction were on par with .SWF's; they've been working on that ever since Jobs refused to let the Flash plugin onto iThings. .SWF is dead, and good riddance. Its plugin was a CPU-hogging binary blob that needed regular updates. It was amazing back in 2000 when it was all we had; it's a lot less amazing now. The program that compiled a bunch of art and code into .SWF files will live on. The penultimate sentence of Adobe's press release? "...we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC...". The tool ain't going nowhere. The tool's just distancing itself from its now-much-loathed first export format. But I would bet money that Animate's file format - the .PSD to its Photoshop - is gonna continue to be called .FLA for the next ten years.

striking 9y ago
You can use this handy tool to convert your SWFs to transparent MOVs without importing to Adobe Animate/Flash: https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen https://github.com/AaronShea/Silkscreen You won't get audio from it, but a lot of other stuff works.
prodikl 9y ago
yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I hope it still gets developed. i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR

mikestew 9y ago

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. One can say that about a lot of things. FoxPro made me a good living for probably 6-7 years, and it got me in the door at Microsoft. I would also argue that for creating a data-centric LOB application, there are not better tools to replace it (even to this day). But times changes, technology moves on, yada, yada. Now I do other stuff with other tools. I miss that little smirking fox logo, I miss slapping together a CRUD app in no time at all, but FP had it's shortcomings, too, so I try not to get too nostalgic about how it was better in the old days. As for Flash, well, I try to stay away from web dev, but I won't miss it taking down my browser on a regular basis. In fact, I miss it so little that I haven't had Flash installed on a machine in years (and promptly rip it right the hell off there if a client's policy sticks it on the machine they hand me).

zackbrown 9y ago

> The tools ... in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. Very much this. The next-closest tech, HTML5, offers the same multimedia capabilities and runtime ubiquity as Flash— but no native tooling for designers/animators. Instead, every design and interaction must be funneled from design tool through code, handed off from designer-brain to engineer-brain, across each and every iteration. Productivity and creative expression are a couple of the casualties of this "hand-off" workflow. > There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Have you seen Haiku? https://haiku.ai https://haiku.ai (I'm on the Haiku team.) We're young but we've got some funding, a functional product, and some big-brand early users. We're going squarely after "modern Flash without the plugin," integrated deeply with modern design/dev tools & workflows. It's a hard problem we're tackling, and we've still got some work ahead of us—but each of us on the team believes so strongly in the need for a solution (as you outlined here) that we're doing something about it.

shmerl 9y ago

No one stopped Adobe from open sourcing those tools, and making them produce JavaScript / WebAssembly instead of Flash.

greggman 9y ago

I don't have any numbers but my impression is the number of people making games in unity dwarfs the number of people who ever made games in flash. it's ridiculously easy now. any coffee shop I visit I see several people in unity.

exodust 9y ago
Yet try to find Unity games on the web to play right now, and you won't find many, and oh look you need to download a plugin to play them.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

I'm not so sure Adobe failed. It was ahead of it's time, and the slowly but surely the market caught up. And then Jobs put the nail in the coffin. Some technologies are meant to come, leave their mark, and then go. That's just the way it is sometimes. But that doesn't mean Adobe failed.

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