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To me, flash was like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked al

• gameswithgo 8y ago
  flash used to make websites was garbage, but used to make games that run in the browser it was very nice.
  • neospice 8y ago
    It seems the trend was that it was nice for makers, not so much for users.
    • izacus 8y ago
      Which, ironically, is the case with modern Electron apps and bloated JavaScript UI frameworks as well.
      • balfirevic 8y ago
        I'm a user of several Electron apps and they are very nice for me too.
        • weiming 8y ago
          Electron (or embedded Chromium, etc.) is lazy development: save time on cross-platform work at the expense of your users' CPU overhead/battery time/SSD life. Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.
          • m90 8y ago
            And then your Mac App ignores all of the people not on Mac. I'm not saying everything should be Electron, but it certainly has usecases just like native does.
            • weiming 8y ago
              Doesn't have to be a Mac only app. But be considerate to your users and use the best available SDKs for each platform, not one size fits all.
              • always_good 8y ago
                If resources were infinite and there were never any trade-offs, most people would agree with you. But what's your game plan under other circumstances? Do nothing?
                • weiming 8y ago
                  If you're a small-time indie dev, do what works so that you can ship. If you're a well-funded co. like Spotify, GitHub, or Slack, however...
                  • always_good 8y ago
                    You're making the mistake of thinking that everything is just a technical challenge that you can throw money at, and that technical superiority is the only trade-off. Just because an enterprise has funding doesn't mean it's wealthy in other, more scarce things like organizational capital. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the client developers at Slack would love to split off into dedicated platform teams and do a rewrite. We as developers love that shit. But you should try to understand why these enterprises make these trade-offs and why they are still in these positions in spite of how much disposable money you think they have.
          • taco_emoji 8y ago
            I think calling it "lazy" is uncharitable, unless you're also going to chastise developers who target only one platform -- they're likewise not doing the cross-platform work. Manually targeting multiple platforms is really hard. How could one person possibly keep track of all the battery-saving API changes in OSX, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android? Yeah, it's annoying that Electron apps are so bloated. But the alternative would be > 50% of people can't use those apps at all because you only targeted one platform.
        • anoncoward111 8y ago
          Sorry but I shouldn't have to use 2GB of RAM to browse the web. Compare Airbnb to Craigslist. One is visually pretty, the other isn't. One uses every framework under the sun, the other is HTML.
          • derefr 8y ago
            “Nice for you” and “nice for your computer” are being treated as separate things here, I think. Assuming a supercomputer (like the kinds most Electron app devs must surely have), Electron [native] apps have a good user experience. Electron wrappers for originally web apps, on the other hand, are usually horrible user experiences—often they don’t even support right-clicking elements, or clicking on links to open them in a browser.
            • saagarjha 8y ago
              > Electron [native] apps have a good user experience. No, they don't. Ever tried to drag and drop into an Electron app? How about used VoiceOver?
        • taeric 8y ago
          Relatedly, I played quite a few flash games, and they were nice for me.
      • brodsky 8y ago
        This is a very broad statement. Would you care to elaborate?
        • chillydawg 8y ago
          "slack"
          • TremendousJudge 8y ago
            "spotify desktop"
            • airstrike 8y ago
              Wasn't Spotify originally written in C++?
              • coldacid 8y ago
                Even if it was, it isn't now.
                • yellowapple 8y ago
                  It probably still is, since Chromium Embedded Framework (which is what Spotify uses, last I checked) is used via a C/C++ API.
    • catach 8y ago
      It was also quite nice for users, assuming the intentions of the makers were good. Ads and security exploits were the truly nasty bits.
    • shawn 8y ago
      Legions of bored teenagers would fight you over that. :) At one time there was no force so powerful as a bunch of friends sharing albinoblacksheep games/videos. Users loved it.
      • smofnoopttzzaaa 8y ago
        A pretty amazing collection of games was at friv.com
        • nojvek 8y ago
          I only got into CS because of Flash. First I spent a ridiculous amount of hours on games, then I learnt to reverse engineer and tweak them, and then a ridiculous amount of hours creating and debugging games/apps with Flash. Flash for the win! Till the day I die. AS3 was amazing. When Typescript came out, it was a lot like AS3. I was convinced and became a believer in TS and never looked back.
        • pmarreck 8y ago
          holy crap, i've never seen this before. it's still up
    • monocasa 8y ago
      For some cases, nice for the makers is nice for the users. I don't think more than a handful of the games and little videos that I enjoyed as a kid on newgrounds and addicting games would have been made had they not had such a low barrier to creation. I do kernel/firmware development now, so I'll be the first to admit that this value proposition isn't valid for all domains. But sometimes, for some use cases, just having a simple to use scripting environment is totally the way to go. Particularly if it's sandboxed well and can't really harm the end user.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • the_af 8y ago
    Exactly this. Flash for websites was trash. But Flash games were a boon. Everyone with an idea was able to make it into a game. I spent a lot of time playing games in Kongregate and similar sites. Many were really interesting, well worth the effort of sifting through the rip-offs and trash.
    • Keyframe 8y ago
      In that regard, looks like Unity is the new Flash.
      • the_af 8y ago
        Very likely! But some years ago, back when I still played Flash browser games, Unity games didn't work in a browser for Linux, the only platform I use. Maybe that situation has changed? :)
        • coldacid 8y ago
          What with a WebGL target for Unity these days, it has. The Unity plugin was deprecated versions ago and they don't even ship a target for it anymore.
      • greggman 8y ago
        It is and it isn't. Unity is great but it's got like a min 5MB download for just a spinning cube. Flash (because the plugin was built in) started instantly and had built in support for streaming. Unity can stream, after the 5MB engine download, but for whatever reason it's not common.
        • Keyframe 8y ago
          I meant more as in people with no technical knowledge whatsoever creating interactive stuff. Just look at the cambrian explosion of indie games from (most) people who probably can't do long division by hand.
    • pmarreck 8y ago
  • aaroninsf 8y ago
    Not just games; anything other than hypertexts and forms. In those days there was no notion of SPA or other contemporary well-established patterns for online interaction. I authored several commercial sites using Shockwave and the like and it enabled us to give clients the ability to author media-rich and design-heavy presentations in a fashion they were familiar with from card decks applications. At the time doing so in a 'sexy' way made them stand out. It was a cul de sac, but it was a worthwhile direction to test in terms of UX. That it was proprietary was weighted differently in those days. The world was dominated by closed standards and open source was still vestigial especially in commercial applications.
    • pmontra 8y ago
      How did you reflow the UI when users resized their browser?
      • jackcviers3 8y ago
        You could communicate between flash and the browser: https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/external/ExternalInterface.html https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions...
• dep_b 8y ago
  I agree but it's about using the right tool at the right time. How else would could they have started YouTube back then for example? Early YouTube definitely was a glimpse into the future.
  • Shorel 8y ago
    It can be argued that the existence of flash delayed the creation of proper video support in browsers.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Bullshit. Without Flash or some other plugin there'd at best have been a different standard for each browser, with the only one worth caring about being whatever IE implemented.
    • mbreese 8y ago
      It was also a useful proof of concept of what could be done. Without Flash, would there have been the critical mass of users who wanted video in their browsers at all? Or the content? I think that we would have gotten there eventually, but probably not as fast. The close - but not quite good enough - implementation of video in Flash was as much of a catalyst as it was a crutch to lean upon.
    • sangnoir 8y ago
      Not sure what you mean by 'proper' - but flash video was a step-up from the previous era where websites gave you a choice of either RealVideo or Windows Media formats - the more quirky sites had Quicktime, and you had to have plugins for each [I'm dating myself here]. By virtue of being installed on 98% of all computers, Flash video was a de facto standard video target. One that could be played on Linux without getting into legal grey areas too! Without Flash looming over them, IE would never have supported cross-platform video - this would have been Microsoft undermining the WMP format.
• zokier 8y ago
  And pretty much all of the downsides you mention apply to these newfangled WASM+Canvas apps
• smofnoopttzzaaa 8y ago
  To me, JavaScript is like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using JavaScript.
  • d4l3k 8y ago
    There are some bad JS websites, but most of them do have proper bookmarking since pretty much every web framework supports adding multiple pages including forward and back navigation. Browsers are also good enough to handle #links as well within a SPA app. Also, they tend to have faster than typical loading times for navigation within the site. Flash didn't have any of that, and was much slower to load than modern JS websites.
    • iforgotpassword 8y ago
      Just no. I'm on latest chrome on android 6 and when I browse search results on YouTube, then click a video and hit back I expect that the scroll position within the results is restored. Instead when I hit back I only see the red top bar and a loading spinner and a moment later the results show up again and I'm at the top of them. Because we don't have nice paged results anymore, but this hip and ubercool dynamically extending page of results and everything. And this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google. They can't get their shit working on their own browser. I have yet to see an SPA with a convincing UX that's more than just some wannabe webdev's "about" page.
      • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        Firefox Android doesn't suffer from this defect.
      • lucideer 8y ago
• ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Flash websites could have a back button. Maybe it wasn't quite as easy as putting in a hyperlink, but it was still pretty easy to configure. Not arguing with you about the rest. As a web developer I still haven't made a website in the last 5 years that was as visually impressive as my Flash projects from before, and sometimes I miss the visuals.... But people forget that the AWESOME intro that you wait two minutes of loading to see... is only cool the first couple times. Many many people where losing 5 minutes of loading time, just to visit websites that they used EVERY day.