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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

• buboard 7y ago
  You can set up a video chat lecture with text chat and pretty good video with the free red5 java server and something like Avchat.com . That's 20 year old tech and works today, but will be removed from the net in a year. There is no HTML5 alternative. Why? I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. Dev tools are more about saving programmers from themselves rather than pushing things to the limit. Flash is probably an example of it
  • doctorpangloss 7y ago
    Unity WebGL is definitely close to where Flash was. If anything WASM adoption is growing, it’s a respected standard. Once there is multi threading, heap expansion and streaming instanciation in iOS ... I’m going to guess 15, or 4 years from now, it’ll be the true spirit of Flash. I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Sounds about right. Modern technology: working hard to replicate what we had 20+ years ago.
      • zanny 7y ago
        What we had 20 years ago was an insecurable proprietary plugin for web browsers. It wasn't standard, nobody could audit it, it was just a corporate product. And where we are at now, where Macromedia got bought and Adobe slowly drained its lifeblood and killed its products, is what happens when you try to build systems on top of holistically proprietary foundations. Nobody owes you their enduring survival and you are totally dependent on whoever owns the platform to give you their blessing. Its a lesson Apple developers often love waxing poetic all over the front page of HN about on the regular.
        • buboard 7y ago
          Totally agreed about the non-open nature of flash. The question is why web technologies are not vastly better than it was. It's been 20 years
        • asjw 7y ago
          Yeah like browsers have had no security issues in the past 20 years...
  • cookie_monsta 7y ago
    I'm not familiar with red5 but it seems that webRTC does a decent job on video and text chat with the browser doing the heavy lifting in terms of encryption and permissions. Am I missing something?
    • buboard 7y ago
      You can set up red5 in a few minutes, at most hours. Replicating a similar setup with something like Janus is a lot more complicated, and there is no HTML5 equivalent Plus webrtc is proving to be a resource hog every time, and a lot more complicated to set up in an app (separate media / data stream etc). flash/red5 works literally out of the package.
      • cookie_monsta 7y ago
        I'm not asking what webRTC does worse - obviously it's going to improve over time, I'm asking what it can't do that flash can.
        • buboard 7y ago
          that misses the point. If its slow and laggy, user is not going to use it and laptops are going to become portable heaters. This is exactly what webRTC does > obviously it's going to improve over time When? webrtc is like 10 years old. How long we have to wait to go back to 1999?
          • cookie_monsta 7y ago
            > When? webrtc is like 10 years old. Well, 8 from initial release. 18 months from first stable release. Far as I understand it, lag and overheating are hardware/network problems. Considering the amount of development going into both of them, that situation is only going to improve but of course I don't have a roadmap. FWIW I haven't noticed problems with either and I don't have a mind blowing setup. I look at what browsers are doing now compared to 1999, there's no way I'd want to go back
    • 7y ago
  • vertex-four 7y ago
    I threw up a livestreaming setup + chat with nginx-rtmp-module, Prosody, Converse.JS and a few lines of javascript in a weekend. I'm not really sure what you're talking about tbh.
    • buboard 7y ago
      i tried converse.js but it hard to integrate in existing userbase, and being xmpp it is introducing unnecessary complication (don't need the pesky @ adresses, groups were impossible to integrate). have not used nginx-rmpt so i dont know how it scales with connections. converse seems to be set up for specific use cases and not very flexible.
  • superkuh 7y ago
    > 2010. ... homogeneous ... bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. This is the result of web devs targeting smart phones. They've made the web suck bending over backwards for the limited abilities of phones to act as computers in both the UI and network sense.
• deleted 7y ago
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• pippy 7y ago
  Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply release the swf spec.
  • The_rationalist 7y ago
    What can flash do that modern browsers can't?
    • Eric_WVGG 7y ago
      IMO, nothing. What HTML 5 (and more specifically, canvas+js) are lacking is a complete timeframe-based IDE. I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • simion314 7y ago
        I do not have experience with pure Flash but with Flex4 that is a powerful GUI for applications. I can share here what I miss from those days: - you had types, performance was important so you had generic types like Vector , the code was compiled and it was really fast - there were built-in efficient GUI widgets, you could have a list or table connected to a data provider with tousends of items but the components were smart and only created enough UI widgets as needed to render, where in HTML you either have to create a LI element for all your 10000 elements, create pagination(is not built in), create infinite scrolling(not built-in) - it was super easy to customize or extend the provided things if you needed , as an example in HTML look at the <select> it is not customizable, everyone has to implement it's own using divs, css and js , but everyone gets it wrong in the corner case(you have issues where the dropdown pops outside the screen, missing events, hell even youtube search box sometimes breaks and the dropdown popup remains stuck open, so even Google engineerscan't create a working dropdown component - performance, remember when a blinking cursor was causing an electron editor to use a lot of resources , the issue with web is that was designed in rush for showing documents. - layouting components was super easy , theming was easy - with css in large old projects there are so many issues( I know people use less but this is not standard ) I have some solutions too, browsers need to provide more powerful components, if we want to do RIAs or desktop apps then we need the same components that desktop toolkits offer with the same customization. Other issue I seen was in a project where the devs ahd to import a third party library because the scrollbars can't be themed in all browsers , I am not refering to the right side of the browser ones(I know sme people hate if you change those) but scrollbars on a list or dropdown component. So you have projects where you import 1 lib for scrollbars, 1 lib for modals, 1 for fancy buttons and inputs, 1 for drag and drop, 1 for calendar widgets, 1 for dropdown that allows you to have icon + text, and of course a framework like angular or react . Browsers should check what developers need the most and add that as standard( ex better dropdowns) you would still have the ability to make your own shit and use your preferred framework
• excessive 7y ago
  I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s. It's easy to imagine the various security vulnerabilities could have been fixed by a more responsible/responsive company, and the abuse by advertisement companies should've been solvable with an ad blocker. JavaScript, CSS, and HTML have come a long way in capability, but the mashup is much more distasteful to me. Flash was elegant despite its frequent misuse.
  • evrydayhustling 7y ago
    Something that's not easy to appreciate about Flash if you weren't there is that it is the first tool that really put multimedia interactivity within reach of non-devs -- and, almost gratuitously, made it dirt simple to distribute your creation at the same time. A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly build and send something around the world in a week. No wonder it uncovered so many creative projects waiting to happen!!
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      And it was very easy to distribute too! All you needed to share was the swf.
    • cmroanirgo 7y ago
      Disclaimer: old timer As someone who wrote a complete 3d modeller for a game, including animation, even before 3dsmax was a thing, I was surprised when a few years later (10+) I saw how easy the Flash UI was to understand, especially the way keyfames were added. The UX was rather extraordinary. Unfortunately even at that time (early iPhone) because Flash was so synonymous with security flaws, I would regularly uninstall it. Since then, I've yet to see a solution that's as easy to use and doesn't have some kind of vendor lock in (like Flash did). Maybe I haven't looked hard enough tho. As much as I personally disliked the artistic Flash- only sites at the time, hindsight shows that they were rather invaluable. We lost a lot of diversity when Apple killed it off.
• l_t 7y ago
  I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life on the screen. I believe it's that powerful experience for novices that we're missing. I'm not sure how we should get it back. (edit: phrasing)
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?
    • pengstrom 7y ago
      ToonBoom is very popular.
      • PBnFlash 7y ago
        Flash MX was super easy to pirate, Toonboom is like 2000$ software with a much harder learning curve.
    • FooHentai 7y ago
      Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.
      • j2bax 7y ago
        Yes it’s still very commonly used by animators. They actually changed the name of the application to Animate but not too much has changed over the last 10 years. We still use it heavily at our studio for 2D game animation and short form animation for TV/web.
• MisterTea 7y ago
  I was going to add how I'm surprised that no one is trying to emulate it in js or wasm but I appear to be wrong. someone on Newgrounds is doing just that: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1444275 https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1444275
  • kbumsik 7y ago
    There was an effort to run Flash using JS by Mozilla, called Shumway, now in Mozilla Graveyard. https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway
• metafunctor 7y ago
  Flash sites were creative, in that they were occasionally built by people with amazing talent and great skill. Most of the time, though, Flash was the multimedia CD-ROM of the web. Flash was an extension shoehorned in, didn't feel like the rest of the web, and didn't deeply integrate with the browsing experience. Flash content was an alien rectangle, a wormhole into a strange dimension, where a mouse click would often not behave anything like a mouse click usually would. Flash pretended to be on the web, but Flash was not of the web. That's why it's now gone.
  • excessive 7y ago
    Heh, this is really a matter of perspective. If you think the rest of the web was wonderful, then Flash was a turd floating in a swimming pool. If you think the web is a poorly designed shoddy mess, then you might think Flash was a raft keeping you afloat in the sewer. HTML and JavaScript are so sloppy and incrementally improved by accretion rather than taste, I lean towards the sewer point of view.
  • code_duck 7y ago
    I couldn't stand the lack of bookmarking, history, back and forward buttons, the use of sounds and music, and lack of ability to view source.
• phs318u 7y ago
  Or Flash’s heyday coincided with the explosion of the web from tech-circles to widespread public use, and critically, before the big walled gardens (FB etc), became the hub for most publication on the internet.
  • Mirioron 7y ago
    FB and other sites like that themselves were popular places for flash games as well.
• cowmix 7y ago
  Homestar Runner.. 'nuff said.
• mateo1 7y ago
  When I was a teenager I wrote a couple flash games with actionscript. I think the biggest thing about flash, asides from running consistently on all platforms, was how simple it was to build functional stuff on it. Adobe's Flash Professional had a nice monolithic IDE that worked out of the box and included visual design aids.
• djsumdog 7y ago
  Home Star Runner!!! Go to the old homestarrunner site, grab a flash file and play it (in the browser if you still have support, or using a rendering library) on a UHD screen. Yes, you can render that ancient 2000s era video .. in 4k. Flash is dead as a door nail though, and Homestar will now only be at the resolution of when they rendered it for YouTube.
  • nevster 7y ago
    Trogdor!!!!!! I introduced my kids to Strong Bad when they were young but just about zero of their friends know about it. :(
• ironfootnz 7y ago
  I'm part of that forgotten industry, since Flash 3. I can tell you that Steve Job letter hurt a lot the industry but I don't believe destroyed the creativity. We're more focused on clicks than interactions in the industry today.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Flash barely ran on Android - Adobe could never get it working correctly on mobile.
• fortran77 7y ago
  I think Flash has been unfairly maligned. I agree that its era is over. But the functionality it provided, at the time it was available, paved the way for a lot of good features on the Web, including YouTube and many interactive websites that work more like applications--now of course implemented in HTML and JavaScript/WebAssembly.
• deleted 7y ago
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• mycall 7y ago
  There is tons of things going on on YouTube these days.
  • Latty 7y ago
    Yeah, while the Flash era was definitely great for animation, that was really more because animation was the only real option for video. Streaming video has largely replaced that, and cheap cameras mean animation is way costlier to do now. It is a shame that the tooling for animation online doesn't appear to be good. I guess the reality is probably that it's just cheaper and easier to render your animation to video, or release as a game. Game engines are working harder to target browsers as a platform, so the latter option will probably come full circle.
• etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash. When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools. Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not all that different from an SVG to be honest. One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made. Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of the old internet by deprecating it. I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that benefits no-one.
  • cft 7y ago
    I read somewhere that Adobe could not opensource Flash Player due to some library codecs licensing issues. It was unfortunate however, that Adobe bought Macromedia. Macromedia Flash would not have caused wrath from Steve Jobs and Macromedia would have been nimble and motivated to work something out with Apple
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Well, Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from supporting Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe did finally get Flash (barely) running on Android. It required 1GB of RAM and 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM. Adobe was late shipping Flash for the Motorola Xoom. Motorola touted being able to use Flash as a feature over the iPad. Leaving it in the unfortunate situation that you couldn’t even visit the Xoom marketing page running Flash from a Xoom for the first six months. Adobe could never get Flash working on mobile well. EDIT: It wasn’t until the iPhone 5 introduced 5 years later in 2012 that there was an iPhone that could have met Adobe’s specs for Flash.
    • 7y ago
• Causality1 7y ago
  Flash was special even without the UI experiments. Flash allowed the creation of vector-based movies with tiny filesizes that accommodated the miniscule internet bandwidth of the early 2000s. The vectorized nature means videos created and uploaded scale almost perfectly to modern resolutions, even 4K.
• dillonmckay 7y ago
  Nobody has mentioned Youtube using Flash initially to create the experience of ‘it just works.’ We had RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others, but video on the web was rather difficult.
  • lqet 7y ago
    And they only made HTML5 playback the default mode 4 years ago.
  • PBnFlash 7y ago
    HLS DASH are never going to be as simple as RTMP was with flash. It "just worked" in a way the internet just doesn't anymore.
    • buboard 7y ago
      it s as if we are regressing
• sgammon 7y ago
  *And Also Most Of The Early Internet's Bugs
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  The bad thing about being "creative" on the web is it not being obvious how to use your site. I remember back in the day a lot of website using Flash only that were like this.
  • code_duck 7y ago
    Flash developers were responsible for a lot of heinous interface experiences that informed every rule of good UI and resource efficiency.
    • code_duck 7y ago
      (I meant 'ignored')
• milchek 7y ago
  As a former Flash dev that worked through those glory days, I tend to agree. The format was just a lot more open and less restrictive in what you could do - especially compared with the early web. We built a lot of different things with it, including games and animations. Contrast that with the first pure HTML sites I created, which were built with tables and frames. I shudder thinking back at some of those sites, which were an absolute clusterfuck of nested tables. Flash was like a playground compared to the restrictive environment of building in HTML and CSS in those days, and it seemed like every client project I worked on was very different in its function and UX. Fast-forward to today, and even with what we can do with modern web technologies, if you look at many sites these days, they're all pretty much the same - especially if they're sales sites. They all use a very familiar cookie-cutter style format. You know the sites I'm talking about; top nav bar, hero image with a wanky quote, 3-block row outlining the nifty features, a call-to-action button etc. Don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautiful sites come about in the post-Flash era, and some pretty nifty effects (parallax movement seemed to gain a lot of popularity for a time). I think that modern web design really just shows how far we've come in terms of optimisation. And there's nothing wrong with that. Most of this has come about because we've all spent collective time and effort to get here and discovered what works best for users (in most cases) what converts sales the easiest, etc. It's a culmination of the evolution of tooling, frameworks, boilerplates and various styles we've all built with along the way that continues to evolve. We know through other mediums and media that users like familiarity (The Mere-exposure effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect), and so, the web ends up all looking the same as well because more familiarity equals fewer barriers and distractions and hopefully more sales/conversions/eyeballs.
• deleted 7y ago
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• someexgamedev 7y ago
  I made games in flash for over a decade and miss the ease of dropping an experimental game idea onto the web where everyone could enjoy it. If you had a free weekend, you could release a game to 99% of the internet. JavaScript game libs simply aren't as featureful, even the ones promising the scenegraph API. They don't work as well cross platform (by the end of that decade I had one codebase which could deploy to web, iOS, and Android); and that's where the audience has headed. I hope this book spends some time on flash's contribution to video game design as well as web design.
  • zanny 7y ago
    You can make a game today in Godot / Unity, export to HTML5, and drop it on itch.io to play in browser in minutes.
    • greggman2 7y ago
      also thousands of games made with pico8 on the net live. Sure pico-8 is not a replacement for flash but people are posting live games and they are making them quickly. Celeste, one of the top 10 games last year on many lists, started as a pico8 prototype live on the web. Also flash never worked cross platform in the modern sense (phones + tablets + desktop). It's a very hard problem and no system I know of handles it automatically for anything more than simple HTML text forms
• jayd16 7y ago
  People are looking back with rose tinted glasses, I think. This was an era where you could build rich media with absolute canvas values and it would look great and it was easy for an artist to take that canvas and do things. The iPhone killed flash but not just in the obvious way. These days everything needs to be reactive and run on well on mobile hardware. Even if iOS supported flash it would need to be a different beast. Different screen sizes, an explosion of aspect rations, heavier security requirements, accessibility, touch controls and more led to the downfall.
  • phaseshifter 7y ago
    I remember sideloading the Flash Player APK on my Android phone around 2013 (they stopped official support in 4.1) and most of the Flash content was effectively unusable even then. Pecking on a tiny video player with your finger to change volume, quality, or playback position was a terrible experience and the battery drain wasn't great either. Watching videos outside of YouTube was a terrible time for phone users before sites transitioned to HTML5.
  • bbayer 7y ago
    Adobe Air could produce executables iOS and many other operating systems and environments. I have seen many successful mobile games done with Air. Flash Player is a virtual machine and swf is compiled bytecode. It could be ported to any hardware and OS. Death of Flash is not technical, it is political. SWF format and Flash Player is proprietary. They chose to kill it instead of supporting someone else's technology.
• PBnFlash 7y ago
  There were dozens of sites dedicated to flash tutorials and getting started for amateurs. It was a highly focused _creative_ environment with low barrier to entry. It allowed and encouraged cross pollination. Flash was a drawing program, Animation, IDE, Game Development, Web development even audio and video editing, with no clear lines between any of the functions. It was a one stop shop for creative expression with thousands of people learning the program and excited to share their knowledge. Nothing does what flash did, because flash did everything and everyone was using it.
• meerita 7y ago
  Flash died because Macromedia and Adobe wanted to replace the open standards for their solutions. It just took Jobs to stop them to crumble and dissapear. They focus on get all instead being a being a complement.
• mattkevan 7y ago
  As far as I’m concerned, the whole field of web design peaked in 1999 when this website was made: http://superior-web-solutions.com/ http://superior-web-solutions.com/ Enable Flash, turn up the sound and whatever you do, do NOT skip the intro.
  • ktpsns 7y ago
    Wow, clicking this link I just realized my Firefox/Linux installation still has the Flash player plugin. So I could view this gem of 90s Flash-only website. It shows all the problem the web had back then: It took me four clicks to see actual text about what the authors are trying to say/sell. Everything before was crying "wow look at the amazing technology we can build". For many web developers at that time (including me), this was a reason why we hated Flash (and intro pages, in general). At some level, the web got more professional after the Flash times, when content was written in HTML again, and SEO was a thing. Unfortunately, today, Javascript takes over the role of Flash and at many sites, without JS there is no text appearing/embedded in HTML only.
• WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  I can also say that it was responsible for the Web's most irritating era. After Flash came out every site suddenly had to have an animated homepage. It was fun once, twice but after awhile it was incredibly irritating. I'm so glad it's gone.
• askvictor 7y ago
  Flash was to multimedia what Delphi was to GUI programming. They made it easy and fun. Then we managed to make everything complicated and brittle.
• cousin_it 7y ago
  If you feel the urge to animate something right now, try http://flipanim.com http://flipanim.com, it has an awesome non-commercial feel.
• deleted 7y ago
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• robflaherty 7y ago
  Today’s internet is far more creative than the internet of the Flash era. Creativity has moved on to more consequential things than graphic design.
  • whywhywhywhy 7y ago
    Flash wasn't "graphic design" it was a unique cross over of design and code in harmony and at the time most graphic designers I encountered used to say "web designers are not real designers" they only considered print work important. Funny how things change.
• tanbog 7y ago
  Security breaches used to be so much more aesthetically pleasing.
• kaolti 7y ago
  Lots of good points made, I'll add mine. Flash got me started in web design as a kid and put me on a path to earning a good living. Lots of things changed since then but I want to hear your thoughts on one specifically. It used to be cool to try things and put something together that in the grand scheme of things is kind of bad. I get the feeling that's not the case anymore. Seems like there's so much pressure to sell the image of you being an expert, there is no room to try wild things and see what happens - which is the basis for learning and development btw. What we get then is everyone copying the "expert" patterns, but hardly anyone doing anything original or truly creative, because it feels risky. This is probably true for a lot of other creative endeavours that have big $ behind them - the movie industry comes to mind. Sure, there are more movies being made now than ever, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like we're in the most creative era and you know it's got nothing to do with the tools. Someone please tell me otherwise.
  • redisman 7y ago
    I feel bad for people coming of age now in the world of programming. There's a lot of pressure to follow the best practices and they sure as heck don't involve an easy way to draw a Z colored pixel at coordinate (X, Y). Or to coax a programmed beep out of the speaker. Which is basically how I learned 50% of programming. You don't really get that visceral moment of magic reaction from web technologies or super polished game engines which is where that happens now.
  • zanny 7y ago
    I think it has to do with the commoditization of image. In the early Internet we didn't have centralized social media so going to a new place and experimenting didn't have ramifications across your social circles via platforms attached to your real name. You could make "bad" stick figure cartoons by night while working a "respectable" career by day and nobody would know who you are either way. I feel terrible for kids today - they grow up into social media not knowing what it is, and by the time they can comprehend it their creativity has been stifled for years by the implied pressures of conformity and a cultural disapproval of failure. But theres some nostalgia in that too - its not like every 80s and 90s kid was sitting in a computer lab inventing the next tower defense game. It has always been a tiny minority of kids that get creative from a young age, and if anything the continued availability and quantity of entertainment can serve to keep kids occupied with consumption rather than creation more today than ever before.
• archie2 7y ago
  My wife and I both grew up in the era of Flash on the web. We were both inspired by it, I became a developer because I wanted to make games like the ones I played that were built on Flash, my wife became an animator and designer because of the cool animations she could find and create using it. The death of Flash meant the death of her childhood and while I still make my living developing for and on the web - my wife has basically been locked out of it because she hasn't been able to find anything "modern" that really takes Flashes place. She can write HTML and simple CSS, and even tweak tiny bits of Javascript or even PHP here and there but nothing at the level of expressivity that she could do with Flash. Ultimately, the death of Flash was the death of our childhood.
• microtherion 7y ago
  Flash may have had its merits, but it was massively overused to build crappy non-searchable, non-accessible web sites.
• jrwoodruff 7y ago
  In my personal opinion, Flash was ruined by Adobe when they tried to 'fix' it (improve it?) with ActionScript 3, which followed the ECMA script standard. AS3 changed everything about how flash worked, and if you weren't a software engineer, the learning curve was steep. I actually went and took some basic programming classes (literally in visual basic lol) and learned how to write proper code. Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun. And besides that, plenty of real coding tools already existed, and HTML/CSS/JS was improving really quickly as well. So I ended up learning those instead. All of that was actually great for my design career, but Flash just didn't have a place anymore. And I'm still sad about that.
  • acdha 7y ago
    > Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun. I don’t disagree with that but I think it needs to be in the larger context of Adobe being bad at almost everything related to platform support. Their APIs were not well-considered; consistency happened at other companies; the tools were expensive, poorly designed, buggy, and basically unsupported (“The Flash IDE crashes when I do X”. 10 months pass. “Pay $800 for the upgrade and let us know if that fixes it ”), and performance/battery impacts always lagged behind the native alternatives — all of which sucked the fun out of the creative process as you had to take time away for pure drudgery working around Adobe’s slacking. If at any time they’d invested 10% more on quality and basic software engineering they wouldn’t have had all of their customers looking for alternatives. As we saw, that can be more profitable for a short period but catches up hard.
  • sirspacey 7y ago
    This one got me in the feels man. Same.
  • woutr_be 7y ago
    I actually quite liked the changes in AS3, and it being more programatic, I think it paved the way for what I do now. After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I think it was for the better.
• tambourine_man 7y ago
  Not strictly on topic, but I still have clients stuck on Flash. Which tools do you advise to extract text content from swf? I tried swftools with not much success. A few commercial apps weren’t much help either. And Google’s tool (forgot its name) was taken down.
• Zenst 7y ago
  s/Internet's/Web/ The most creative Era of the Internet was the Web.
• Mugwort 7y ago
  WASM will eventually catch up to the glory days of Flash and far surpass them. It will be amazing.
• xellisx 7y ago
  https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/
  • nevster 7y ago
    The only limit is... yourself!
• juniorplenty 7y ago
  I vividly remember following yugop.com (Yugo Nakamura’s Mono*crafts) in college around ~2000, waiting for more experiments to be posted. To me that was what the web was for, far reaching and experimental design. This article was a reminder of how absent that kind of design experimentation is now, even as businesses and applications have gotten more experimental.
• kizer 7y ago
  Thank god someone is saying it. ActionScript 3 was my first programming language! Without flash (and I know the many reasons for its extinction), there's nothing that truly "bundles" an interactive experience altogether into one little file, which plays in just one little box. To be honest, "responsive" concerns shouldn't be the job of the creative. That's an external concern. Video games generally simply scale graphics to fit the screen using a simple algorithm and that's that. But when you design, for example, games on the web, you have the luxury of fine-grained adjustment based on browser, resolution, DPI, etc. But that freedom is exactly what creates an ambiguous "boundary" for internet games. They aren't guaranteed to fit in this 800x600 div that *'s games portal site requires. In short, I think that the open & open-ended, non-strict support-all-the-technologies nature of the web is too free for creative production. There's too much. There's a known principle that limitations are crucial to creative expression to the same degree the "tools" and "medium" are. We need an open-source spiritual successor to flash which utilizes the wonder web ecosystem but exposes a more constrained API so that games/interactive experiences are portable and to an extent LIMITED again.
• kizer 7y ago
  BTW, for all the elderly ;) HNers, the mid-twenties came of age during the golden age of Flash, which almost defined the internet at that point in time. Dammit, I'm getting teary-eyed. It was elementary, junior, and high-school for me. Many memories of consuming content through Flash, AND also PRODUCING content with flash. Learning how to program with pirated versions of then-Macromedia's flagship product - now working at... the company that proved old dogs can (sort of) learn new tricks ;). Perhaps it's analogous to a Commodore 64 or something for the older guys, hahaha.
• kizer 7y ago
  I think this [0] is a large reason why. 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation
• mastrsushi 7y ago
  Flash isn't responsible for anything. It was the technology used to animate the web. Something else would of came along, and of course did.
• JohnBooty 7y ago
  We're.... misattributing some things here, I think. Flash was a bundle of good things and bad things, as we all more or less agree. Good for creativity, bad for usability and accessibility and security, etc. You could, obviously, do so many things in Flash that were impossible with web standards. But, why was there such a gap between what you could do in Flash and what you could do with web standards? Why was Flash even necessary? This was due in large part to how Microsoft acquired a stranglehold on the web right as it was beginning to really take off -- IE4, IE5, and IE6 were the defacto standards, and Microsoft used them to quash innovation on the web as they (successfully) tried to hold on to their desktop software business for another decade or so. Perhaps we haven't lived through the worst possible timeline, but there was certainly a better outcome possible - where Microsoft didn't stifle innovation on the web for close to a decade. (And now, of course, we're approaching another dark age as Google heads toward IE6-like market share....)
  • redisman 7y ago
    Flash had a VM that truly was "write once, run on anything" and a great (software) pixel and vector renderer. Cross-browser compatibility with HTML standards was completely bonkers and HTML had none of the features Flash Games and Animations needed. Try to move or rotate a picture at 30 fps with old HTML.
    • nashashmi 7y ago
      Had Adobe bought Goowy Desktop, Adobe could have launched their own iPad or iPhone of sorts. Maybe even a desktop. Instead AOL bought them and realized that was a mistake.
    • bbanyc 7y ago
      I remember Flash being slow and buggy on Mac and Linux at the time, and updates lagged far behind the Windows version (on Linux in particular). And then I saw an article from a Macromedia/Adobe dev saying that it was heavily optimized x86 assembly code targeted towards Windows and very difficult to port to other platforms... given the IE6 monoculture at the time, it made sense, but I felt like a redheaded stepchild for daring to use a minority OS. I don't think it was 64-bit clean, either, so now no modern device runs Flash "natively."
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]? It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager. I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed. Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process. New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one. It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed. It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed! [1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989
  • smush 7y ago
    The scrubbing features remind me of Microsoft 3D movie maker which was a Win 95-era product that had the same easy approach, but with 3d characters.
• smt88 7y ago
  It is very, very silly to suggest the Flash era was more creative than the YouTube/indie-game era. In general, the Web is more commercialized now, so creative content doesn't always rise to the top, and there are incentives to be a low-quality content factory. But there are thousands or millions of online videos (some, like Flash, are animated) and indie games on major platforms that are just as creative as the most experimental, interesting stuff on Newgrounds.
  • buboard 7y ago
    youtube and indie games literally started as flash
    • smt88 7y ago
      What does that have to do with my comment? Flash was a platform for games and video. Now we have much, much larger platforms with more contributors and more consumers. There's likely more than one order of magnitude more content being produced now than 15 years ago. It's possible that the average level of creativity has gone down, but the amount of highly creative output has surely gone way, way up.
• vippy 7y ago
  AAAAAAHbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgersbadgers
• wolco 7y ago
  With the end of flash came the end of the intro splash page.
• samstave 7y ago
  I loved flash games, the only thing I couldn’t stand was the lack of ability to scale the gaming window on most sites, so you’re playing through,what, 320x320, or something so small... I also hated the anti-flash tech crowd in Silicon Valley. One person I knew ‘Jason’ would get violently angry about flash... And he was so vehemently opposed to flash, that regardless of his arguments against, he just made himself look like an ass. Think BOFH or typical NetworkNazi against flash... but he couldn’t succinctly state “why” other than “it’s a piece of shit”. - fuck that guy. (And the other guy who wanted to fight me when I said that apple was going to go to intel based procs...) Flash was GREAT (from a creative) aside from “give me a bigger damn game screen!”
• jaimex2 7y ago
  tbh Adobe killed Flash after it bought it from Macromedia.
• EamonnMR 7y ago
  In so many ways, the dream of computing died with flash.
• oblib 7y ago
  I started playing with FutureSplash when it first came out and loved it. It was so easy to use and just a lot of fun. I was pretty heartbroken when Macromedia acquired it because I knew they'd muck it up. It was hardly anytime at all before they added huge amounts of complexity, and bugs with it, and jacked the price up to a painful point. I never did buy anything from MacroMedia and I quit buying Adobe software around ten years ago. I don't miss them a bit, but I do still miss FutureSplash.
• notatoad 7y ago
  Flash was a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things". As a platform for web mini-games or self-contained interactive animations, it remains unparalleled. As a tool for building whole websites meant to convey information, it was always shit. If lazy web developers hadn't collectively abused flash to make annoying websites and dumb ads, perhaps we could still have fun flash games on the web today.
  • valtism 7y ago
    It was not discontinued because people were making annoying websites with it, it was discontinued because it was a nightmare for security.
    • cortesoft 7y ago
      Yeah, I thought security was where they were going with the "can't have nice things" comment
• jugg1es 7y ago
  I couldn't possibly agree more with this article. It is still possible to do the kinds of things that Flash did now-a-days with HTML5 canvas, but it requires a lot more programming abilities than Flash required. Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms have beautiful, yet predictable, websites. The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical stack of buttons, no top nav bar. Designers back then encouraged exploration. You just don't see that anymore. Overall, websites are way better now. But we have certainly lost something as the entire web has become commoditized and homogenized. No one is willing to take risks anymore. The late 90s and 2000's was a different kind of internet than it is now, for sure.
  • bredren 7y ago
    But there is far more competition than there was before. People have devices allowing them shorter attention span to get to value than before. This change is not only because of the loss of flash.
    • buboard 7y ago
      The people competing are the top 3 companies who won the race. The rest have quit trying and are just copying them. There is far less competition, the internet became an oligopoly
• rezmason 7y ago
  I might have missed a few names, but I'd like to contribute a list of folks and sites from the old Flash community who seemed like rock stars (in order of how much I idolized them). Once I typed it up, I realized it was all dudes, so let me first link to https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/ https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/ , who shone a spotlight on the women who worked in the same space. (Shoutout to Lisa Larson-Kelley, fellow alumnus of FlashCodersNY, and Stacey Mulcahy, whose hilarious AS2-to-AS3 migration talk was fucking awesome!) If you wish to view any of these links, I recommend pasting them into web.archive.org and setting the Wayback to the mid-to-late 2000's. mrdoob.com (Mr. doob, later created three.js) audiotool.com, lab.andre-michelle.com (Andre Michelle) wefail.com (Jordan Stone, Martin Hughes) gskinner.com (Grant Skinner, later created EaselJS, etc) quasimondo.com (Mario Klingemann) bytearray.org (Thibault Imbert) bit-101.com (Keith Peters) vectorpark.com (Patrick Smith) hoogerbrugge.com (Han Hoogerbrugge) levitated.net (Jared Tarbell) blog.joa-ebert.com (Joa Ebert (also audiotool)) orisinal.com (Ferry Halim) hospital.apoka.com (Edouard Artus) kirupa.com (Kirupa Chinnathambi) mosessupposes.com (Moses Gunesch) gotoandlearn.com, theflashblog.com (Lee Brimelow) Most of these folks also spoke at tech events, sharing techniques and hard-learned lessons. Like that time when Wefail gave a talk that took a memorably heavy shit on Jakob Nielsen. Hell yes. Also worth noting the HBO Voyeur promotional site made by Big Spaceship: archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur The Flash community was creative and groundbreaking as hell. Most of the folks who criticized it for being proprietary and insecure are lifelong users of proprietary, insecure platforms; the worst aspects of the Flash-equipped web linger still, namely ads, inaccessibility and site bloat; and let's face it, as capable as the modern web client stack is, it's lost so much ground to the walled garden platforms, that Steve Jobs's 2010 agenda can no longer be seen as anything but duplicitous. Godspeed, FutureSplash! You were to good for this web.
  • jjirsa 7y ago
    All of that and no 2Advanced
• JordanFarmer 7y ago
  Flash died because Steve Jobs knew that it would cost Apple much money since the to grossing App Store items have always been games and Flash was what most of the web based games were programmed in. He couldn't cash in on that market plus it was a direct competitor. He had the leverage and opportunity to do so... so he defamed and killed it. Jobs was all about innovation... as long as it was coming out of Apple.
• sehugg 7y ago
  Anybody remember FantaVision on the Apple ][? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7V5nfmveI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7V5nfmveI Vector tweening in 1985. Though not interactive. (and I think the video is sped up a bit)
• taneem 7y ago
  During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho. Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars. However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash. Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk. Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that. So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me. In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.
  • dpau 7y ago
    thanks for sharing this wonderful story. it would make for a lovely short film.
    • buboard 7y ago
      In flash. but you have to hurry
  • on_and_off 7y ago
    It was so special. It was just the right mix of relative simplicity and power. No wonder that all the creatives flocked to flash.
  • cmarschner 7y ago
    So what are you doing these days?
• bbanyc 7y ago
  Sturgeon's law applies. 99% of Flash was garbage - animated autoplaying ads that slowed your browser to a crawl, unnecessary unskippable splash pages for every restaurant website ever, DRM'd audio and video players... And then there was utter genius like Homestar Runner, which made it almost worth it.
• nojvek 7y ago
  I only got into CS because of flash. It was simple to get started. Draw some shapes, add color and start tweening. Point and click got you very interesting animations. Deploying was a swf that worked in a ubiquitous manner. Then I learnt a bit of Actionscript on my own before even learning any sort of formal programming. It was a ton of fun to add event listeners and do basic interaction. I learnt what object oriented programming was. The sprites were the objects and I could program them and create dynamic instances. I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then got into mxml and Flex. Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too. Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.
  • dluan 7y ago
    I got an A in 7th grade biology because I animated the electron transport chain in a little flash movie over a holiday break. I burned the swf onto a CD and gave it to my biology teacher who then showed it on his computer during parent teacher night.
• ArtixKrieger 7y ago
  Flash was my favorite game design tool of all time, and it changed my life. In 2002 I created the original AdventureQuest. Because the game was created in Flash (Actionscript 1) it was instantly cross platform. It could dynamically load any number of animated monsters, weapons, cut-scenes, towns, and backgrounds. Most importantly, those loaded items could have their own code which let them do anything-- giving them new AI, features, or letting there be a game within the game. Also, it was easy to communicate with the database through posts to webpages. Because of this, your character was persistent and the game was able to update with new things every week. (In fact, the game has been updating for 17 years and is STILL updated with new things every single week.) As Flash evolved, we built more games: DragonFable, MechQuest, and a slew of minigames. Actionscript 2 has a special place in my heart. It was my favorite language. Not being a "real programmer", it was really easy to use. Making things was ultra fast. Actionscript 3 was a challenge for me. our "real programmers" loved it. But, it was so hard for me to actually make anything happen with it. When it became the new standard and we started developing with it, I stopped programming and focused on the content assembly side. We have built several Flash Massively Multiplayer Video games: AdventureQuest Worlds, EpicDuel, Oversoul, and HeroSmash. They all benefited from the same features that the very first game did, allowing for weekly (or more often) releases of new content. The games literally grew under your feet as you played them. Creating art, animation, and interactivity in Flash was the best. Flash 3.0 was probably my favorite version. Flash CS6 being a close second. We are currently in the process of converting our most popular game, AdventureQuest Worlds to Unity. Switching from vector to raster is a nightmare-- ask anyone who has gone through converting 10,000 items with no universal conformity. Flash was just so fast and easy. We still use Adobe Animate (which is what they call the Flash tool now) for creating 2D vector art. But I really do miss Flash as a "one stop shop" tool to create... anything. Battle on! Artix
  • smush 7y ago
    Man - DragonFable & MechQuest were great fun. I still think of Sir Valence and the various knights with punny names! I hope between godot, procreate 5, and open source flash runners, long term Flash will be properly succeeded; for now it appears we have regressed unless you pay Adobe for a CC subscription.
  • 7y ago
• milesward 7y ago
  Ok, so yup, flash rocked. Why can't we capture what was rad and ship it now? Who was critical to building it then?
• jeffml84 7y ago
  Radiskull. Lord Destros. I'll await Bloomberg's coverage of when those two get topped.
• marban 7y ago
  Simply put, Flash was the Web's 80's moment — It influenced generations to come, eventually ending up in monotone conformity. Obligatory Gabo Corp Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c
• epopt 7y ago
  lol. era.
• pjmlp 7y ago
  Many apparently have missed that Flash is pretty much alive, Adobe has renamed it into Animate. In fact some might even been playing Animate AOT compiled games on their iOS devices. https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
• hoelle 7y ago
  The premise of this article is just weirdly wrong and out of touch. There are monstrously huge creative spaces on the modern internet, powered by better and better tools. YouTube. Unity. Scratch. Roblox. Twitch. Itch.io. Blender. Minecraft. And so on. It is noteworthy that professional/corporate creators haven't followed the hobbyists and kids into some of these spaces to represent their brands as much as they did into the land of Web+Flash. I don't see how that matters when measuring the "Internet's Most creative Era." Consumers are more savvy, and brands are have gained some wisdom to not step on territory that makes them appear inauthentic and creepy. Second Life was an interesting experiment, but I'm happy that big brands haven't made ads in Roblox yet.
  • chii 7y ago
    youtube is not a tool - it's a platform, and increasingly more hostile towards content creators (and increasingly biased towards commercial content or clickbait content). Twitch is same as youtube basically, but slightly more content creator friendly. Unity, scratch, blender, these are all programming related. They are not beginner friendly at all. itch.io isn't a tool either, but a website for distributing. The content you find on there are good, but most are not made with something easy like the flash animations would've been. Game maker comes close, but it isn't well suited for animation. There isn't, and hasn't been, a replacement for flash animation suite, which is such a great, easy to use, integrated tool of drawing, animation and timing with a relatively simple scripting model. Even amateurs are able to make interesting animations with it. I bet you can't say the same for any of the tools named above.
    • hoelle 7y ago
      My 9 year old is comfortable messing around in Unity, Scratch, and Blender. They're super beginner friendly and the amount of free tutorials available today is staggering. Flash was also a platform, though you were still reliant on a host like Newgrounds to upload to. All of this is relevant to today's ecosystems. YouTube, Itchio and others have grown beyond anything in the Flash era. > There isn't, and hasn't been, a replacement for flash animation suite, which is such a great, easy to use, integrated tool of drawing, animation and timing with a relatively simple scripting model. Even amateurs are able to make interesting animations with it. I bet you can't say the same for any of the tools named above. I agree that the learning curve for Blender, Unity, etc, is probably a bit steeper than Flash. That wasn't the point of the article linked, nor is it what I'm arguing.
• drawkbox 7y ago
  Flash was an amazing creative interactive development platform, it was a ton of fun. Creatives designers and developers could create some amazing projects with it because it is very approachable. Flash provided a place for people to create games, web shows/cartoons, eventually video and with almost no limits except creativity. The compression and optimization of Flash was unmatched in the early days. The vector based nature of Flash was fresh and was also an excellent drawing tool. All this combined attracted a special type of creative designer/developer and some unique platform progression pushing innovation. The community from Flash 4 (late 90s) / AS2 to FlashDevelop + AS3 (2007/8) was very fun to be a part of. AS3 was big and was based off of ES4, it really kickstarted Javascript development as well into overdrive. Everything big early on the web was Flash, From Joe Cartoon to Stain Boy to Praystation to Papervision which inspired three.js to gaming sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate and more. Flash pushed WebGL in the browser and HTML5/Canvas/video. Flash made the web interactive and fun. Flash was apps before mobile apps. While there could be overuse of Flash intros, on the flipside some of the most amazing game, video and interactive experiences and platforms started with Flash. Promotional games and game sites in Flash were huge pre-mobile. Flash revolutionized video and made Youtube possible. Video was a mess before it. Both Flash and eventually Silverlight pushed innovation in this area leading to H.264 and HTML5 video capabilities. Flash was during a time where developers with plugins were pushing trends in the browser, not large corp. Still to this day it is hard to recreate all the features of Flash with web standards but Flash was the plugin that pushed us forward the most on the web. The self-contained platform nature of Flash allowed focus on the app/game/interactive content and less fighting with technology, it was almost like an early console. Flash could do web requests/services before AJAX, so for a time it was the way to do web apps. I'll miss plugin innovation that was always ahead of standards. I will miss innovation on the web from Flash and the access that plugins had to push forward. Flash was very well run when Macromedia ran it. Adobe bought it mainly for the video platform and to take competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator off the market in Macromedia Fireworks/Freehand. Adobe let both Director and Flash wither and did not react to hardware/software rendering soon enough. If Macromedia had kept in the game it might have gone differently. The period where Silverlight and Flash were competing was also quite nice, just before the mammoth mobile arrived in 2007/8 that changed everything. Smartphones revolutionized apps/interactives and game development, leading to a new handheld gaming/app platform that attracted most if not all Flash developers. I got started in interactive development and game development professionally with Flash in the mid to late 90s. The release of Flash 4 was the beginning of a decade plus of massive innovation, pushed mostly by Flash. I made my first professional game in 2000 and did Flash games/interactives for a decade+. Now I do Unity, Unreal, WebGL/three.js and others for apps/games/web. Flash allowed me to work at agencies and helped the leap to professional game development. Unity/Unreal and WebGL became the places that most people in Flash ended up who were focused on games/interactives. Adobe should have moved faster with Adobe AIR and HTML5 support as well as native/hardware acceleration, ultimately the slowness on mobile let it slip, the browsers blocking plugins pushed Flash from the web. Amazing creative designers and developers ended up either doing Unity games/apps/interactives or WebGL/canvas/three.js games/apps/interactives. OpenFL [1], Haxe[2] and Lime [3] with FlashDevelop [4] is still out there for Flash development. In terms of empowering people to learn technology and see immediate results it is still a great platform. Adobe Animate CC (renamed from Flash) is still great for animation, most large animated shows use Animate/Flash [5] or ToonBoom. One of the earliest exciting things about Flash was the ability to create cartoons and shows online, it is still one of the best tools for that and most popular animated shows use it that are 2D based. Flash being vector based really helps out for animation and scaling. For animated shows, there isn't another tool that comes close yet, Flash is still king in 2D animation. [1] https://www.openfl.org/ https://www.openfl.org/ [2] https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ [3] https://lime.software/ https://lime.software/ [4] https://www.flashdevelop.org/ https://www.flashdevelop.org/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
• larusso 7y ago
  Flash is the reason I’m a developer. I’m a self studies software developer. I wanted to become a screen designer in the early 2000 but also liked to bring the pages I designed to life. JavaScript for interactive content was impossible to use for me. I stumbled upon flash and was hooked. I started of with simple timeline animations, learned to structure and control the whole player from one script file. Learned basic OOP concepts and with AS3 the lot of OOP paradigms and patterns etc. I had a 3 year fun period with Flex and moved finally to mobile development. I never regretted to spend so much time on this now dead Technologie. I can still draw from my experience even when it comes to thinks “how not to do it”. I have to work Indirectly with Unity now. And it has it faults as well. I often joke that I preferred flash over it. There was only the Textfeld implementation to work around ;).
• fbn79 7y ago
  Flash was a cancer for the web (poor usability, incomprensible web interfaces, low importance to the real content, quasi-zero accessibility), no responsive, closed source insecure and monopolistic platform. I has never been a fan of Jobs and iPhone but I was very happy when the iPhone success signed the start of the decline and extinction of Flash tecnology.
• dmje 7y ago
  It's a good piece (and damn it, book added to basket - that looks ace...) but I think it's confusing to suggest Flash was the [only] creative bit. What was truly creative / inspiring / enabling in the 90's / 00's IMO was the fact you could see something someone had made and then view source and see how they made it. Then with cheap or free tools you could edit locally, fiddle with it, upload to a cheap host if you wanted. This is clearly the opposite of what Flash gave us which was a black box with no way of seeing inside. Nowadays you've got no chance of working out what a site is doing or how it's working - view source is a litter of external resources which you've got to follow until hell freezes over. And apparently now you've got to brew-grunt-git-node-fuckknowswhatelse in order to get anything running at all. I'm an old git and it's hackneyed to say it but I miss the simpler old days. I'm really hoping the Javascript trend dies quickly so beginners / amateurs can get back in the game. Now: Flash: what's interesting to me is that what Flash offered genuinely doesn't seem to be a thing that can be done any more. We do a lot of rich content work and frequently get asked about making online experiences to help explain concepts or ideas as infographics or games. Flash was may bad things, but the universality and really easy to use building tools just don't seem to have been replaced by anything comparable. Or maybe I've missed it?
• guggle 7y ago
  I can understand the nostalgia and creativity and all of this. But there are two sides to this story. I had flash courses where a significant amount of effort was put into making loading bars... and that pretty much sums up Flash for me: something abused in a way that it slowed down access to meaningful content.
• obituary_latte 7y ago
  Glad to see Joshua Davis (Praystation) in there. Now known as https://joshuadavis.com/ https://joshuadavis.com/ he was way ahead of the times IMO.
• jonplackett 7y ago
  I still miss flash. Why is it so hard to replace with something equally as good that works on mobile?
• apignotti 7y ago
  Our take on how to preserve Flash content in the WebAssembly era: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...
• robmoorman 7y ago
  Looking back at 10 years AS 2/3 has brought us more than we have ever done within the Javascript era. The major lacking stabilities, compilers like TypeScript makes the modern toolset so incredible bad. Lovely to see as most of old AS programmers still approach these modern Javascript webapps way better than people started with Javascript without knowing the language behind it. "R.i.p. Robotlegs" (lol @ https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-library https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-library)
• neop1x 7y ago
  What prevents someone to replicate the Flash experience with modern web tech like JS, HTML5, CSS or Canvas/WebGL? I mean something with similar editor functionality, producing result drawable in modern web browsers. EDIT: There actually is Adobe Animate so what prevents people from being as creative as in the Flash era?! https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
  • whatever_dude 7y ago
    My theory is that the web has overall matured. A lot of what Flash did is now possible and even better/faster/easier, but the reason for those aren't there. In many ways Flash websites featured novel navigation and interaction experiences, the likes of people never had seen before, but that's a gimmick that gets old fast. No insurance company wants or needs an animated 3d intro in their website; they want and need good SEO, and information that's easy to reach. If they want to impress with something visual, they'll go to YouTube or Instagram.
• madiathomas 7y ago
  Flash is one of those technologies that I refused to learn. It was in fashion when I was still starting my career in Software Development. I didn't like the experience on websites using flash. I saw Flash and other similar technologies as cancers to the web. I didn't want to be part of the problem.
• scotty79 7y ago
  Just another great piece of software Adobe bought and killed by mixture of neglect and quality Adobe software engineering.
• devsatish 7y ago
  Flex was immensely powerful. Back in 2007 I was able to prototype a Flex app for a financial firm where I could load 20K complex records on UI super fast for various streaming views/Charts/trading views etc. All possible with AS3, BlazeDS/LCDS Java back-end; building trading/streaming applications was fast. Wish Adobe and rest of the guys supported Flash/Flex platform on Desktop at least. Moving to open-source/apache didnt help either; Apache Flex is pretty much written off. Sigh !
• _pmf_ 7y ago
  And Microsoft invented AJAX and the dynamic web.
• davidu 7y ago
  But finally there are viable, open, replacements that are emerging: https://www.2dimensions.com/explore/popular/trending/all https://www.2dimensions.com/explore/popular/trending/all which uses Flare: https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare (and is using an Open Source runtime that runs natively)
• brylie 7y ago
  Is there any open source tool/community trying to create a simple HTML5 animation studio similar to Flash? That would really open up doors for widespread creativity and the adoption of web standards.
  • ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    I've been asking the same question for years. Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash to me. But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript. https://greensock.com/ https://greensock.com/
    • brylie 7y ago
      Same here, been wanting this for a long time. I even started a project called Hypermedia Canvas, but didn't have the skills or collaborators to get it started. I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web standard technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG) directly in a web browser. We would build on existing efforts and prior art where possible.
      • brylie 7y ago
        E.g. the CreateJS toolkit might be a good basis: https://createjs.com/ https://createjs.com/ I'm not clear how to build a keyframe timeline or bezier graph for property tweening, nor am I sure whether shape tweening is possible with CSS or SVG.
        • brylie 7y ago
          The Scene.js Timeline seems foundational to making keyframe animations using JS/CSS: https://github.com/daybrush/scenejs-timeline https://github.com/daybrush/scenejs-timeline Granted, Scene.js seems oriented towards short animations. Building a hypermedia studio, even with Scene.js as a component, that could produce something as elaborate as Homestar Runner would need considerable effort. The idea here is basically an open source, web standards-based alternative to Adobe Animate.
• irrational 7y ago
  Amen to this. At my job we create training content. In the Flash era we had a team of animators that created the greatest content. Our clients in Asia especially loved our content. Then the iPad came out. Overnight all of our clients decided that they were going to use iPads for training (we were training sales associates who previously had to use a manager's computer in a back room, now with iPads they could train on the sales floor). Of course, the iPad doesn't support flash. So we moved from awesome animations to plain text and images web pages with a few short videos for really important content. This is still what we are doing. At this point these is no chance of going back to the time of web animations, and I think it is a real shame. Content now sucks big time. Why has nobody been able to build a Flash clone to create content for the canvas element? I've looked at Adobe Animate and it is nowhere near being in the same class as Flash.
• classified 7y ago
  Yea, the "internet" apparently needs a festering cesspool of bugginess, resource hogging, and remote code execution vectors to be "creative". A programming language that lets you take control safely would just be too stifling.
• rendall 7y ago
  It was Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" essay that really turned the tide on Flash. Flash, as a direct threat to the gigantic revenue stream that was the Apple Store, could not be put on the iPhone. I immediately saw that essay for what it was, and didn't pay much attention. Rather than say "Flash threatens Apple's revenue" Jobs' had to employ FUD. But within a day, Wired magazine published an op-ed masquerading as a factual article, hating on Flash; and never stopped that drumbeat. "Flash. Must. Die." it (literally) wrote. And then, it was a total pile-on. No "serious programmer" would go anywhere near it, nor admit that there was anything positive about it at all. One could not mention Flash without devs asserting loudly that it was "riddled with security holes" (always "riddled", always "security holes"). I learned some lessons that year, about tech, devs, corporations and people.
• moisto 7y ago
  Strongbad Email FTW