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Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an abs

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it produced from the bottom of my heart. Long live Flash & special mention to Macromedia Shockwave.

echelon 6y ago
> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opportunity and dropped the ball. Flash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab. But Flash missed a chance to contribute to its defense. If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, Flash support might have been a required feature. Lots of people would have launched apps as Flash apps instead of iOS- or Android-specific apps, and we might have gotten much more open and cross-platform devices as a consequence. I kind of blame Flash's lack of follow-through for the App Store hell we have today. The web that could have been...
- Sunspark 6y ago
  You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3
  - Marazan 6y ago
    The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry. As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%. All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.
    - olau 6y ago
      I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering. At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better. But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.
      - Marazan 6y ago
        Abobe's failure to switch the flash tools to targeting HTML5 is one of the most inexplicable decisions of all time. In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development. And they just abandoned it. In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.
        triangleman 6y ago
        Sorry I don't understand what is the connection between HTML5 and Flash? Isn't flash an object that runs inside HTML5? What would you like Adobe to have done exactly?
        Marazan 6y ago
        Instead of outputting a flash object file the Flash tools could have output actual HTML. The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.
- ilyagr 6y ago
  There are game libraries that try to be similar to flash, such as http://www.openfl.org/learn/ http://www.openfl.org/learn/.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Agreed. Flash a quality that's hard to identify. Is the source code for Flash available? That would be brilliant.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  I feel like Unity3D could be turned into an animation tool like Flash with some extensions. It already has HTML5 export.
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    Unity’s HTML5 export is super heavyweight (unless you do some super complicated things getting it to work with the ECS stuff). Flash was...though abused a lot, much more lightweight, able to slot into a randomo webpage without sticking out too much/causing performance issues. Also as a direct substitute, Unity has much inferior font rendering, and no built-in vector graphics capabilities. If I was doing a 2D animation tool for browser export, I don’t see that unity would offer me much, and would come with a lot of downsides.
  - mesh 6y ago
    The Flash authoring tool (now called Adobe Animate) has HTML5 / Canvas output via the CreateJs library. https://createjs.com/ https://createjs.com/ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
- userbinator 6y ago
  Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard They did open it up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, they might have been a required feature. ...but the feature bloat that Adobe created with the platform was part of the problem, introducing not only security issues but inefficiency. SWF started out as a small and efficient vector format, and then accrued far more features than were really necessary for its core purpose. (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)
  - windsurfer 6y ago
    > (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.) Adobe themselves pushed for using open web tech. I was working at Adobe in AS3/Flex during the transition and they were going to great lengths to promote and encourage development of open standards.
- spullara 6y ago
  Remember that Jobs banned it to kill it. https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-the-iphone/ https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...
  - tapirl 6y ago
    I don't think this is the fatal reason Flash is stopped. Flash is only forbidden in mobile web browsers. Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.
    - omghashtag 6y ago
      Flash abandoned their own product only after it wasn't allowed on iPhones anymore.
    - spullara 6y ago
      It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.
      - mattmanser 6y ago
        Definitely. I remember at the time Adobe Air was still recently new and there was some buzz around in the tech scenes because everyone like Balsamiq Mockups, which originally was only in available in Adobe Air. Then Apple announced they weren't going to support flash and overnight everyone realized flash was dead, and Air and Silverlight were both a dead end. I was working on a Silverlight product at the time and it got canned soon after too, with Microsoft soon losing enthusiasm for it too. Some oldies from here: 2007 - Steve Jobs saying Flash is bad for video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496 2008 - John Gruber being prescient about Apple banning flash compiler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431 2010 - Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (2nd comment thread is pg saying he's against it ideologically): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799
- boarnoah 6y ago
  The mid 2000s era was a really magical time for me growing up. Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites. Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days. I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things. I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.
  - echelon 6y ago
    I think today's creative youth are on Twitch and TikTok. I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy. Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.
    - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
      Seems reasonable that being a content creator is a viable career for young people as automation and globalization continue to eat jobs. TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.
      - romanoderoma 6y ago
        Content creation is an elite Only a few make a living out of it And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Content creator is a vanishingly small lottery winner occupation now and in the future unless it’s connected to a product in some way.
- mrschwabe 6y ago
  Agree with that sentiment! But would take it one step further. I argued in 2010 that Adobe should have (could have, would have) launched their own hardware platform. This would have given them & the thousands of loyal Flash devs a more permanent 'final destination' for their apps & games - despite Apple's intentions. Easier said than done, but fun to think about how things could have played out if Flash was given a dedicated hardware platform and follow on generational iterations ie- today maybe we'd have one more option other than iOS or Android. In fact, an allegience with Microsoft probably would have been best and saved both companies' endevours in the dedicated phone/tablet space but now I'm just spitballing.
- ehwhyreally 6y ago
  > Nothing filled the gap left by Flash Flash should have never been used to create websites. end of story.
- paulie_a 6y ago
  Nothing filled the gap left by flash? I see that as a good thing. Flash was a power hungry, slow and obnoxious technology. Not to mention it was a security nightmare. I'm glad the barrier to entry to make pointless animations is atleast slightly higher
- shawnz 6y ago
  While I agree there is an unfilled need after the end of Flash, is the problem really a matter of technology or is it just that nobody has produced a vector animation editor as easy/accessible as the Flash software was? Clearly all the pieces are in place to do everything Flash can do if you can emulate Flash at full speed entirely in the browser.
  - zyx321 6y ago
    Flash Animation was made possible by technical limitations as much as by technical possibilities. 480p Flash clocking in at less than 100kB vs RealPlayer needing several MB for the same amount of content in 240p is a huge difference on a slow connection. 1080p streaming in real-time is "good enough" and YouTube will not only host it for free, but even share ad revenue. You could deliver vector animation in HTML5, but a pure animation platform will have a hard time against something that can do both animation and camera recordings.
- wbl 6y ago
  Canvas should aim to be as close as possible to this. I think with a bit better animation support they would be there, but I really don't know much about the domain.
  - rypskar 6y ago
    With frameworks like PixieJS and Three.js it is there, but requires more coding to start, instead of using a simple GUI to get started and then add code as needed
- Marazan 6y ago
  The flash player spec was published and the ActionScript3 engine was open source.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  > I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab No it isn't. It has degenerated into being only browsable in its entirety by Chrome, with all other "browser vendors" except Apple having given up due to sheer complexity and infeasibility to keep up - Opera, Microsoft, and now Firefox. That's what you get by putting Google (ie WHATWG, consisting of Chrome devs) into the role of defining so-called "web standards", with W3C (a self-declared "standardization body") depending on Google's and other big player's money having done nothing meaningful for years except brittling and foobaring CSS.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The Web is gone, ChromeOS has won.
- OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
  Yes, there is nothing like the flash IDE available today. I had a manager in the late 2000's who was giddy with the possibilities of HTML5 "It can do everything we do with flash!" Whilst that may be technically true, in practice bloated libraries like D3 are required for even the most basic vector manipulation and coding every tiny detail of an animation feels like groping in the dark when there used to be a source of illumination. I'm not sad about the demise of Flash, but I think there is a gap in the market for a more graphical keyframe based approach, where things can be rapidly prototyped, resulting in clean code.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    I'm using Tumult Hype, it's SVG animation capabilities are pretty good IMO, and it's all GUI-based.
    - OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
      OK cool, will give it a shot, thanks for the recommendation! I tested every application I could find a couple of years ago. Lots of pretty prototyping apps, but generally the end code is somehow garbled or proprietary.
- daniel-s 6y ago
  What replaced flash? Was it SVG + JavaScript?
  - EamonnMR 6y ago
    Video replaced flash movies and nothing replaced flash games, there's just a hole.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  There are actually a large number of apps that did launch on Flash and were on iOS and Android. Adobe had app exporter functionality for Flash back in 2010. There's even drama surrounding it. If you remember Steve Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash" - that wasn't a mea culpa for not supporting browser plugins. Apple was seriously considering banning all third-party development tools to stop Adobe from getting Flash games on iOS, and "Thoughts on Flash" was written and published to justify that ban. The FTC threatened to sue and Apple backed down a few months later. I should also point out that you seem to be remembering the days of Flash 5-8 where development was primarily on the timeline and AS2 classes were fancy new tech. By the time Adobe and Apple were feuding over Flash, most developers were using AS3, which was a lot more like modern JavaScript development. Hell, Adobe was specifically pushing to make AS3 the next version of JavaScript. You could still develop AS3 on the timeline, but it was less powerful than AS1/2 and most developer resources assumed all your code lived in separate files using Adobe's APIs to interact with the display list directly.
- cmrdsprklpny 6y ago
  Media authoring-wise, the Wick Editor [1] is attempting to fill the gap. It's still pretty young, but looks promising. [1]: https://www.wickeditor.com https://www.wickeditor.com
- rchaud 6y ago
  As someone with a solid HTML/CSS background but weak JS, I gave up on trying to figure out GSAP and other animation frameworks, and just bought Tumult Hype. It's a GUI-based web animation tool that exports to HTML and MP4, with the ability to write custom JS if you need it. Being able to visually look at timelines and set tweening by dragging a slider is much more my speed, and reminiscent of Flash, which I haven't done anything on in more than 10 years. Best of all, it's a one-time payment. I considered Adobe Animate, but monthly subscriptions are a total no-no for me.
- driverdan 6y ago
  > Flash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. For basic animation and graphics that's true but not for creating anything interactive. ActionScript was based on ECMAScript / JavaScript and was very similar. If you knew JS you could easily write AS and vice versa. If you mean it didn't have the complexity of today's JS-based apps that may be true but that's a choice, not a technical limitation.
muzani 6y ago
There's a lot of really good games built for Symbian as well. I'm glad to be building for Android/iOS, but those were some of the best mobile games I've ever played. Touch screen has a lot of limitations when it comes to gaming.
stronglikedan 6y ago
It's still used in quite a few business environments, both bespoke and enterprisey, and there's a significant amount of devs crapping bricks right now.
blub 6y ago
You love Flash from the bottom of your heart, but you're happy it's dead? Could it be that you're hiding your true feelings to be more in line with the expectations of the community? The modern web development establishment has managed to convince people that it has merit, when in fact it's a case study in accidental complexity. Every now and then some poor soul realizes what a mess they're in and writes a blog about the miserable state of web development, but the wider community cannot face the truth, because it would mean that the last 20 years of "progress" have been wasted. And indeed, after two decades of support from every player in the industry, shoving countless APIs in the pseudo web standards controlled by Google, modern web applications work almost as well as a Flash app - except with thousands of tiny packages and tools cobbled together into one big ball of nonsense.
- afiori 6y ago
  merit is not a scalar quantity, rather it has quite a few dimensions.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  I love the content it produced and the people it inspired rather than the tech itself. I’m not happy it’s dead, I just don’t think it’s a good choice these days. As an artistic tool it’s perfectly valid, but I wouldn’t use it to design my next project.

echelon 6y ago

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opportunity and dropped the ball. Flash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab. But Flash missed a chance to contribute to its defense. If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, Flash support might have been a required feature. Lots of people would have launched apps as Flash apps instead of iOS- or Android-specific apps, and we might have gotten much more open and cross-platform devices as a consequence. I kind of blame Flash's lack of follow-through for the App Store hell we have today. The web that could have been...

Sunspark 6y ago
You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3
- Marazan 6y ago
  The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry. As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%. All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.
  - olau 6y ago
    I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering. At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better. But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.
    - Marazan 6y ago
      Abobe's failure to switch the flash tools to targeting HTML5 is one of the most inexplicable decisions of all time. In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development. And they just abandoned it. In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.
      - triangleman 6y ago
        Sorry I don't understand what is the connection between HTML5 and Flash? Isn't flash an object that runs inside HTML5? What would you like Adobe to have done exactly?
        Marazan 6y ago
        Instead of outputting a flash object file the Flash tools could have output actual HTML. The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.
ilyagr 6y ago
There are game libraries that try to be similar to flash, such as http://www.openfl.org/learn/ http://www.openfl.org/learn/.
breakfastduck 6y ago
Agreed. Flash a quality that's hard to identify. Is the source code for Flash available? That would be brilliant.
jimmaswell 6y ago
I feel like Unity3D could be turned into an animation tool like Flash with some extensions. It already has HTML5 export.
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  Unity’s HTML5 export is super heavyweight (unless you do some super complicated things getting it to work with the ECS stuff). Flash was...though abused a lot, much more lightweight, able to slot into a randomo webpage without sticking out too much/causing performance issues. Also as a direct substitute, Unity has much inferior font rendering, and no built-in vector graphics capabilities. If I was doing a 2D animation tool for browser export, I don’t see that unity would offer me much, and would come with a lot of downsides.
- mesh 6y ago
  The Flash authoring tool (now called Adobe Animate) has HTML5 / Canvas output via the CreateJs library. https://createjs.com/ https://createjs.com/ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
userbinator 6y ago
Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard They did open it up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, they might have been a required feature. ...but the feature bloat that Adobe created with the platform was part of the problem, introducing not only security issues but inefficiency. SWF started out as a small and efficient vector format, and then accrued far more features than were really necessary for its core purpose. (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)
- windsurfer 6y ago
  > (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.) Adobe themselves pushed for using open web tech. I was working at Adobe in AS3/Flex during the transition and they were going to great lengths to promote and encourage development of open standards.
spullara 6y ago
Remember that Jobs banned it to kill it. https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-the-iphone/ https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...
- tapirl 6y ago
  I don't think this is the fatal reason Flash is stopped. Flash is only forbidden in mobile web browsers. Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.
  - omghashtag 6y ago
    Flash abandoned their own product only after it wasn't allowed on iPhones anymore.
  - spullara 6y ago
    It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      Definitely. I remember at the time Adobe Air was still recently new and there was some buzz around in the tech scenes because everyone like Balsamiq Mockups, which originally was only in available in Adobe Air. Then Apple announced they weren't going to support flash and overnight everyone realized flash was dead, and Air and Silverlight were both a dead end. I was working on a Silverlight product at the time and it got canned soon after too, with Microsoft soon losing enthusiasm for it too. Some oldies from here: 2007 - Steve Jobs saying Flash is bad for video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496 2008 - John Gruber being prescient about Apple banning flash compiler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431 2010 - Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (2nd comment thread is pg saying he's against it ideologically): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799
boarnoah 6y ago
The mid 2000s era was a really magical time for me growing up. Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites. Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days. I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things. I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.
- echelon 6y ago
  I think today's creative youth are on Twitch and TikTok. I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy. Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Seems reasonable that being a content creator is a viable career for young people as automation and globalization continue to eat jobs. TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      Content creation is an elite Only a few make a living out of it And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Content creator is a vanishingly small lottery winner occupation now and in the future unless it’s connected to a product in some way.
mrschwabe 6y ago
Agree with that sentiment! But would take it one step further. I argued in 2010 that Adobe should have (could have, would have) launched their own hardware platform. This would have given them & the thousands of loyal Flash devs a more permanent 'final destination' for their apps & games - despite Apple's intentions. Easier said than done, but fun to think about how things could have played out if Flash was given a dedicated hardware platform and follow on generational iterations ie- today maybe we'd have one more option other than iOS or Android. In fact, an allegience with Microsoft probably would have been best and saved both companies' endevours in the dedicated phone/tablet space but now I'm just spitballing.
ehwhyreally 6y ago
> Nothing filled the gap left by Flash Flash should have never been used to create websites. end of story.
paulie_a 6y ago
Nothing filled the gap left by flash? I see that as a good thing. Flash was a power hungry, slow and obnoxious technology. Not to mention it was a security nightmare. I'm glad the barrier to entry to make pointless animations is atleast slightly higher
shawnz 6y ago
While I agree there is an unfilled need after the end of Flash, is the problem really a matter of technology or is it just that nobody has produced a vector animation editor as easy/accessible as the Flash software was? Clearly all the pieces are in place to do everything Flash can do if you can emulate Flash at full speed entirely in the browser.
- zyx321 6y ago
  Flash Animation was made possible by technical limitations as much as by technical possibilities. 480p Flash clocking in at less than 100kB vs RealPlayer needing several MB for the same amount of content in 240p is a huge difference on a slow connection. 1080p streaming in real-time is "good enough" and YouTube will not only host it for free, but even share ad revenue. You could deliver vector animation in HTML5, but a pure animation platform will have a hard time against something that can do both animation and camera recordings.
wbl 6y ago
Canvas should aim to be as close as possible to this. I think with a bit better animation support they would be there, but I really don't know much about the domain.
- rypskar 6y ago
  With frameworks like PixieJS and Three.js it is there, but requires more coding to start, instead of using a simple GUI to get started and then add code as needed
Marazan 6y ago
The flash player spec was published and the ActionScript3 engine was open source.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
> I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab No it isn't. It has degenerated into being only browsable in its entirety by Chrome, with all other "browser vendors" except Apple having given up due to sheer complexity and infeasibility to keep up - Opera, Microsoft, and now Firefox. That's what you get by putting Google (ie WHATWG, consisting of Chrome devs) into the role of defining so-called "web standards", with W3C (a self-declared "standardization body") depending on Google's and other big player's money having done nothing meaningful for years except brittling and foobaring CSS.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The Web is gone, ChromeOS has won.
OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
Yes, there is nothing like the flash IDE available today. I had a manager in the late 2000's who was giddy with the possibilities of HTML5 "It can do everything we do with flash!" Whilst that may be technically true, in practice bloated libraries like D3 are required for even the most basic vector manipulation and coding every tiny detail of an animation feels like groping in the dark when there used to be a source of illumination. I'm not sad about the demise of Flash, but I think there is a gap in the market for a more graphical keyframe based approach, where things can be rapidly prototyped, resulting in clean code.
- rchaud 6y ago
  I'm using Tumult Hype, it's SVG animation capabilities are pretty good IMO, and it's all GUI-based.
  - OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
    OK cool, will give it a shot, thanks for the recommendation! I tested every application I could find a couple of years ago. Lots of pretty prototyping apps, but generally the end code is somehow garbled or proprietary.
daniel-s 6y ago
What replaced flash? Was it SVG + JavaScript?
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  Video replaced flash movies and nothing replaced flash games, there's just a hole.
kmeisthax 6y ago
There are actually a large number of apps that did launch on Flash and were on iOS and Android. Adobe had app exporter functionality for Flash back in 2010. There's even drama surrounding it. If you remember Steve Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash" - that wasn't a mea culpa for not supporting browser plugins. Apple was seriously considering banning all third-party development tools to stop Adobe from getting Flash games on iOS, and "Thoughts on Flash" was written and published to justify that ban. The FTC threatened to sue and Apple backed down a few months later. I should also point out that you seem to be remembering the days of Flash 5-8 where development was primarily on the timeline and AS2 classes were fancy new tech. By the time Adobe and Apple were feuding over Flash, most developers were using AS3, which was a lot more like modern JavaScript development. Hell, Adobe was specifically pushing to make AS3 the next version of JavaScript. You could still develop AS3 on the timeline, but it was less powerful than AS1/2 and most developer resources assumed all your code lived in separate files using Adobe's APIs to interact with the display list directly.
cmrdsprklpny 6y ago
Media authoring-wise, the Wick Editor [1] is attempting to fill the gap. It's still pretty young, but looks promising. [1]: https://www.wickeditor.com https://www.wickeditor.com
rchaud 6y ago
As someone with a solid HTML/CSS background but weak JS, I gave up on trying to figure out GSAP and other animation frameworks, and just bought Tumult Hype. It's a GUI-based web animation tool that exports to HTML and MP4, with the ability to write custom JS if you need it. Being able to visually look at timelines and set tweening by dragging a slider is much more my speed, and reminiscent of Flash, which I haven't done anything on in more than 10 years. Best of all, it's a one-time payment. I considered Adobe Animate, but monthly subscriptions are a total no-no for me.
driverdan 6y ago
> Flash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. For basic animation and graphics that's true but not for creating anything interactive. ActionScript was based on ECMAScript / JavaScript and was very similar. If you knew JS you could easily write AS and vice versa. If you mean it didn't have the complexity of today's JS-based apps that may be true but that's a choice, not a technical limitation.

muzani 6y ago

There's a lot of really good games built for Symbian as well. I'm glad to be building for Android/iOS, but those were some of the best mobile games I've ever played. Touch screen has a lot of limitations when it comes to gaming.

stronglikedan 6y ago

It's still used in quite a few business environments, both bespoke and enterprisey, and there's a significant amount of devs crapping bricks right now.

blub 6y ago

You love Flash from the bottom of your heart, but you're happy it's dead? Could it be that you're hiding your true feelings to be more in line with the expectations of the community? The modern web development establishment has managed to convince people that it has merit, when in fact it's a case study in accidental complexity. Every now and then some poor soul realizes what a mess they're in and writes a blog about the miserable state of web development, but the wider community cannot face the truth, because it would mean that the last 20 years of "progress" have been wasted. And indeed, after two decades of support from every player in the industry, shoving countless APIs in the pseudo web standards controlled by Google, modern web applications work almost as well as a Flash app - except with thousands of tiny packages and tools cobbled together into one big ball of nonsense.

afiori 6y ago
merit is not a scalar quantity, rather it has quite a few dimensions.
breakfastduck 6y ago
I love the content it produced and the people it inspired rather than the tech itself. I’m not happy it’s dead, I just don’t think it’s a good choice these days. As an artistic tool it’s perfectly valid, but I wouldn’t use it to design my next project.