5 ms·

I understand why people here are so pissed about Flash, but if I be completely honest with you, IMO this tech was part of the stuff that made the "old" web so v

by nirui 6y ago

I understand why people here are so pissed about Flash, but if I be completely honest with you, IMO this tech was part of the stuff that made the "old" web so vibrant. I remember about 15 years ago, there was a Flash animations channel on a Chinese website PCOnline.com.cn (Pacific Computer Network), many "Flashkers" published their art works and games there, Little Cherry Cartoon, ShiHuang Animations and that green bean frog to name a few. It was the number 1 place I went to every time when I back from school (that every half month). For Americans, if you visit NASA.gov in around 2005 (I maybe misremembered the exact time), their intro page was a Flash animation featuring rocket launch and other stuff. And that animation was really cool and moving. All of that is no more in today's web. Today's web only gives you few pictures or maybe a video in the background, and a big highlighted "Sign Up"||"Get Started" button. They are less and less "Look me, I'm so cool", and the resonance is mostly gone. It's sad that Adobe was unable to address the security and stability issue in the Flash Player. Bye Flash, it was really fun.

justsee 6y ago
It's true, Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity which drew in both artists and programmers in a way the felt new and unique, and seemed to last for almost a decade from ~2000 - ~2010. Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene. Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player. Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85 https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85. Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons. I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that... As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish. In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...
- marvel_boy 6y ago
  >Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity No.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    There were numerous sites like Bullseyeart.com that served up original Flash based animation. Those cartoons and short films were not available on television or anywhere else. Most are lost and no longer available anywhere.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  I'm not sure I'd call it "candid" for Adobe engineers to blame their demise purely on Apple evil. Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash. It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity. Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
  - justsee 6y ago
    Oh I agree with you. When I say 'candid', I mean they conveyed the sense they were sharing some internal opinion that it was entirely about Apple playing commercial games, when in retrospect I don't think that was correct – there were technical issues that made it a non-starter on mobile (battery, smooth UX as you say).
resoluteteeth 6y ago
Like many people here, you seem to be slightly misunderstanding what it means for the flash player to be killed. The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html. In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format. If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.
- justsee 6y ago
  I think you're both right and wrong. You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness. But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices. The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society. Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices. The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience. [1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
trm42 6y ago
I would splice the argument in half: A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose. Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.
- robertoandred 6y ago
  Adobe Animate (née Flash) still exists. It just exports games and animations to HTML now.
_trampeltier 6y ago
Sadly Sun also did not took security in Java Applets serious, so they died. It had been so much possible with Java Applets.
schoolornot 6y ago
All they had to do was open the spec for SWF and Flex. Those greedy you know whats at Adobe. There was no threat whatsoever of the official tools being overtaken by alternatives. There is still no replacement today for motion tweens and the kinds of projects people built back then.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  SWF format details were published in 2010, and Flex was also open-sourced around that same timeframe.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    That was probably about five years too late for the open-sourcing strategy to be successful. By 2010 Flash was already widely reviled on the desktop and doomed to be shut out of the mobile browsing experience. But if there had been at least a fledgling open-source Flash ecosystem for a year or two before the iPhone was released, things could have played out very differently.
badconvincer 6y ago
I was an Adobe Flex developer years ago. There still isn’t a similar replacement right? Last I checked when I was still developing you had to do insane things with CSS for even the most basic animations. Is there something better now?

by nirui 6y ago

justsee 6y ago

It's true, Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity which drew in both artists and programmers in a way the felt new and unique, and seemed to last for almost a decade from ~2000 - ~2010. Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene. Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player. Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85 https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85. Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons. I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that... As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish. In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...

marvel_boy 6y ago
>Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity No.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  There were numerous sites like Bullseyeart.com that served up original Flash based animation. Those cartoons and short films were not available on television or anywhere else. Most are lost and no longer available anywhere.
jjoonathan 6y ago
I'm not sure I'd call it "candid" for Adobe engineers to blame their demise purely on Apple evil. Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash. It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity. Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
- justsee 6y ago
  Oh I agree with you. When I say 'candid', I mean they conveyed the sense they were sharing some internal opinion that it was entirely about Apple playing commercial games, when in retrospect I don't think that was correct – there were technical issues that made it a non-starter on mobile (battery, smooth UX as you say).

resoluteteeth 6y ago

Like many people here, you seem to be slightly misunderstanding what it means for the flash player to be killed. The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html. In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format. If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.

justsee 6y ago
I think you're both right and wrong. You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness. But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices. The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society. Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices. The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience. [1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate

trm42 6y ago

I would splice the argument in half: A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose. Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.

robertoandred 6y ago
Adobe Animate (née Flash) still exists. It just exports games and animations to HTML now.

_trampeltier 6y ago

Sadly Sun also did not took security in Java Applets serious, so they died. It had been so much possible with Java Applets.

schoolornot 6y ago

All they had to do was open the spec for SWF and Flex. Those greedy you know whats at Adobe. There was no threat whatsoever of the official tools being overtaken by alternatives. There is still no replacement today for motion tweens and the kinds of projects people built back then.

Jasper_ 6y ago
SWF format details were published in 2010, and Flex was also open-sourced around that same timeframe.
- wtallis 6y ago
  That was probably about five years too late for the open-sourcing strategy to be successful. By 2010 Flash was already widely reviled on the desktop and doomed to be shut out of the mobile browsing experience. But if there had been at least a fledgling open-source Flash ecosystem for a year or two before the iPhone was released, things could have played out very differently.

badconvincer 6y ago

I was an Adobe Flex developer years ago. There still isn’t a similar replacement right? Last I checked when I was still developing you had to do insane things with CSS for even the most basic animations. Is there something better now?