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The comments here and on the article itself both imply that flash is maybe a little less bad that the alternatives or that it isn't just the absolute worst. I d

by fargle 5y ago

The comments here and on the article itself both imply that flash is maybe a little less bad that the alternatives or that it isn't just the absolute worst. I does not escape me that this is 10-year old post. But - is it still the same now, really? I'm a long time software engineer for UNIX and embedded, but I'm certainly not a web developer - the closest I get to a browser and related technologies is as a user/reader. I think this may be part of the cause of a very different viewpoint - it seems like web developers actually bemoan the demise of flash? As a UNIX/Linux user especially, I was extremely happy to see the end of that. I danced a jig when Netflix and Prime dumped it. GAD it was awful! Only think worse was java in the browser. I had never considered anyone would be a flash apologist (even adobe employees). So while using CSS, etc. etc. might be a pain for the developer, I think everybody else was more than happy to see it die. Just about everything from adobe seems to have the same basic stench. I wonder what other things are popular for the creators but hated by the users? That's kind of an odd economic situation.

sparky_z 5y ago
Speaking as a user, not a developer, I miss Flash because I had control over it. I could turn off "autoplay" everywhere with a global setting, turn it back on on a case by case basis, and the website owners couldn't do anything to stop me.
zinekeller 5y ago
> I wonder what other things are popular for the creators but hated by the users? That's kind of an odd economic situation. Electron, depending on how the developers use it. Most users doesn't knew that it's Electron because it's bundled with the application versus Flash which is visibly installed by the user, but most do indirectly complain of incomplete integration on their OS (usually they re-implement the notification system instead of using the native notification of the system) and very bloated memory requirements.
pjmlp 5y ago
It has been 10 years, and the tooling for WebAssembly/WebGL is still quite far from what Flash was allowing in 2011. Yes Unity and Unreal do support them as backend, yet those export formats remain as experimental prototypes. The indie game development community moved into the mobile platforms, which gave them what the Web took away and is yet to properly replace. And for what? WebGL + WebAssembly now have brought Flash back. https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
noduerme 5y ago
Flash was often misused - and you could argue it made it too easy for bad coders or malicious actors to load up a page with garbage. But as a game designer - especially for being able to code and work in the same environment as the artists producing assets - it was wayyyy ahead of its time. And it's true that even now, unless you use some other closed ecosystem like Unity, there is nothing even close to the workflow that Flash allowed for packaging a game that would work on the web, Android and iOS. And not just games - all kinds of interactive apps and simulations that could live outside a walled garden (which IMHO was why it was really killed). Yeah, we've sort of got the tools now, ten years later, to be able to do what we were doing in the 2000s. Although it's still a lot messier. You now need to pick an audio lib and a drawing lib and a networking lib and hope they're all still supported in a few years, or be willing to maintain them yourself. But what really gets me is the way Adobe killed it in the end, by silently adding a self-destruct date to the plugin several versions in advance. I mean, people should still be allowed to somehow load my old games and apps if they want to. But now I can't even load them on my new machine. Literally hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted code, three gaming platforms I built from scratch, several private business logistics apps that were still in daily use, and the majority of my work output from 2004-2014, was obliterated with very little warning. Right now I'm still rewriting a critical AIR app that's still used by employees onsite all over the country, the last one I have in the wild. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the app other than that the language was killed, and it's basically impossible for me to push updates. Doing everything again is just a huge waste of time. The client can't understand why we're spending the money and time to completely rewrite something that will look and function exactly the same, only it'll be in TS instead of AS3. The reason there's not an open source AS3 emulator out there that you can run in a web page is that Flash did so many different things, as related by this little article. It let you code sockets before there were websockets, and was still a friendly place for your artists to make their animations. It was like a swiss army knife with everything in one place, working pretty darn well.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  What do you think of Cheerp, the project linked in a post above? Are there limitations that prevent it from being s replacement to the Flash engine? https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
joeyjojo 5y ago
At its core the beauty of Flash was the extremely tight interplay between vector graphics in nested timelines, and the the programming environment. Many people compare Flash to Unity, but I really don't find the two all that comparable. You don't create your assets in Unity, and by the time those assets get into Unity you have lost most potential for dynamic behaviour. Flash's tight integration allowed for extremely fast iterations, and its hierarchal model was very flexible and allowed you to work very fast and creatively. I'm surprised no one has had a good crack at re-creating the core functionality of Flash circa 2004, based on web tech, or something like Kha[1]. I've thought many times about starting such a project. I think the biggest challenges are developing a solid vector rendering runtime alongside the vector drawing tools, but just about everything else that ex-Flashers want can be reduced down to some pretty simple functionality. You could even forego all the cruft of the display list, the event model, etc, and just go with a simpler immediate mode renderer and I think you'd still be retaining those core components that made Flash special. There are so many use cases (eLearning experience, Digital Signage, Touch Screen Kiosks) that Unity isn't particularly suitable for, and for which HTML/Javascript is just clunky, that such a tool could far better accomodate. 1. https://github.com/Kode/Kha https://github.com/Kode/Kha.
- rogual 5y ago
  Flash's vector drawing tools were the best in the business, and I think would be very difficult to clone. It was all based on doing boolean operations between bezier splines ("planar maps" I think is a good search term), which I believe (I did a small amount of research into this) has no generally-applicable analytic solution, so you sometimes have to fudge it with approximations. And Flash's tools did spaz out sometimes; occasionally your drawings would disappear or turn inside out or otherwise corrupt themselves. To be honest I think it's amazing that it was as stable as it was. AFAIK this drawing model came from Flash's predecessor FutureSplash Animator. In fact, it might have already been there in SmartSketch. It really was the most innovative part of what became Flash, and it's not surprising to see all the commercial and open-source would-be-replacements opt for the easier-to-implement vector model used in stuff like Illustrator, where you just have a stack of separate shapes. I think any Flash replacement that does vector graphics the easier way will have a hard time feeling as natural to create in as Flash did.
icemelt8 5y ago
Why did you hate flash as a user?

by fargle 5y ago

sparky_z 5y ago

Speaking as a user, not a developer, I miss Flash because I had control over it. I could turn off "autoplay" everywhere with a global setting, turn it back on on a case by case basis, and the website owners couldn't do anything to stop me.

zinekeller 5y ago

> I wonder what other things are popular for the creators but hated by the users? That's kind of an odd economic situation. Electron, depending on how the developers use it. Most users doesn't knew that it's Electron because it's bundled with the application versus Flash which is visibly installed by the user, but most do indirectly complain of incomplete integration on their OS (usually they re-implement the notification system instead of using the native notification of the system) and very bloated memory requirements.

pjmlp 5y ago

It has been 10 years, and the tooling for WebAssembly/WebGL is still quite far from what Flash was allowing in 2011. Yes Unity and Unreal do support them as backend, yet those export formats remain as experimental prototypes. The indie game development community moved into the mobile platforms, which gave them what the Web took away and is yet to properly replace. And for what? WebGL + WebAssembly now have brought Flash back. https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

noduerme 5y ago

Flash was often misused - and you could argue it made it too easy for bad coders or malicious actors to load up a page with garbage. But as a game designer - especially for being able to code and work in the same environment as the artists producing assets - it was wayyyy ahead of its time. And it's true that even now, unless you use some other closed ecosystem like Unity, there is nothing even close to the workflow that Flash allowed for packaging a game that would work on the web, Android and iOS. And not just games - all kinds of interactive apps and simulations that could live outside a walled garden (which IMHO was why it was really killed). Yeah, we've sort of got the tools now, ten years later, to be able to do what we were doing in the 2000s. Although it's still a lot messier. You now need to pick an audio lib and a drawing lib and a networking lib and hope they're all still supported in a few years, or be willing to maintain them yourself. But what really gets me is the way Adobe killed it in the end, by silently adding a self-destruct date to the plugin several versions in advance. I mean, people should still be allowed to somehow load my old games and apps if they want to. But now I can't even load them on my new machine. Literally hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted code, three gaming platforms I built from scratch, several private business logistics apps that were still in daily use, and the majority of my work output from 2004-2014, was obliterated with very little warning. Right now I'm still rewriting a critical AIR app that's still used by employees onsite all over the country, the last one I have in the wild. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the app other than that the language was killed, and it's basically impossible for me to push updates. Doing everything again is just a huge waste of time. The client can't understand why we're spending the money and time to completely rewrite something that will look and function exactly the same, only it'll be in TS instead of AS3. The reason there's not an open source AS3 emulator out there that you can run in a web page is that Flash did so many different things, as related by this little article. It let you code sockets before there were websockets, and was still a friendly place for your artists to make their animations. It was like a swiss army knife with everything in one place, working pretty darn well.

TuringTest 5y ago
What do you think of Cheerp, the project linked in a post above? Are there limitations that prevent it from being s replacement to the Flash engine? https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/ https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

joeyjojo 5y ago

At its core the beauty of Flash was the extremely tight interplay between vector graphics in nested timelines, and the the programming environment. Many people compare Flash to Unity, but I really don't find the two all that comparable. You don't create your assets in Unity, and by the time those assets get into Unity you have lost most potential for dynamic behaviour. Flash's tight integration allowed for extremely fast iterations, and its hierarchal model was very flexible and allowed you to work very fast and creatively. I'm surprised no one has had a good crack at re-creating the core functionality of Flash circa 2004, based on web tech, or something like Kha[1]. I've thought many times about starting such a project. I think the biggest challenges are developing a solid vector rendering runtime alongside the vector drawing tools, but just about everything else that ex-Flashers want can be reduced down to some pretty simple functionality. You could even forego all the cruft of the display list, the event model, etc, and just go with a simpler immediate mode renderer and I think you'd still be retaining those core components that made Flash special. There are so many use cases (eLearning experience, Digital Signage, Touch Screen Kiosks) that Unity isn't particularly suitable for, and for which HTML/Javascript is just clunky, that such a tool could far better accomodate. 1. https://github.com/Kode/Kha https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

rogual 5y ago
Flash's vector drawing tools were the best in the business, and I think would be very difficult to clone. It was all based on doing boolean operations between bezier splines ("planar maps" I think is a good search term), which I believe (I did a small amount of research into this) has no generally-applicable analytic solution, so you sometimes have to fudge it with approximations. And Flash's tools did spaz out sometimes; occasionally your drawings would disappear or turn inside out or otherwise corrupt themselves. To be honest I think it's amazing that it was as stable as it was. AFAIK this drawing model came from Flash's predecessor FutureSplash Animator. In fact, it might have already been there in SmartSketch. It really was the most innovative part of what became Flash, and it's not surprising to see all the commercial and open-source would-be-replacements opt for the easier-to-implement vector model used in stuff like Illustrator, where you just have a stack of separate shapes. I think any Flash replacement that does vector graphics the easier way will have a hard time feeling as natural to create in as Flash did.

icemelt8 5y ago

Why did you hate flash as a user?