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> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document wi

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear boundary between the document and the application parts. Did the particular (Adobe's proprietary) implementation of Flash player suck? Yes, sure. Could this have been done better? Yes, sure. Is it possible to reimplement a Flash player from scratch within a reasonable timeframe with a small team of developers? Yes, sure, Ruffle[1] is a thing, and it's being actively developed. I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually. [1] https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs

iamcurious 4y ago
Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone? That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.
- grishka 4y ago
  None that I know of. Of course it would be nice to have an open-source editor as well, but an open-source player is much more important. You can get by with abandonware for the creation side of things, but you can't ask your site visitors to install abandonware that is known for an astonishing amount of scary vulnerabilities (if they use an OS that was supported in the first place).
- chrischen 4y ago
  Try https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
  - iamcurious 4y ago
    Looks cool! But I don't own nor plan to own a mac.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ <-- I give these folks some money on Patreon because I feel like they're trying for the right thing
rektide 4y ago
This sort of "wouldnt it be great to have some other thing, so we can murder the rest of the web platform" is so grotesque to me, just repugnant & vile & cruel. Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedia ball of jank, and it had the most trashfire craptastic lack of accessibility one could ever imagine. This desire to keep hypermedia down, to create hard walls between different purposes of apps... it feels poisonous & misguided. There is too much of the web today thay does abuse client side code too much. But frankly it rarely affects most people, there's still viable techniques for manipulating it (except for Flutter's CanvasKit which is an abomination more cursed than Flash), and honestly, we're still getting better at webdev, still learning, still emerging better libraries & best practices, & generally the urge to do better is here & slowly happening. There's some really dark takes that we have to save the web from apps. That we should bring back Flash is one of the most unforutnate least justified most tragic hot takes I've heard though.
- gmueckl 4y ago
  Your rant is focused so much on the actual implementation details of Flash that it misses the point that the abstract concept of a VM based application container/sandbox could have been a great thing. In fact, it was such a great idea that browser developers were forced into a pretty tough struggle to actually kill it in order to stay relevant themselves. Adobe's poor stewardship sealed the deal, not conceptual shortcomings.
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.
    - grishka 4y ago
      The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...
DeathArrow 4y ago
Why not just use Java and .NET? They have pretty capable VMs which support lots of languages: Java, Python, Clojure, C#, F#, Visual Basic, Python, C++ and others.
gitgud 4y ago
> I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually. Flash was great for developers, but terrible for users. The only good user experience was "flash games/animations" and even then they weren't responsive and a little clunky. The Flash I remember was bloated "Flash" websites that had No HTML, No url paths, No SEO metadata, Terrible for accessibility.... but it was easy to develop for I guess...

iamcurious 4y ago

Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone? That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

grishka 4y ago
None that I know of. Of course it would be nice to have an open-source editor as well, but an open-source player is much more important. You can get by with abandonware for the creation side of things, but you can't ask your site visitors to install abandonware that is known for an astonishing amount of scary vulnerabilities (if they use an OS that was supported in the first place).
chrischen 4y ago
Try https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
- iamcurious 4y ago
  Looks cool! But I don't own nor plan to own a mac.
kixiQu 4y ago
https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ <-- I give these folks some money on Patreon because I feel like they're trying for the right thing

rektide 4y ago

This sort of "wouldnt it be great to have some other thing, so we can murder the rest of the web platform" is so grotesque to me, just repugnant & vile & cruel. Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedia ball of jank, and it had the most trashfire craptastic lack of accessibility one could ever imagine. This desire to keep hypermedia down, to create hard walls between different purposes of apps... it feels poisonous & misguided. There is too much of the web today thay does abuse client side code too much. But frankly it rarely affects most people, there's still viable techniques for manipulating it (except for Flutter's CanvasKit which is an abomination more cursed than Flash), and honestly, we're still getting better at webdev, still learning, still emerging better libraries & best practices, & generally the urge to do better is here & slowly happening. There's some really dark takes that we have to save the web from apps. That we should bring back Flash is one of the most unforutnate least justified most tragic hot takes I've heard though.

gmueckl 4y ago
Your rant is focused so much on the actual implementation details of Flash that it misses the point that the abstract concept of a VM based application container/sandbox could have been a great thing. In fact, it was such a great idea that browser developers were forced into a pretty tough struggle to actually kill it in order to stay relevant themselves. Adobe's poor stewardship sealed the deal, not conceptual shortcomings.
- MrJohz 4y ago
  Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.
  - grishka 4y ago
    The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

DeathArrow 4y ago

Why not just use Java and .NET? They have pretty capable VMs which support lots of languages: Java, Python, Clojure, C#, F#, Visual Basic, Python, C++ and others.

gitgud 4y ago

> I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually. Flash was great for developers, but terrible for users. The only good user experience was "flash games/animations" and even then they weren't responsive and a little clunky. The Flash I remember was bloated "Flash" websites that had No HTML, No url paths, No SEO metadata, Terrible for accessibility.... but it was easy to develop for I guess...