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god, Flash wasn't suited for anything and yet somehow it got used for everything until Apple managed to kill it by keeping it the hell off the iPhone. It was ki

god, Flash wasn't suited for anything and yet somehow it got used for everything until Apple managed to kill it by keeping it the hell off the iPhone. It was kind of okay for so many things and actually great at none of them. It might even still be in use at Cartoon Network, it's been a while since I last heard from my former co-worker in the dialup-delivered Flash cartoon mines who ended up as the animation director for Foster's and Titans but he sure was still using an old version of Flash/Animate long after the browser plugin was retired. There's probably a lot of lessons in Flash's status as a tool that did a ton of different things half-assedly.

munificent 4y ago
It was like the JavaScript of UX and 2D games for a while. It was trash as a technology, but it was a technology that millions of UI designers and indie game developers cut their teeth on and already knew deeply, so it stuck around much longer than it should have. Like grown-ups trying to ride tricycles to work. I remember someone at EA talked to Adobe about getting access to the Flash (.fla) file format so that our UI tools could read it directly to export into the in game format instead of reading the already compiled and compressed .swf format. And they were like, "Uh... you really don't want to do that. It's like a memory dump of the entire application state. It's a giant mess. We're really sorry." By all accounts, it seemed like the Flash codebase was a dumpster fire. But so many amazing little games and UIs were built using it.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  The .fla format was a OLE compound file. It wasn't that bad -- I reverse engineered how it worked in the Flash MX 2004 days, and it was mostly editor data structures formatted like how you'd expect.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  hahahha, "It's a memory dump of the entire app state" explains SO MUCH.
  - game-of-throws 4y ago
    To be fair that's how a lot of software worked in that era. MS Office worked that way too (doc files, not docx files).

munificent 4y ago

It was like the JavaScript of UX and 2D games for a while. It was trash as a technology, but it was a technology that millions of UI designers and indie game developers cut their teeth on and already knew deeply, so it stuck around much longer than it should have. Like grown-ups trying to ride tricycles to work. I remember someone at EA talked to Adobe about getting access to the Flash (.fla) file format so that our UI tools could read it directly to export into the in game format instead of reading the already compiled and compressed .swf format. And they were like, "Uh... you really don't want to do that. It's like a memory dump of the entire application state. It's a giant mess. We're really sorry." By all accounts, it seemed like the Flash codebase was a dumpster fire. But so many amazing little games and UIs were built using it.

Jasper_ 4y ago
The .fla format was a OLE compound file. It wasn't that bad -- I reverse engineered how it worked in the Flash MX 2004 days, and it was mostly editor data structures formatted like how you'd expect.
egypturnash 4y ago
hahahha, "It's a memory dump of the entire app state" explains SO MUCH.
- game-of-throws 4y ago
  To be fair that's how a lot of software worked in that era. MS Office worked that way too (doc files, not docx files).