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For those people in the thread talking about Adobe Animate or AirBnB's Lottie - Flash was capable of so much more than frame-by-frame animation. As long ago as

For those people in the thread talking about Adobe Animate or AirBnB's Lottie - Flash was capable of so much more than frame-by-frame animation. As long ago as around 2001, with ActionScript 1 or 2, I was already building smart drag-and-drop calendar applications, where conference attendees could book all their sessions online in an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, that included tips, and complex hover states, with extra information at user's fingertips. I'd say web-apps are almost getting to the same state of sophistication and user-friendliness around about now. After that, with ActionScript 3, I was building interactive and immersive promo sites where users could explore alternative environments, build their own 3D worlds, or do crazy stuff like mash-up their own facial features (captured through their webcam) together with different celebrity musician's faces, and then do a remix of the musician's music (for an 'art' event that the musicians were taking part in). There were masses of other capabilities - both serious and playful - but I must admit, even though I'm sometimes sad we lost Flash, in the end - especially when it was obvious that Adobe had let it drift - it was a shitshow of insecurity and bandwidth-waste.

laundermaf 4y ago
As you probably know, what you describe has already long been possible without Flash too, just look at FWA. Immersive 3D experiences “in HTML5” are now 10 years old on FWA. I know because I was there. The only difference is that they now cost more, but also are not as requested, as mentioned in a comment in this thread: > heavy, high-gloss interactions akin to what Flash afforded and what could be accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what people want in their mobile browsing experience
dvirsky 4y ago
AS3 was really great for its time. 15 years ago it had stuff we've seen go mainstream afterwards - the language was like modern Typescript, it had components and React like behaviors, I did a couple of projects on it and it was a joy - besides the VM being crappy. HTML and Javascript today are better than what it was then, but it was years ahead of web technology at the time.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I had a lot of fun for the week or so I did some programming in Adobe Flex. A mix of nostalgia and that project being greenfield perhaps. It seems like doing C# coding on the front end, and was pretty nice at the time. Also built an Adobe Air app. Those technologies had a fun about them that I haven't seen since. (Compare that to building a web app or an Electron app!)
- pier25 4y ago
  Yep. It's a shame EcmaScript 4 (based on AS3) was trashed. The web would be very different today.

laundermaf 4y ago

As you probably know, what you describe has already long been possible without Flash too, just look at FWA. Immersive 3D experiences “in HTML5” are now 10 years old on FWA. I know because I was there. The only difference is that they now cost more, but also are not as requested, as mentioned in a comment in this thread: > heavy, high-gloss interactions akin to what Flash afforded and what could be accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what people want in their mobile browsing experience

dvirsky 4y ago

AS3 was really great for its time. 15 years ago it had stuff we've seen go mainstream afterwards - the language was like modern Typescript, it had components and React like behaviors, I did a couple of projects on it and it was a joy - besides the VM being crappy. HTML and Javascript today are better than what it was then, but it was years ahead of web technology at the time.

quickthrower2 4y ago
I had a lot of fun for the week or so I did some programming in Adobe Flex. A mix of nostalgia and that project being greenfield perhaps. It seems like doing C# coding on the front end, and was pretty nice at the time. Also built an Adobe Air app. Those technologies had a fun about them that I haven't seen since. (Compare that to building a web app or an Electron app!)
pier25 4y ago
Yep. It's a shame EcmaScript 4 (based on AS3) was trashed. The web would be very different today.