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Working with Flash was like working with future technologies, back in the day. You could build amazing things with it, things that was not possible using standa

Working with Flash was like working with future technologies, back in the day. You could build amazing things with it, things that was not possible using standard browser API’s. In fact, Flash led the way and was the prototype for what browsers can to today. If you cared about what you built, with clever hacks and bitwise performance tricks then the Flash runtime could run your code efficiently. I remember developing an app which used Box2D, camera based gesture control with sound effects and background music all running simultaneously, reaching 60 FPS. In other projects we used software based 3D (à la Papervision 3D), Adobe dropped the ball and Molehill/GPU accelerated 2D/3D arrived too late. Perhaps it’s not common knowledge but we could develop true cross-platform apps, compiling for different targets (SWF, IPA for iOS and .app/.exe). AS3 was a good language, and definitely reminds me of TS. Here’s a piece of code from 15 years ago: https://github.com/PureMVC/puremvc-as3-standard-framework/blob/master/src/org/puremvc/as3/core/Controller.as https://github.com/PureMVC/puremvc-as3-standard-framework/bl... That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time, which felt bad as there were many of us that put a lot of time, care and effort in creating amazing stuff with it. Thanks Flash!

th0ma5 4y ago
At the time it was unfortunately both true that Apple needed idle CPUs for battery life and Adobe had no intention or probably no ability either to make that happen with Flash.
acdha 4y ago
> That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time, You might not have seen it but the hate for Flash was well-established by then, solely due to Adobe’s gross mismanagement of their platform. Flash was what crashed and took out your entire browser session. Flash was what made drive-by compromises so easy and common. Flash was what popped up annoying “you should manually update” prompts because they sat out the automatic update trend for nearly two decades. Flash was also what made your entire computer visibly slow down because it was so inefficient - they weren’t an option on phones due to the UI differences but performance and memory alone would have ruled them out in any case. Flash was also painful to develop for. Yes, you could do things which browsers couldn’t do back then but it came at the cost of having to pay Adobe thousands of dollars for shoddy, unsupported tools[1] and while there were a handful of ways where AS3 was ahead of JavaScript there many areas where it was behind and unlike browsers it stayed there, and it was really common to find bugs in Adobe’s libraries which meant you had to build a complete replacement or wait years to never for them to fix it. People made cool things despite that but I attribute almost all of the blame for Flash’s demise to Adobe. They could have cut their executive bonus pool by 10% to hire a QA team and they’d have had a much better chance at long term success. Instead, they let the platform stagnate to the point where one of the early Chrome selling points was that when Flash crashed you’d only lose that page! 1. I bought a Flash license once. I naively filed bug reports for reproducible crashes in the player and IDE (the debugger was especially unstable), as well as compatibility and correctness issues with their various libraries. Each time, I got no reply before the next major release and then I got a generic “please pay $1,500 for the upgrade and let us know if we fixed it” message.

th0ma5 4y ago

At the time it was unfortunately both true that Apple needed idle CPUs for battery life and Adobe had no intention or probably no ability either to make that happen with Flash.

acdha 4y ago

> That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time, You might not have seen it but the hate for Flash was well-established by then, solely due to Adobe’s gross mismanagement of their platform. Flash was what crashed and took out your entire browser session. Flash was what made drive-by compromises so easy and common. Flash was what popped up annoying “you should manually update” prompts because they sat out the automatic update trend for nearly two decades. Flash was also what made your entire computer visibly slow down because it was so inefficient - they weren’t an option on phones due to the UI differences but performance and memory alone would have ruled them out in any case. Flash was also painful to develop for. Yes, you could do things which browsers couldn’t do back then but it came at the cost of having to pay Adobe thousands of dollars for shoddy, unsupported tools[1] and while there were a handful of ways where AS3 was ahead of JavaScript there many areas where it was behind and unlike browsers it stayed there, and it was really common to find bugs in Adobe’s libraries which meant you had to build a complete replacement or wait years to never for them to fix it. People made cool things despite that but I attribute almost all of the blame for Flash’s demise to Adobe. They could have cut their executive bonus pool by 10% to hire a QA team and they’d have had a much better chance at long term success. Instead, they let the platform stagnate to the point where one of the early Chrome selling points was that when Flash crashed you’d only lose that page! 1. I bought a Flash license once. I naively filed bug reports for reproducible crashes in the player and IDE (the debugger was especially unstable), as well as compatibility and correctness issues with their various libraries. Each time, I got no reply before the next major release and then I got a generic “please pay $1,500 for the upgrade and let us know if we fixed it” message.