11 ms·

Thoughts on Flash (2010)

51 points by marcodiego 3y ago

camillomiller 3y ago
I remember this spat clearly. At the time Kevin Lynch was Adobe’s CTO and came out with a pretty strong (and IMHO totally insufficient) rebuttal of this memo. Fast forward 3 years and he jumped ship to join Apple’s on the Watch project, where he still holds a VP of Technology position. I don’t know who, inside Adobe, was working as a fifth column for Apple, but they definitely made the Flash people realize they had to leave the ship to sink and move on.
- shove 3y ago
  Kevin was in an impossible position, he could have ripped Steve a new one and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
- nemothekid 3y ago
  With the knowledge that Apple actually tried to get Flash on iOS and didn't half-ass the attempt, I'm inclined to believe Jobs that it was technical decision. Flash was everywhere and Apple had to says something to 1.) explain why iOS didn't have Flash, and 2.) convince developers to drop Flash so iOS web browsers wouldn't be a second class citizen. Looking at all the effort poured into Ruffle, I think the death of Flash was inevitable. https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jhatemyjob 3y ago
  I wonder why Adobe didn't port it to MobileSafari. They were able to port it to Android in a heartbeat.
  - Marazan 3y ago
    Apple didn't expose necessary APIs
    - jhatemyjob 3y ago
      Yes they did
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    A heartbeat? It wasn’t available for Android until 2010
    - jhatemyjob 3y ago
      Android as we know it didn't exist until late 2009
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        The HTC Dream was released in September 2008. Only a year after the first iPhone.
        jhatemyjob 3y ago
        Congrats, you can skim Wikipedia
        scarface_74 3y ago
        Or you know, I could have already in my early 30s when it happened and been following tech…
        jhatemyjob 3y ago
        Ok sorry but I just don't believe you, nobody cared about the HTC Dream. Android didn't hit mass market until the Motorola Droid (and all those other Android phones that came out in late 2009).
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Adobe's fifth column was Adobe. The entire management structure, top to bottom. The thing that actually killed Flash wasn't the iPhone, but the Premium Features nonsense they tried to pull a few years later. Adobe saw Unity trying to add Flash export and found a way to lock it behind a revshare[0], but it pissed off so many Flash developers that they backed down. In revenge they cancelled AS4 and FPNext work that otherwise would have been a good opportunity to bring Flash to mobile devices in a way that didn't suck. I suppose you could throw all of that on Kevin Lynch, but it's not like he continued sabotaging the Apple Watch after-the-fact. I suspect it's more the overall system that Adobe was: an engine to buy up other people's products and extract revenues from them. [0] Specifically, you could not use both AS3 domain memory (Flash's answer to WASM) and Stage3D (Flash's answer to WebGL) at the same time without having a digital signature from Adobe in your SWF that they would only give you if you opened up your books to Adobe and paid a portion of revenues out of them to Adobe.
shove 3y ago
A business decision pretending to be a technology decision. In the end, there were just as many shitty Flash sites as there were shitty iOS apps. The legacy of this choice turns out to be the beginning-of-the-end for the broad market in high(er)-end, custom website development and the move towards the walled gardens of app stores and social media giants.
- camillomiller 3y ago
  So you’re saying that refusing to support a subpar competing format on your own devices was just business? Of course it was ALSO business, but are you telling me, for real, that Adobe Flash and Flash Reader, 100% proprietary non-easily-portable technologies, where the tentpoles of the free internet?!
  - shove 3y ago
    Subpar is really stretching it. With some care, Flash content could behave quite well on the iPhone. It was not 100% proprietary. Of course it wasn’t 100% open either, but then I direct your attention to the Apple App Store. Edit: Flash Paper was hot garbage. Definitely not going to defend that one lol
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      Subpar was accurate. What you can theoretically do with an SWF file given a new from-scratch runtime and what you could actually do with the extant Flash player at the time are different topics.
    - nemothekid 3y ago
      It came out years later that Apple hired Adobe to help, if Adobe couldn't do it, I don't blame Apple for abandoning it. Looking at how difficult it is to build an open implementation of Flash via Ruffle, I don't think subpar is a stretch. https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
    - 3y ago
pavlov 3y ago
The final reason stated is the only real reason why Apple blocked Flash: they didn’t want any cross-platform runtime when it became clear they were winning. They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable, but embarked on a deliberate program to limit Safari’s capabilities to hamper the web as a platform (just like Microsoft did with IE ten years earlier). In the late 1990s Steve Jobs was a big fan of Cocoa-Java because he thought a cross-platform language and runtime could help adoption of his company’s middleware product. In 2010 he was very much against middleware and cross-platform runtimes. That’s how it goes. The thing you’re selling at that moment is always the right answer.
- camillomiller 3y ago
  Well, that was the “Flash” that Steve was bashing here. Of course the tech for animation in itself was not a problem, but the proprietary reader was a massive s*itshow of security vulnerabilities. On top of that, it was so poorly optimized that it would have burnt through iPhone batteries in no time. The fact that not allowing Flash games would favor the then still nascent App Store certainly played a big role as well, but technologically Flash was inferior to what Apple was developing.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  Funny that IE is the only remaining browser to still support Java, even if it's disabled by default.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  > They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable IIRC, Jobs was against an App Store and pushed for people to install web apps on their home screen. Only after huge demand did they develop the locked down App Store, which was a far bigger success than they expected. I'd bet a dollar that is the only reason why they're as well supported as they are to this day. Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation#:~:text=According%20to%20Walter%20Isaacson's%20biography,work%20on%20the%20new%20platform https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st....
grishka 3y ago
Apple's problem was not with Flash itself as a technology but with the half-assed player implementation form Macromedia/Adobe — the only one that existed at the time. There's nothing inherently terrible about ActionScript or the SWF format itself. On the contrary, it's a very nice container for scriptable vector and bitmap animations, still unmatched by any purported modern replacements. I sure hope that Flash eventually makes a comeback.
- camillomiller 3y ago
  It’s basically still here inside Adobe Animate, which is now a decent, albeit half forgotten, heir to Flash (the software to build animations). It basically works in the same way, and the exported animations are compatible with all modern browsers and run quite smoothly thanks to createJS and easel integration.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Apple's problem was not with Flash itself as a technology but with the half-assed player implementation form Macromedia/Adobe — the only one that existed at the time. Having been there at the time, this is the real answer. The Flash runtime had the distinction of being the #1 cause of crashes for Mac OS users, and Steve had f#@king had enough.
  - Anechoic 3y ago
    Absolutely. I'm guessing most of the responders on this thread didn't use a Mac in the early aughts - Flash ran like dogshit on Macs (when it wasn't crashing) and Macromedia/Adobe had no interest in fixing it because "no one used a Mac" back in those days. I suspect that if Adobe had played lip service to trying to address those issue, Flash on iPhone may have had a shot. But they were also dealing with Adobe threatening to not update Photoshop on Mac, MS threatening to not update Office on Mac, etc. Given all of that, what incentive did Apple have in letting Flash on iPhone?
    - grishka 3y ago
      I haven't used a Mac back then neither have I seen one, I only knew they existed. But even as a Windows user, Flash was mildly annoying. Serious exploitable vulnerabilities just never ended. They'd fix one and three new ones would pop out. But then again, I also built my own stuff with Flash, and that side of it was amazing. ActionScript docs are some of the best API docs I've ever seen. The ease with which you learn to use Flash the authoring software is also noteworthy.
Thoreandan 3y ago
Another interesting open letter from Jobs was "Thoughts on music" https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/15878/open-letter-07 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/15878/open-letter-07 I seem to recall a third open letter on another subject but search fails me at the moment
- NaOH 3y ago
  There was an open letter to all iPhone users when, just a few months after the device became available, Apple cut the price. https://web.archive.org/web/20070914154202/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070914154202/http://www.apple....
Cockbrand 3y ago
I'll be the one to lament that with Flash, a very accessible authoring system died that hasn't been replaced yet. Lots of creative laypeople built fantastic stuff because Flash was so easy to use, yet powerful. This comment is mandatory for every post mentioning Flash, and although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog and an absolute security nightmare, it's still true.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  It was a huge onramp to UX Engineering that still hasn't been replicated. Unity seems like it's a similar model, but I don't see the same abundance of "high schoolers and low-tech artists building cool shit for fun." Being able to draw until it got tedious and you learned to program was a huge fucking deal.
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    Thank you for elaborating on this, I absolutely feel the same. Dabbling with a pirated copy of Flash and reaching satisfying results very quickly with just the right learning curve towards more complex stuff probably sparked quite a few careers in tech and/or animation.
- phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
  I say that every time. As a web developer I have yet to find a tool that lets me write apps as fast as the flash ide and as3 allowed me to do. And only now, 14 years later are the standards getting to a point that the features and be compared.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > As a web developer I have yet to find a tool that lets me write apps as fast as the flash ide and as3 allowed me to do. FWIW, the Flash IDE (now called Animate) and ActionScript 3 never went away, they just became irrelevant.
  - keyle 3y ago
    I remember when Steve Jobs came out and said "Flash is shit" (I paraphrase) I thought that's fine... Then the day after, the CEO of Adobe went on CNN and said "we agree, flash is shit, standards are the future." I could not believe my eyes. RIP Flash, and 12 years of pain.
jonplackett 3y ago
> Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future I wish they had taken this advice instead of just giving up. A massive part of the value of flash was the authoring tool. It let non-coders make interactive things easily by just adding code straight to their designs. Having non-coders able to express their ideas like this is good and I miss it. The next closest thing would probably be Unity, or maybe Effects House / Spark AR for making insta and tiktok effects. But these are obviously totally limited to their own platform. Nothing has truly replaced flash for this purpose.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  They technically rebranded Flash as Animate, but it conceptually died then. IDK how Animate handles ActionScript, but it doesn't seem like it's still used by hobbyists. I presume it mostly exists to enable banner ad animators (and maybe low-fi television animators) to keep their Flashy workflows.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Animate still supports AS3 export, or at least it did the last time I needed to build a test SWF for Ruffle. AS2 export was removed when they rebranded to Animate.
jacknews 3y ago
"Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system." And the big issue is, it's not OUR closed system!
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  He sidesteps that by talking about the web. Pretty disingenuous since the lack of Flash in the browser was only one sticking point, not being able to use it in apps on the App Store was the other.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > And the big issue is, it's not OUR closed system! I don't understand this. What's Apple's closed analog to Flash?
  - MissingAFew 3y ago
    Flash was a creative tool locked behind a paywall, like most creative apps. Apple products are entire ecosystems locked behind a pay wall, where publishing to that ecosystem is highly regulated and heavy with fees. You're right, they aren't similar. If Adobe had its own ecosystem that forced developers to pay money per published flash app, per flash sale, then it would be a little more similar.
jonny_eh 3y ago
> Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit Not anymore!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time: Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 - April 2010 (505 comments) Also related: Thoughts on Flash (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500287 - Feb 2022 (17 comments) Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059938 - May 2021 (190 comments) Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217216 - Nov 2011 (3 comments) FSF responds to Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309314 - April 2010 (2 comments) Ex-Adobe Engineers on Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 - April 2010 (56 comments) Adobe CEO Responds to Steve Jobs' 'Thoughts on Flash' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305823 - April 2010 (1 comment)
mrcwinn 3y ago
He killed OpenDoc, too! XD
Animats 3y ago
Is there a current open source Flash editor? There's an open source player now, Ruffle, and it's in Rust, so the security problems are much less. Application: a 2D UI for games and don't want to haul in a whole web browser.
- icemelt8 3y ago
  This is the direct successor to Flash: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html it outputs html5
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    It also outputs SWFs, same as it did decades ago. The only limitation is that you can't compile AS2 with it. That being said, this is an old workflow. For AS3 most people actually would use Flash Builder (which is now Apache Flex) for the programming side and then compile in graphical & animation resources exported from Animate.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      That's definitely a workflow I was familiar with... Animation frames created in Flash, then used in a Flex project. So much eLearning work was in Flash/Flex.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  Try Haxe [0], its the spiritual successor to Flash that a lot of Flash developers moved to. It's got a great game dev scene (dead cells [1] and papers please were written in Haxe), and it takes Java's "develop once run/debug everywhere" to another level with the Haxe compiler transpiling Haxe code to 7 languages and 4 VM/environments. Only thing remotely bad about it is the small community and the admittedly dismal documentation. [0]: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ [1]: https://heaps.io/about.html https://heaps.io/about.html [2]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/239030/view/3651894293966905793 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/239030/view/36518942...
est 3y ago
.swf and as3 was very cool. Adobe's runtime sucks. iPhone sucks (at that time)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 3y ago
Always worth digging my old post up, 2011: Flash Sucks But everything else sucks more. https://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html https://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html My crystal ball is pretty well calibrated but it doesn't usually at the time, give popular opinions. Defending flash was seen as insane 12 years ago.

51 points by marcodiego 3y ago

I remember this spat clearly. At the time Kevin Lynch was Adobe’s CTO and came out with a pretty strong (and IMHO totally insufficient) rebuttal of this memo. Fast forward 3 years and he jumped ship to join Apple’s on the Watch project, where he still holds a VP of Technology position. I don’t know who, inside Adobe, was working as a fifth column for Apple, but they definitely made the Flash people realize they had to leave the ship to sink and move on.

shove 3y ago
Kevin was in an impossible position, he could have ripped Steve a new one and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
nemothekid 3y ago
With the knowledge that Apple actually tried to get Flash on iOS and didn't half-ass the attempt, I'm inclined to believe Jobs that it was technical decision. Flash was everywhere and Apple had to says something to 1.) explain why iOS didn't have Flash, and 2.) convince developers to drop Flash so iOS web browsers wouldn't be a second class citizen. Looking at all the effort poured into Ruffle, I think the death of Flash was inevitable. https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jhatemyjob 3y ago
I wonder why Adobe didn't port it to MobileSafari. They were able to port it to Android in a heartbeat.
- Marazan 3y ago
  Apple didn't expose necessary APIs
  - jhatemyjob 3y ago
    Yes they did
- scarface_74 3y ago
  A heartbeat? It wasn’t available for Android until 2010
  - jhatemyjob 3y ago
    Android as we know it didn't exist until late 2009
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      The HTC Dream was released in September 2008. Only a year after the first iPhone.
      - jhatemyjob 3y ago
        Congrats, you can skim Wikipedia
        scarface_74 3y ago
        Or you know, I could have already in my early 30s when it happened and been following tech…
        jhatemyjob 3y ago
        Ok sorry but I just don't believe you, nobody cared about the HTC Dream. Android didn't hit mass market until the Motorola Droid (and all those other Android phones that came out in late 2009).
kmeisthax 3y ago
Adobe's fifth column was Adobe. The entire management structure, top to bottom. The thing that actually killed Flash wasn't the iPhone, but the Premium Features nonsense they tried to pull a few years later. Adobe saw Unity trying to add Flash export and found a way to lock it behind a revshare[0], but it pissed off so many Flash developers that they backed down. In revenge they cancelled AS4 and FPNext work that otherwise would have been a good opportunity to bring Flash to mobile devices in a way that didn't suck. I suppose you could throw all of that on Kevin Lynch, but it's not like he continued sabotaging the Apple Watch after-the-fact. I suspect it's more the overall system that Adobe was: an engine to buy up other people's products and extract revenues from them. [0] Specifically, you could not use both AS3 domain memory (Flash's answer to WASM) and Stage3D (Flash's answer to WebGL) at the same time without having a digital signature from Adobe in your SWF that they would only give you if you opened up your books to Adobe and paid a portion of revenues out of them to Adobe.

shove 3y ago

A business decision pretending to be a technology decision. In the end, there were just as many shitty Flash sites as there were shitty iOS apps. The legacy of this choice turns out to be the beginning-of-the-end for the broad market in high(er)-end, custom website development and the move towards the walled gardens of app stores and social media giants.

camillomiller 3y ago
So you’re saying that refusing to support a subpar competing format on your own devices was just business? Of course it was ALSO business, but are you telling me, for real, that Adobe Flash and Flash Reader, 100% proprietary non-easily-portable technologies, where the tentpoles of the free internet?!
- shove 3y ago
  Subpar is really stretching it. With some care, Flash content could behave quite well on the iPhone. It was not 100% proprietary. Of course it wasn’t 100% open either, but then I direct your attention to the Apple App Store. Edit: Flash Paper was hot garbage. Definitely not going to defend that one lol
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Subpar was accurate. What you can theoretically do with an SWF file given a new from-scratch runtime and what you could actually do with the extant Flash player at the time are different topics.
  - nemothekid 3y ago
    It came out years later that Apple hired Adobe to help, if Adobe couldn't do it, I don't blame Apple for abandoning it. Looking at how difficult it is to build an open implementation of Flash via Ruffle, I don't think subpar is a stretch. https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
  - 3y ago

pavlov 3y ago

The final reason stated is the only real reason why Apple blocked Flash: they didn’t want any cross-platform runtime when it became clear they were winning. They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable, but embarked on a deliberate program to limit Safari’s capabilities to hamper the web as a platform (just like Microsoft did with IE ten years earlier). In the late 1990s Steve Jobs was a big fan of Cocoa-Java because he thought a cross-platform language and runtime could help adoption of his company’s middleware product. In 2010 he was very much against middleware and cross-platform runtimes. That’s how it goes. The thing you’re selling at that moment is always the right answer.

camillomiller 3y ago
Well, that was the “Flash” that Steve was bashing here. Of course the tech for animation in itself was not a problem, but the proprietary reader was a massive s*itshow of security vulnerabilities. On top of that, it was so poorly optimized that it would have burnt through iPhone batteries in no time. The fact that not allowing Flash games would favor the then still nascent App Store certainly played a big role as well, but technologically Flash was inferior to what Apple was developing.
iraqmtpizza 3y ago
Funny that IE is the only remaining browser to still support Java, even if it's disabled by default.
jonny_eh 3y ago
> They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable IIRC, Jobs was against an App Store and pushed for people to install web apps on their home screen. Only after huge demand did they develop the locked down App Store, which was a far bigger success than they expected. I'd bet a dollar that is the only reason why they're as well supported as they are to this day. Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation#:~:text=According%20to%20Walter%20Isaacson's%20biography,work%20on%20the%20new%20platform https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st....

grishka 3y ago

Apple's problem was not with Flash itself as a technology but with the half-assed player implementation form Macromedia/Adobe — the only one that existed at the time. There's nothing inherently terrible about ActionScript or the SWF format itself. On the contrary, it's a very nice container for scriptable vector and bitmap animations, still unmatched by any purported modern replacements. I sure hope that Flash eventually makes a comeback.

camillomiller 3y ago
It’s basically still here inside Adobe Animate, which is now a decent, albeit half forgotten, heir to Flash (the software to build animations). It basically works in the same way, and the exported animations are compatible with all modern browsers and run quite smoothly thanks to createJS and easel integration.
CharlesW 3y ago
> Apple's problem was not with Flash itself as a technology but with the half-assed player implementation form Macromedia/Adobe — the only one that existed at the time. Having been there at the time, this is the real answer. The Flash runtime had the distinction of being the #1 cause of crashes for Mac OS users, and Steve had f#@king had enough.
- Anechoic 3y ago
  Absolutely. I'm guessing most of the responders on this thread didn't use a Mac in the early aughts - Flash ran like dogshit on Macs (when it wasn't crashing) and Macromedia/Adobe had no interest in fixing it because "no one used a Mac" back in those days. I suspect that if Adobe had played lip service to trying to address those issue, Flash on iPhone may have had a shot. But they were also dealing with Adobe threatening to not update Photoshop on Mac, MS threatening to not update Office on Mac, etc. Given all of that, what incentive did Apple have in letting Flash on iPhone?
  - grishka 3y ago
    I haven't used a Mac back then neither have I seen one, I only knew they existed. But even as a Windows user, Flash was mildly annoying. Serious exploitable vulnerabilities just never ended. They'd fix one and three new ones would pop out. But then again, I also built my own stuff with Flash, and that side of it was amazing. ActionScript docs are some of the best API docs I've ever seen. The ease with which you learn to use Flash the authoring software is also noteworthy.

Thoreandan 3y ago

Another interesting open letter from Jobs was "Thoughts on music" https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/15878/open-letter-07 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/15878/open-letter-07 I seem to recall a third open letter on another subject but search fails me at the moment

NaOH 3y ago
There was an open letter to all iPhone users when, just a few months after the device became available, Apple cut the price. https://web.archive.org/web/20070914154202/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070914154202/http://www.apple....

Cockbrand 3y ago

I'll be the one to lament that with Flash, a very accessible authoring system died that hasn't been replaced yet. Lots of creative laypeople built fantastic stuff because Flash was so easy to use, yet powerful. This comment is mandatory for every post mentioning Flash, and although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog and an absolute security nightmare, it's still true.

bsimpson 3y ago
It was a huge onramp to UX Engineering that still hasn't been replicated. Unity seems like it's a similar model, but I don't see the same abundance of "high schoolers and low-tech artists building cool shit for fun." Being able to draw until it got tedious and you learned to program was a huge fucking deal.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  Thank you for elaborating on this, I absolutely feel the same. Dabbling with a pirated copy of Flash and reaching satisfying results very quickly with just the right learning curve towards more complex stuff probably sparked quite a few careers in tech and/or animation.
phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
I say that every time. As a web developer I have yet to find a tool that lets me write apps as fast as the flash ide and as3 allowed me to do. And only now, 14 years later are the standards getting to a point that the features and be compared.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > As a web developer I have yet to find a tool that lets me write apps as fast as the flash ide and as3 allowed me to do. FWIW, the Flash IDE (now called Animate) and ActionScript 3 never went away, they just became irrelevant.
- keyle 3y ago
  I remember when Steve Jobs came out and said "Flash is shit" (I paraphrase) I thought that's fine... Then the day after, the CEO of Adobe went on CNN and said "we agree, flash is shit, standards are the future." I could not believe my eyes. RIP Flash, and 12 years of pain.

jonplackett 3y ago

> Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future I wish they had taken this advice instead of just giving up. A massive part of the value of flash was the authoring tool. It let non-coders make interactive things easily by just adding code straight to their designs. Having non-coders able to express their ideas like this is good and I miss it. The next closest thing would probably be Unity, or maybe Effects House / Spark AR for making insta and tiktok effects. But these are obviously totally limited to their own platform. Nothing has truly replaced flash for this purpose.

bsimpson 3y ago
They technically rebranded Flash as Animate, but it conceptually died then. IDK how Animate handles ActionScript, but it doesn't seem like it's still used by hobbyists. I presume it mostly exists to enable banner ad animators (and maybe low-fi television animators) to keep their Flashy workflows.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Animate still supports AS3 export, or at least it did the last time I needed to build a test SWF for Ruffle. AS2 export was removed when they rebranded to Animate.

jacknews 3y ago

"Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system." And the big issue is, it's not OUR closed system!

jonny_eh 3y ago
He sidesteps that by talking about the web. Pretty disingenuous since the lack of Flash in the browser was only one sticking point, not being able to use it in apps on the App Store was the other.
CharlesW 3y ago
> And the big issue is, it's not OUR closed system! I don't understand this. What's Apple's closed analog to Flash?
- MissingAFew 3y ago
  Flash was a creative tool locked behind a paywall, like most creative apps. Apple products are entire ecosystems locked behind a pay wall, where publishing to that ecosystem is highly regulated and heavy with fees. You're right, they aren't similar. If Adobe had its own ecosystem that forced developers to pay money per published flash app, per flash sale, then it would be a little more similar.

jonny_eh 3y ago

> Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit Not anymore!

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dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time: Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 - April 2010 (505 comments) Also related: Thoughts on Flash (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500287 - Feb 2022 (17 comments) Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059938 - May 2021 (190 comments) Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217216 - Nov 2011 (3 comments) FSF responds to Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309314 - April 2010 (2 comments) Ex-Adobe Engineers on Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 - April 2010 (56 comments) Adobe CEO Responds to Steve Jobs' 'Thoughts on Flash' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305823 - April 2010 (1 comment)

mrcwinn 3y ago

He killed OpenDoc, too! XD

Animats 3y ago

Is there a current open source Flash editor? There's an open source player now, Ruffle, and it's in Rust, so the security problems are much less. Application: a 2D UI for games and don't want to haul in a whole web browser.

icemelt8 3y ago
This is the direct successor to Flash: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html it outputs html5
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  It also outputs SWFs, same as it did decades ago. The only limitation is that you can't compile AS2 with it. That being said, this is an old workflow. For AS3 most people actually would use Flash Builder (which is now Apache Flex) for the programming side and then compile in graphical & animation resources exported from Animate.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    That's definitely a workflow I was familiar with... Animation frames created in Flash, then used in a Flex project. So much eLearning work was in Flash/Flex.
subtra3t 3y ago
Try Haxe [0], its the spiritual successor to Flash that a lot of Flash developers moved to. It's got a great game dev scene (dead cells [1] and papers please were written in Haxe), and it takes Java's "develop once run/debug everywhere" to another level with the Haxe compiler transpiling Haxe code to 7 languages and 4 VM/environments. Only thing remotely bad about it is the small community and the admittedly dismal documentation. [0]: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ [1]: https://heaps.io/about.html https://heaps.io/about.html [2]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/239030/view/3651894293966905793 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/239030/view/36518942...

est 3y ago

.swf and as3 was very cool. Adobe's runtime sucks. iPhone sucks (at that time)

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kristopolous 3y ago

Always worth digging my old post up, 2011: Flash Sucks But everything else sucks more. https://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html https://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2011/12/flash-sucks.html My crystal ball is pretty well calibrated but it doesn't usually at the time, give popular opinions. Defending flash was seen as insane 12 years ago.