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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 stu

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.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    This is, um, not how I remember things going. I remember years of fighting. If you visited the page for downloading Flash with an iPhone user agent, you'd see a passive-aggressive message explaining how Apple sucks and everything is their fault.
    - keyle 3y ago
      Really? That makes it easier to swallow. I never knew of this. But seriously the CEO of Adobe was on CNN saying they're pivoting the day after Jobs made the commentary.
      - afiori 3y ago
        I have no specific knowledge of this, but is it possible that the CEO message was "what Apple says is true but we are going to make it good in the future"?
      - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        Can you find that interview by any chance? Another thing Adobe did was actually make a Flash player for Android. https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/flash-player-mobile/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/flash-player-mobile/ I used it, it worked pretty well!
    - subhero 3y ago
      Yeah, it was a business (model) war. Apple on their part juggled the constant names for hardware acceleration (e.g. video codecs) with every minor OS release for a time with Flash defaulting to software rendering. That’s why you could fry eggs on your Mac trackpad while watching youtube videos if you didn’t keep up with obligatory FP minor version updates. Fun times….
tambourine_man 3y ago
And closed source. As was the authoring system. Flash was truly awesome, but I'm glad we only need a text editor these days.
- Joeri 3y ago
  There was a pretty good open source development pipeline targeting the flash runtime in the later years. But the design tools and runtime were indeed always closed. Had adobe open sourced that runtime things might have turned out differently. It could have been the sqlite of animation.
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    Well, as a player, there's Ruffle [0] now which seems to do a very decent job. But it seems like it came out when Flash was already a faint memory, and also the authoring system is of course still closed source. I guess that much of the great content in the early days was created on pirated versions of the authoring system, greatly helping its popularity. With Adobe CC, piracy isn't really possible anymore (AFAIK). [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      > With Adobe CC, piracy isn't really possible anymore (AFAIK) I’m a paying user, but it is possible, it’s just harder and requires more frequent patches. Along with macOS making it harder and harder to run unsigned binaries, it truly demands a lot of effort from the user
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    SQLite is among the safest and most thoroughly tested softwares out there. I think Richard Hipp would be offended by the comparison :)
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  This is correct, and still a technical layperson will have a much harder time creating a fun animation with a text editor than with the Flash authoring system.
neovive 3y ago
I completely agree! I loved working with Flash back in the day; it was an empowering tool for me as a developer with little animation experience. It packed so much power into one tool with a complete end-to-end workflow. Over a decade since the "end of Flash" and I still find myself searching for tools that deliver the same capabilities, without the complexity. Things are improving with tools like Rive, but the market still feels fragmented and complex. Flash was way ahead of its time.
thrashh 3y ago
Tools and ecosystem really make a product. Microsoft knew this when they invested so much in tooling. Java has some of the best tool chains of any language. Macromedia and to some extent Adobe invested a lot with tooling for Flash. Shit I even made GUIs for all my command-line tools so normal people could use them.
- pipo234 3y ago
  Creating a GUI to cater for "normal people" has merits. But GUIs, and especially GUI-only apps come at a cost too. Using the Unix philosophy to combine text based tools does not translated to GUIs. How about test automation? Back in the day when I was still forced to develop software on Windows or Mac OS I wasted so much time maintaining brittle click & even snoop-based integration using kludgy tools like selenium and add-hoc click-the-freaking-button.exe just because the app originally happened to be developed natively in Java, Flash, HTML5+ajax by some rockstar, 10x coder without seatbelts.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Also even when just using Windows, it's frustrating how the ecosystem convention seems to be to launch a heavy program with an idiosyncratic GUI to do any simple file -> file transformation. And half the time these trivial apps are proprietary free/shareware nagging you to "upgrade" for features like "not arbitrarily restricted to 10 files". Luckily a lot of the command line tools I use on Linux will run on Windows, it's just that few people bother due to an irrational fear of the command line
    - pipo234 3y ago
      Or how about all those windows 99% CLI programs that once in a silver moon decide to bother the user with a pop-up "Are you sure Y/N?". You find these on billboard, kiosks, payment terminals, ATMs. Or try running a simple Java tool on headless Windows using Jenkins agent or cygwin SSH and you'll discover how horribly bad relying on a GUI can be. Or: how about automatically launching a MacOS VM on VMWare and setting up a VPN tunnel after a restart power outage without a mouse, keyboard and display. Should work in theory, but in practice never gets beyond most of the time.
robertoandred 3y ago
The Flash authoring system never went away: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Yes, but the HTML50-output options leave a lot to be desired - it's not as simple as taking an existing multi-megabyte *.fla file from 2004, opening it in Animate CC and going File > Export - there's a whole bunch of incompatibility and breaking-changes involved, some are listed here: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... What's kinda interesting to me is that Macromedia also had a Java-applet-based SWF player, which got me wondering why a Java-based version of Flash, instead of the native-code Flash, never took-off as a more secure alternative.
  - Gabrys1 3y ago
    Java applets took forever to lunch. Maybe that's why
    - alibarber 3y ago
      Also the JVM didn't seem as widespread as flash player in my experience - it was something like a 40+MB download and somewhat-involved install whereas Flash player seemed to have been included in the OS or as an easy IE plugin add-on. Can't remember exactly though but this is the experience I vaguely recall.
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    As mentioned in another comment, there is a quite decent WASM based Flash player now [0]. I don't know whether Adobe Animate can even export .fla any more, though. [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
fergie 3y ago
Wow. I have got to the place in my journey as a software developer that I can actually agree with this statement. Whilst I once dismissed Flash for being being "proprietary", I can now appreciate it as a great democratising force. Today- if you want to make some cute animations from scratch, you basically have to first work out how to rig up the js development environment de jour, and then delve into some fairly complicated mathematics to make it work. In other words, the type of thing that no spontaneous creative type is going to waste their life on. Flash used to help normal people to make websites. Normal people have stopped making websites. We should bring back Flash, or something like it if we want to maintain a truly decentralised web.
- DanielHB 3y ago
  I remember everyone absolutely hated flash websites, they were terrible in all aspects. Flash was only really good for animations and games.
  - jcelerier 3y ago
    I loved flash websites
  - pluijzer 3y ago
    Like the other sibling, I too really liked flash websites. Often they where creative pieces of art. I only started to dislike Flash when switching to Linux. You could only use the 32-bit closed official version from Adobe which was difficult to set up, or use an open source implementation but this one wasn't feature complete. Lots of websites filled in the technical gaps of html/js with flash, which made you dependent on it even for government sites. It wasn't fun to have a Windows partition just to be able to do your tax.
  - subtra3t 3y ago
    I think you're extrapolating too far based on just your experience. As evidenced in the other replies to your comment, a lot of people did like Flash.
    - 3y ago
prmoustache 3y ago
> a very accessible authoring system I reckon you are not talking about accessibility the way we use it for product design right? Because to me Flash was the opposite of accessibility compared to the regular web of the time that could mostly be browsed with a text based web browser using a braille display.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  Yes, I meant accessible in the sense of "easy to understand for most people". I absolutely agree that the typical output of Flash isn't accessible in the sense you mention.
Marazan 3y ago
Whilst it was a complete and total security nightmare the Flash Player wasn't a resource hog. People just wrote bad flash apps, that was where the resource hogging came. Those same people are now writing the same bad code in HTML5/Javascript.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Flash games that ran perfectly fine on Windows only ran very choppy (if at all) on the Mac. So the people who are calling flash a resource hog might have been using a Mac in that time.
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    I used Mac and Linux at that time, and both were definitely 2nd class platforms for a lot of companies whose software ran fine on Windows.
GuB-42 3y ago
> although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog And yet, it was really lightweight compared to what we have now. If you have a webpage or game on the level of what Flash typically did, expect tens of MB of downloads, more than 100MB of RAM usage, and choppy animation on anything but a high-end PC. Flash was a resource hog in the early 2000s, when people still had dial-up modems, single core sub-GHz CPUs, mechanical hard drives, RAM in the 100s of MB,... Performance of the "modern web" is abysmal for the computing power of modern devices. Also, with the loss of Flash, we lost most of the vector graphics that was typical of that era. It was, in a sense more, modern than what came after since vector graphics work really well on the high-resolution displays we have now. Vector graphics on the web are timidly making a comeback, on websites with many times the resource requirements of what was typical for Flash.
- anthk 3y ago
  Flash was both propietary and with zero accesibility. It deserved to die.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    No, it deserved to be opened and have its accessibility improved. These were totally fixable problems and Adobe fucked up by not addressing them. Like the vulnerabilities, they were just a result of developers dropping the ball on bug fixes, not a flaw of the tech itself. We wasted a good decade rebuilding things from ground up with what became the web stack, including many of the bad things we blamed Flash for, like intrusive ads and DRM. And along the way, we lost some of best parts, like the authoring tools, and we dragged a lot of bloat too.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    So is the modern web.
thedonkeycometh 3y ago
[dead]
detourdog 3y ago
Director was a better general development environment than Flash IMO. Flash was mostly a Director focused on the web animations. Director was available until 2017. I first saw it in the early 90's and I think it was just called MacroMind. Eventually becoming MacroMind Director and eventually Adobe Director. Creative people could have moved to Director from flash.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
>Flash, a very accessible authoring system died Honestly by the time Thoughts on Flash was written Adobe hadn't cared about that aspect for many years. They seemed to be only interested in it as a video delivery system and then a hardcore multiplatform tool not the entry level space it filled for many of the earlier years. Adobe also for many years claimed Mac was the problem for the poor performance of the player yet after Apple denied them the iPhone the Mac player reached Windows performance parity in weeks.

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.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  This is, um, not how I remember things going. I remember years of fighting. If you visited the page for downloading Flash with an iPhone user agent, you'd see a passive-aggressive message explaining how Apple sucks and everything is their fault.
  - keyle 3y ago
    Really? That makes it easier to swallow. I never knew of this. But seriously the CEO of Adobe was on CNN saying they're pivoting the day after Jobs made the commentary.
    - afiori 3y ago
      I have no specific knowledge of this, but is it possible that the CEO message was "what Apple says is true but we are going to make it good in the future"?
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      Can you find that interview by any chance? Another thing Adobe did was actually make a Flash player for Android. https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/flash-player-mobile/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/flash-player-mobile/ I used it, it worked pretty well!
  - subhero 3y ago
    Yeah, it was a business (model) war. Apple on their part juggled the constant names for hardware acceleration (e.g. video codecs) with every minor OS release for a time with Flash defaulting to software rendering. That’s why you could fry eggs on your Mac trackpad while watching youtube videos if you didn’t keep up with obligatory FP minor version updates. Fun times….

tambourine_man 3y ago

And closed source. As was the authoring system. Flash was truly awesome, but I'm glad we only need a text editor these days.

Joeri 3y ago
There was a pretty good open source development pipeline targeting the flash runtime in the later years. But the design tools and runtime were indeed always closed. Had adobe open sourced that runtime things might have turned out differently. It could have been the sqlite of animation.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  Well, as a player, there's Ruffle [0] now which seems to do a very decent job. But it seems like it came out when Flash was already a faint memory, and also the authoring system is of course still closed source. I guess that much of the great content in the early days was created on pirated versions of the authoring system, greatly helping its popularity. With Adobe CC, piracy isn't really possible anymore (AFAIK). [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    > With Adobe CC, piracy isn't really possible anymore (AFAIK) I’m a paying user, but it is possible, it’s just harder and requires more frequent patches. Along with macOS making it harder and harder to run unsigned binaries, it truly demands a lot of effort from the user
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  SQLite is among the safest and most thoroughly tested softwares out there. I think Richard Hipp would be offended by the comparison :)
Cockbrand 3y ago
This is correct, and still a technical layperson will have a much harder time creating a fun animation with a text editor than with the Flash authoring system.

neovive 3y ago

I completely agree! I loved working with Flash back in the day; it was an empowering tool for me as a developer with little animation experience. It packed so much power into one tool with a complete end-to-end workflow. Over a decade since the "end of Flash" and I still find myself searching for tools that deliver the same capabilities, without the complexity. Things are improving with tools like Rive, but the market still feels fragmented and complex. Flash was way ahead of its time.

thrashh 3y ago

Tools and ecosystem really make a product. Microsoft knew this when they invested so much in tooling. Java has some of the best tool chains of any language. Macromedia and to some extent Adobe invested a lot with tooling for Flash. Shit I even made GUIs for all my command-line tools so normal people could use them.

pipo234 3y ago
Creating a GUI to cater for "normal people" has merits. But GUIs, and especially GUI-only apps come at a cost too. Using the Unix philosophy to combine text based tools does not translated to GUIs. How about test automation? Back in the day when I was still forced to develop software on Windows or Mac OS I wasted so much time maintaining brittle click & even snoop-based integration using kludgy tools like selenium and add-hoc click-the-freaking-button.exe just because the app originally happened to be developed natively in Java, Flash, HTML5+ajax by some rockstar, 10x coder without seatbelts.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Also even when just using Windows, it's frustrating how the ecosystem convention seems to be to launch a heavy program with an idiosyncratic GUI to do any simple file -> file transformation. And half the time these trivial apps are proprietary free/shareware nagging you to "upgrade" for features like "not arbitrarily restricted to 10 files". Luckily a lot of the command line tools I use on Linux will run on Windows, it's just that few people bother due to an irrational fear of the command line
  - pipo234 3y ago
    Or how about all those windows 99% CLI programs that once in a silver moon decide to bother the user with a pop-up "Are you sure Y/N?". You find these on billboard, kiosks, payment terminals, ATMs. Or try running a simple Java tool on headless Windows using Jenkins agent or cygwin SSH and you'll discover how horribly bad relying on a GUI can be. Or: how about automatically launching a MacOS VM on VMWare and setting up a VPN tunnel after a restart power outage without a mouse, keyboard and display. Should work in theory, but in practice never gets beyond most of the time.

robertoandred 3y ago

The Flash authoring system never went away: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Yes, but the HTML50-output options leave a lot to be desired - it's not as simple as taking an existing multi-megabyte *.fla file from 2004, opening it in Animate CC and going File > Export - there's a whole bunch of incompatibility and breaking-changes involved, some are listed here: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... What's kinda interesting to me is that Macromedia also had a Java-applet-based SWF player, which got me wondering why a Java-based version of Flash, instead of the native-code Flash, never took-off as a more secure alternative.
- Gabrys1 3y ago
  Java applets took forever to lunch. Maybe that's why
  - alibarber 3y ago
    Also the JVM didn't seem as widespread as flash player in my experience - it was something like a 40+MB download and somewhat-involved install whereas Flash player seemed to have been included in the OS or as an easy IE plugin add-on. Can't remember exactly though but this is the experience I vaguely recall.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  As mentioned in another comment, there is a quite decent WASM based Flash player now [0]. I don't know whether Adobe Animate can even export .fla any more, though. [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
  - kmeisthax 3y ago

fergie 3y ago

Wow. I have got to the place in my journey as a software developer that I can actually agree with this statement. Whilst I once dismissed Flash for being being "proprietary", I can now appreciate it as a great democratising force. Today- if you want to make some cute animations from scratch, you basically have to first work out how to rig up the js development environment de jour, and then delve into some fairly complicated mathematics to make it work. In other words, the type of thing that no spontaneous creative type is going to waste their life on. Flash used to help normal people to make websites. Normal people have stopped making websites. We should bring back Flash, or something like it if we want to maintain a truly decentralised web.

DanielHB 3y ago
I remember everyone absolutely hated flash websites, they were terrible in all aspects. Flash was only really good for animations and games.
- jcelerier 3y ago
  I loved flash websites
- pluijzer 3y ago
  Like the other sibling, I too really liked flash websites. Often they where creative pieces of art. I only started to dislike Flash when switching to Linux. You could only use the 32-bit closed official version from Adobe which was difficult to set up, or use an open source implementation but this one wasn't feature complete. Lots of websites filled in the technical gaps of html/js with flash, which made you dependent on it even for government sites. It wasn't fun to have a Windows partition just to be able to do your tax.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  I think you're extrapolating too far based on just your experience. As evidenced in the other replies to your comment, a lot of people did like Flash.
  - 3y ago

prmoustache 3y ago

> a very accessible authoring system I reckon you are not talking about accessibility the way we use it for product design right? Because to me Flash was the opposite of accessibility compared to the regular web of the time that could mostly be browsed with a text based web browser using a braille display.

Cockbrand 3y ago
Yes, I meant accessible in the sense of "easy to understand for most people". I absolutely agree that the typical output of Flash isn't accessible in the sense you mention.

Marazan 3y ago

Whilst it was a complete and total security nightmare the Flash Player wasn't a resource hog. People just wrote bad flash apps, that was where the resource hogging came. Those same people are now writing the same bad code in HTML5/Javascript.

newaccount74 3y ago
Flash games that ran perfectly fine on Windows only ran very choppy (if at all) on the Mac. So the people who are calling flash a resource hog might have been using a Mac in that time.
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  I used Mac and Linux at that time, and both were definitely 2nd class platforms for a lot of companies whose software ran fine on Windows.

GuB-42 3y ago

> although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog And yet, it was really lightweight compared to what we have now. If you have a webpage or game on the level of what Flash typically did, expect tens of MB of downloads, more than 100MB of RAM usage, and choppy animation on anything but a high-end PC. Flash was a resource hog in the early 2000s, when people still had dial-up modems, single core sub-GHz CPUs, mechanical hard drives, RAM in the 100s of MB,... Performance of the "modern web" is abysmal for the computing power of modern devices. Also, with the loss of Flash, we lost most of the vector graphics that was typical of that era. It was, in a sense more, modern than what came after since vector graphics work really well on the high-resolution displays we have now. Vector graphics on the web are timidly making a comeback, on websites with many times the resource requirements of what was typical for Flash.

anthk 3y ago
Flash was both propietary and with zero accesibility. It deserved to die.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- GuB-42 3y ago
  No, it deserved to be opened and have its accessibility improved. These were totally fixable problems and Adobe fucked up by not addressing them. Like the vulnerabilities, they were just a result of developers dropping the ball on bug fixes, not a flaw of the tech itself. We wasted a good decade rebuilding things from ground up with what became the web stack, including many of the bad things we blamed Flash for, like intrusive ads and DRM. And along the way, we lost some of best parts, like the authoring tools, and we dragged a lot of bloat too.
- hulitu 3y ago
  So is the modern web.

thedonkeycometh 3y ago

[dead]

detourdog 3y ago

Director was a better general development environment than Flash IMO. Flash was mostly a Director focused on the web animations. Director was available until 2017. I first saw it in the early 90's and I think it was just called MacroMind. Eventually becoming MacroMind Director and eventually Adobe Director. Creative people could have moved to Director from flash.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

>Flash, a very accessible authoring system died Honestly by the time Thoughts on Flash was written Adobe hadn't cared about that aspect for many years. They seemed to be only interested in it as a video delivery system and then a hardcore multiplatform tool not the entry level space it filled for many of the earlier years. Adobe also for many years claimed Mac was the problem for the poor performance of the player yet after Apple denied them the iPhone the Mac player reached Windows performance parity in weeks.