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I know that there were almost certainly patent issues and the like that made this difficult, but I firmly believe that if Adobe had open-sourced the Flash playe

I know that there were almost certainly patent issues and the like that made this difficult, but I firmly believe that if Adobe had open-sourced the Flash player, then Flash would still be as big or bigger today. If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually. It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die. The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die. I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work. No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
- tombert 2y ago
  There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012. I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Totally. I still think that more development can cover a lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest interpreted runtimes. Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast. Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
galangalalgol 2y ago
The ruffle.rs project has most of newgrounds back up running flash inside a wasm runtime. Is there any reason we can't all use the same old development tools in a vm to create more new flash content?
- tombert 2y ago
  I don't see why you couldn't, other than getting hands on legitimate versions of Flash that still have ActionScript support.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die. I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work. No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.

tombert 2y ago
There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012. I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Totally. I still think that more development can cover a lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest interpreted runtimes. Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast. Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.

galangalalgol 2y ago

The ruffle.rs project has most of newgrounds back up running flash inside a wasm runtime. Is there any reason we can't all use the same old development tools in a vm to create more new flash content?

tombert 2y ago
I don't see why you couldn't, other than getting hands on legitimate versions of Flash that still have ActionScript support.