HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-25) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
"We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end
of 2020"
705 points by mintplant
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update...___________________________________________________________________
misticdeveloper - 3 hours ago
Yes! HBO's lazy ass will finally be forced to get rid of their
horrible Flash web player
FRex - 4 hours ago
This is absolutely awful. There are thousands of great games on
ArmorGames and Kongregate that are in Flash. I they consider open
sourcing it or at least allowing open source alternatives to grow.
[deleted]
Kenji - 6 hours ago
Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old
ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught
me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost
identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work
perfectly. That's an achievement. Not to mention, Macromedia
(later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and
I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for today's
children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you
can scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with
code, just like that. And then publish it on the internet
effortlessly.
icebraining - 4 hours ago
Flash (the editor) wasn't killed, Adobe renamed it to Animate and
now exports to other formats.
camus2 - 6 hours ago
It was an incredible opportunity for programmers to work with
graphic artists and sound designers.It was the best years of my
life as a programmer.Flash was first and foremost a community
where the goal was to further creativity with the "web" as a
medium.No thanks to Elop who "Eloped" Macromedia.
dandare - 2 hours ago
Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote
my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good
foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3.
AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS
vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to
AS3.I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.
Kenji - 35 minutes ago
I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other
technologies because even back then, the end of flash was
forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time to move on for a
variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control
over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance
concerns.Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at
"Introduction to programming" asked in which languages we've
programmed before and I said ActionScript and he said that is
not a programming language :)
ash_gti - 6 hours ago
I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days?I
assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in
Flash still these days.
Dolores12 - 6 hours ago
legacy games & apps
samsonradu - 4 hours ago
Low-latency live streaming and video conferencing on the web.
LeoNatan25 - 6 hours ago
A lot of advertisement on porn sites is still Flash. Will anybody
think of the children?
hornbaker - 6 hours ago
A metric TON of them are.
gothroach - 6 hours ago
VMware vCenter's Web UI by default runs in Flash, even on the
newest vCenter 6.5. There's an option for an HTML5 interface,
but it's not feature-complete and is far buggier and laggier than
the already buggy Flash client. ESXi 6.5's web interface is
HTML5, and it appears to have a lot of common codebase with
vCenter's HTML5 interface, but is far more mature and accessible.
I hope that this gives VMware the kick in the pants to finally
lose the Flash vCenter client and finish up the HTML5 version.
empath75 - 5 hours ago
Just a couple of years ago, someone from EMC came to our data
storage team and proudly announced their brand new interface,
written in Flash. I laughed in his face when he said that.I
guess it's a step up from java?
gothroach - 5 hours ago
That's amazing, I haven't used EMC much and didn't realize
they used Flash for their interface also.I (with protest) use
Java UIs so much for configuring various networking gear (old
Cisco MDS switches still in use, etc) that I have to have
three Win7 VMs with different Java versions and settings to
make sure I can access them all. At least using Flash for
the UI makes it so I can access it on just about any machine
with Flash enabled so I don't have to have crazy configs to
get things working.
wvenable - 5 hours ago
Be nice if they just went back to desktop client; it was better
in every way.
gothroach - 3 hours ago
I totally agree. In the past week I deployed a new VMware
cluster with vCenter, and found myself constantly wishing for
the desktop client. A lot of the issues I had were related
to bugs in the web interface itself, I had to SSH in to fix
random things. Apparently, certain 'invalid' VM
configurations can cause the web interface to error out
completely until the VM is disassociated or edited, even on a
brand new cluster. For VM stuff I can use Workstation to
administrate them so I was able to change the VM settings
from there, but for anything above individual VM control you
pretty much need the web UI.
TremendousJudge - 4 hours ago
spotify web uses flash
0xffff2 - 5 hours ago
HBO Now is still using a (terrible) Flash-based player.
[deleted]
damontal - 5 hours ago
Filmstruck uses it
xanderstrike - 4 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...To
ns of animators still use Flash, the tools are by far the best
and easiest for making animated and interactive content. It used
to also have an awesome publishing path, but Apple killed that
off. All the animators I know still work with it, but record the
flash animations as videos and post 'em on youtube.
touristtam - 6 hours ago
An awfull lot of UI component in desktop and mobile application
seems to be using flash under the hood, and yes that is including
games as well, but not just the "farm ville" type (world of tanks
is a prime example).
syshum - 6 hours ago
Vmware, ADP, and Several Other very large Enterprise Vendors use
Flash, Infact some of them just made a transitions from Java to
Flash after Java announced the EOL of Web Browser Applets.
whatever_dude - 6 hours ago
Lots of games, but that's about it.
Will_Parker - 6 hours ago
It was a path to programming for a lot of artistic minded kids
who enjoy learning things on their own. They could start by
slowly adding programming to animations until it became a game
they could share with their friends. A lot of these people grew
up into development jobs. I think if the barrier to learning
was picking up ES6 and React or Unity before being able to make
a functional game, a lot of them would not have gotten
started.This is not a small thing.
rocky1138 - 6 hours ago
This is why they should open source it if they aren't
planning to do anything with it.
icebraining - 4 hours ago
They are doing something with it, they renamed it to
Animate and made it export to HTML5. They're just killing
the format.
xanderstrike - 4 hours ago
Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_tel
evis...Flash is one of the best workflows for animators ever.
This is equivalent to Photoshop being EOL'd because Apple
doesn't like the pictures you can make with it.
dandare - 2 hours ago
> Where a format didn?t exist, we invented one ? such as with Flash
and Shockwave.Cringe!Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with
Macromedia that invented them 10 year earlier.
favorited - 2 hours ago
But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included
Macromedia after the acquisition?
mulmen - 2 hours ago
That's disingenuous. Adobe didn't invent Flash, they bought
the company that did. Adobe's strategy is based on them having
resources to acquire, not create.
baby - 2 hours ago
This letter might have been written by one of the guy in the
original Macromedia team.
thousande - 1 hours ago
The two companies kind of merged and Adobe continued to employ
some of the original members from the Flash teamhttps://en.wiki
pedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing)https://daringfireball.ne
t/2005/04/adobe_translation
redindian75 - 2 hours ago
Actually Macromedia didnt invent it either. A small company
called "FutureSplash" had a software called FutureSplash
Animator. Macromedia bought it in the late 90s
qrbLPHiKpiux - 6 hours ago
Good.
camus2 - 6 hours ago
This is Adobe's fault. They could have open-sourced the player
anytime they wanted, they didn't. I don't blame Apple, or Flash-
haters or anybody else but Adobe and all its stupid policies. Adobe
killed Flash. Nobody else did.
theandrewbailey - 6 hours ago
I bet there's lots of third party tech in Flash that prevents
them from open sourcing it.
givinguflac - 6 hours ago
Good riddance.
cjensen - 4 hours ago
I feel so bad for the Scratch language, which converted to Flash at
exactly the wrong time.
seanalltogether - 6 hours ago
> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will
stop updating and distributing Flash.Adobes stance on backwards
compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where
does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists
around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are
way to slow for most content.
gumby - 5 hours ago
> Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always
been "Don't break the web".Flash wasn't the web. Opaque,
unsearchable blobs break the web. Screwing around with controls
etc break the web.Adobe's hope was to replace the open web.
TremendousJudge - 5 hours ago
good thing we nipped that one in the bud, and now we are not
embracing another opaque, unsearchable mangle of blobs as the
next new thing
i_cant_speel - 3 hours ago
What are you referring to?
ihsw2 - 3 hours ago
That would be Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).https://en.w
ikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_ExtensionsThe saga behind
media conglomerates, tech firms, pornography distributors
and the W3C is pretty unpleasant, and (suffice to say) it
has brought us to where we are today. As fast in-browser
decryption hits broader swaths of the world's internet
users, we should expect to see more and more sections of
the web walled off to unregistered users.Considering
most/all users are accustomed to being required to register
and log in to websites to view content, the outrage will be
minimal and isolated to enthusiastic commenters like the
parent above you.Let's put this in a familiar context --
remember how Twitter decided to close off its platform to
third-party apps? Now most users need either Twitter for
Twitter-sanctioned apps.This similar sequence of events can
be replicated over all sources of content of the web with
mini-walled gardens popping up.
SkyMarshal - 6 hours ago
I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port
anything considered important to something else.
gpawl - 5 hours ago
Meanwhile, DOS programs from 1986 still run in DOSBox.
itomato - 4 hours ago
Given enough demand, the same will be true for Flash thirty
years hence.
azinman2 - 4 hours ago
Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those
concerned with abandonware? Companies that want people to pay
for new porting work?The majority of content that is still in
flash and active use probably won?t get ported... the iPhone 10
years ago set that trend.
richardwhiuk - 4 hours ago
The flash player won't stop working when Adobe declare it
EOL....
sigjuice - 4 hours ago
If another program runs in a rectangle in your browser, it should
not be called "the web".
Simon_says - 6 hours ago
> Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still
exists around the web after 2020?Hopefully in their quieter
moments they'll be reflecting on the wisdom of building on top of
closed-source systems.
stevenh - 4 hours ago
Most actual developers currently using Adobe's products will only
want to know whether Adobe AIR is safe. It
is.https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772
TheRoccoB - 4 hours ago
I made a celebration post! https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-
of-the-end-of-flash-8...
Samuray - 5 hours ago
Good thing I spent so much time learning and using Flash. Never
again, Adobe.
bdcravens - 4 hours ago
There was a time that was a great career path. However, you never
can predict how well a technology will perform, especially if
it's tied to a closed platform. I suppose this speaks to the
power of open source.Then again, Animate CC should allow you to
use those skills for the various platforms it supports.
reboog711 - 3 hours ago
Because all that knowledge is now useless and does not apply to
any other technology or approach to development?
nathanm412 - 4 hours ago
When was this? They've been trying to discourage people from
using flash for years
now.https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-
html5-an...
Marazan - 3 hours ago
Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts
of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected
by).Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to
storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe
Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex
totally.Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.
liquidise - 2 hours ago
The Flex concept of variables being "observable" was about 8
years ahead of Backbone and later Angular, and now React-style UI
updates from an event loop.It was surreal working in the
Cairngorm Flex framework briefly in 2000s and then see Backbone
and Angular pitched as groundbreaking years later. Only now are
we getting to a similar level of elegance with loop-style UI
updates.
5trokerac3 - 2 hours ago
Still haven't had a better development experience than Flex with
the CLI compiler.Built some of the first web based AR engines
with it and alchemy. Built giant, 80"+ touchscreen, trade show
interactives with it that nobody had a clue were Flash unless you
told them. Was able to port just about anything to iPad with Air
for Mobile and actually build IPA files on Linux.All they needed
to do was cross compile to HTML5 and barely anyone would be using
Angular or Bootstrap nowadays.
Hasknewbie - 2 hours ago
>> Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable."Adobesque"?
rhapsodic - 2 hours ago
> Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing
acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected
by).Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an
active developer community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and
appear to work on Flex full-time.Unfortunately, it seems the
developer community is focusing most of their efforts on FlexJS,
an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I don't
see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework
space.
therethenthat - 1 hours ago
up in heaven, Steve Jobs is smiling a bit more than usual today :)
cpncrunch - 6 hours ago
What about Adobe Connect? They have been talking about moving to
HTML5 for years, but nothing seems to happen. Then recently they
announce that if you don't have Flash you can instead download an
executable:https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-
in.htmlCould this be the end of AC, or will they pull something out
of a hat at the last minute?
vecinu - 4 hours ago
Connect is not going to die, is my understanding.
cpncrunch - 3 hours ago
Two options seem to be:- go to a downloadable .exe- move to
HTML5They appear to be moving towards the .exe path at the
moment, which seems like a bad idea.
meerita - 3 hours ago
I made a living with Flash. In fact, I first made Flash before
making HTML, CSS.
pier25 - 5 hours ago
The Flash player (which is really what's being killed here) was
piece of crap, but the Flash ecosystem was amazing.There is nothing
today that offers a similar level of accessible crossplatform
development like Adobe Air. Qt is the only thing that comes
close.Sadly Adobe decided to kill the Flash platform. I wrote a
long rant here a couple of years back: https://medium.com/@Pier
/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-fla...
thebouv - 5 hours ago
Exactly! The type of stuff I built with Flex and Adobe Air was so
great. I was able to solve so many problems that I just couldn't
have (easily) without it. And for that brief moment when I could
turn Flex code into iOS/Android apps? Awesome.
reboog711 - 3 hours ago
You still can turn Flex and Adobe AIR code into iOS / Android
app...
thebouv - 1 hours ago
Really?Once Flex went to Apache and FlexDeveloper was killed,
I just stopped paying attention.
oblib - 4 hours ago
The only people who care about the life of this product are those
who invested in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand
why they care, but I don't.I decided not to invest in it back when
Macromedia bought it because I knew it would be expensive and
subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash" was great and
had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's
planned obsolescence and I hated the way Macromedia designed their
UIs and thought they charged way too much for their products.I
stopped using Adobe's plug-in on my Mac even before Jobs came out
and complained about Flash. I considered it a form "spyware" and
even if it wasn't it was constantly pestering me to update it and I
seldom ever visited a site that used it. As I recall it was a bit
of a pain to get rid of it too.
tambourine_man - 4 hours ago
>The only people who care about the life of this product are
those who invested in buying and learning how to use it.And the
ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few
of my clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in
the early 2000s. Every year I try to convince them that they need
to switch, but they can't justify the cost.
omg_ketchup - 2 hours ago
Nobody "learned" Flash. You opened it up and you already knew
what to do.That's the real value it provided.
methodover - 6 hours ago
I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ...
It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations
and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a
creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes
even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.There
are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned
Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that knowledge is
useless. And there aren't even better tools to replace it.It could
have been different. Too bad they let it fail.
BLanen - 5 hours ago
Adobe now has "Adobe Animate" though.
TheCoreh - 5 hours ago
Yeah, the Flash creation tools will remain in development,
simply rebranded as "Animate". The plugin is no longer needed,
since Animate can export to HTML/JS/SVG or to video files. This
is by far the best outcome: We get to keep the awesome creation
tools, but it exports on free/open formats.
[deleted]
djsumdog - 6 hours ago
A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to
be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector
graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it
still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older
flash content.Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make
their YouTube videos.It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win)
and was a much better portable web app platform than Java
applets.Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks
for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old
games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll
lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be
archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash
player in Javascript O_o)
ikreymer - 5 hours ago
Webrecorder supports remote browsers that allow you to run
older browsers pre-configured with Flash, as well as Java
applets.http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/oct/25/rhizome-
releases-ma...Example: Record Flash:
https://webrecorder.io/_new/temp/flash-
example/record/$br:ch...An archived Java applet: https://webrec
order.io/demo/java/20170505193641$br:firefox:4...In this mode,
the browsers run remotely and stream the video to your browser.
We are still working on the audio support but hope to have
audio support soon. It should be possible to archive Flash in
this way, though we could use more help/research in this
area.Once the last version of Flash is released, we'll include
the latest browsers that can run it.If the Mozilla Shumway
project or similar picks up again (we hope), Webrecorder can
integrate that as well to offer a native JS based Flash-
recording and replay.If anyone is interesting in helping out,
let us know!
solidr53 - 4 hours ago
Yes, Jones in the Fast
Lane!!!http://home.broadpark.no/~kboye/jones/jones.html
zwily - 6 hours ago
Looks dead, but https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon
RussianCow - 6 hours ago
More up to date, but still looks dead:
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway
bsmedberg - 6 hours ago
Shumway was a followup to this. Flash -> Gordon -> Shumway
;-)But they're all dormant/dead. Compatibility is really
hard.
[deleted]
wlesieutre - 6 hours ago
I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the
Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster
fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always
assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in
supporting it on iOS.
mrpippy - 5 hours ago
Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and
unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86
version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common
since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a
32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive)
hacks like nspluginwrapper.I suspect the crappiness of the
Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence,
but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams.
Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that,
if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years
used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case
for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.
Endy - 2 hours ago
I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're
going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished
experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop
marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux,
etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be
seen as a blessing.
reality_czech - 2 hours ago
I guess my feeling could be summed up as: bye, flash! We
in the Mac/Linux sphere won't miss you.
wlesieutre - 1 hours ago
Yes and no. It was nice to have support for that whole
community of animations and games, even with crappy
performance. And we could get to the godawful
interactive-restaurant-websites where framerates didn't
matter. But the existence of a terrible Mac port helped
fuel its adoption as a web technology (versus something
like ActiveX where you were Windows/IE only). Without
that, maybe those restaurants would have stuck to HTML
like they should have to begin with.Especially on the
video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format,
we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in
the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates
and definitely not crashing my browser so often.As a
portable web application platform, I suppose it was
better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to
those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.
kakwa_ - 4 hours ago
I could not agree more.The Linux version was really badly
maintained for ages.Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff
like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its
version string from 11 to 12This was to work around a
requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash
versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that
time (11.2 IIRC).I hope that at some points, Adobe will
release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most
beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide
a reference implementation and help other implementations a
lot.
chungy - 4 hours ago
As much as I personally dislike Flash, I have to agree
that making it open source would be a net benefit to the
world, even if only for preservation of existing media.
gmmeyer - 1 hours ago
Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012: http://www.pcwor
ld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the...Even back
then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after
that it became very hard to get anything to work.
Eventually someone came out with a service called
pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use
windows only plugins in Firefox:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked
great until I didn't need it anymore.
yuhong - 20 minutes ago
They still have it today (it was never truly
"discontinued").
jakobegger - 4 hours ago
Yes. Flash was unusably slow on MacOS. Stuff that ran smooth
on Windows would stutter and lag on the Mac.
[deleted]
mattnewton - 5 hours ago
Yuphttps://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/"We also
know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs
crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems,
but they have persisted for several years now. "
kbenson - 4 hours ago
That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of
PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that
problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame
that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app
to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a
bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit).All this
means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep
their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping
crap software from crashing your computer is one of the
things the OS does.
mattnewton - 4 hours ago
I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the
operating system itself crashed
kbenson - 4 hours ago
That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I
find it hard to believe that it would have been
accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me
that means the likely explanations are that either it
actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall
from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that
Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame
to an application, which I think is possible. Or some
combination thereof.
nardi - 3 hours ago
As is common, Apple uses the term ?panic? to describe the
OS itself failing. ?Crash? is reserved for applications.
kbenson - 1 hours ago
If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly
unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash.
The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to
say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to
the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like
someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to
Windows applications because people say blue screen
instead of crash usually. Even if you accept the
terminology, it's applied to the wrong subject.As I said,
I can't imagine that distinction having escaped notice in
a PR piece such as this.
wooter - 58 minutes ago
a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena
kbenson - 42 minutes ago
> a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomenaYes, but
he didn't say panic, he said crash. Crash is often used
to refer to both application crashes, and os crashes,
which are also often called kernel panics. Saying
something causes "Macs to crash" when you mean
applications running on a Mac, as people are suggesting,
is very unclear.
wlesieutre - 22 minutes ago
I agree, the wording isn't great. Kernel panic is a
specific thing, yes, but there are other system-wide
crashes that are much more common on Macs than kernel
panics."Sleep Wake Failure" comes to mind. When the 2016
MBP was new I'd get one literally every night that I left
my computer asleep. It's now much less frequent (a couple
a month, still more than it should be), but more often
than panics (haven't had one yet).
jacoblambda - 2 hours ago
I believe that also applies to most UNIXes and UNIX-
likes.
I really like that terminology though, it
makes quite a bit of sense. When you witness a crash(you
are not part of the crash, you were simply
witnessing/interacting with the thing that crashed. You
are not necessarily harmed), it is not like the whole
world is falling apart. There was a crash, it is horrible
and now you have to save what you can. This applies both
digitally and in real life. Think crashing a drone or
watching a plane crash. You rush to the scene and call
for help, but you are not harmed.Now when the OS fails,
it stops everything and can potentially result in
significantly more data loss than a standard application
crash. Much like when a person is in an accident
involving a vehicle. It is no longer just a crash, it is
now a panic. When you end up in an accident you don't
think "oh ya that crash" you think panic, not the word,
the feeling.Sorry for the rambling on, it
kinda just happened. But ya that terminology is great.
kbenson - 7 minutes ago
> That's definitely not what that phrasing meansTo
clarify, because I think people may be misinterpreting
what I meant by that. I wasn't implying a definitive
intent to the statement, but stating that the suggested
interpretation is not what that statement means in
English, as the the subject is a "Mac", which could
logically be construed as the OS, the hardware, or both,
but not an application running on a Mac. So either it
means something other than the suggestions put forth
(that he's referring to application crashes), or it's a
misstatement, on purpose or not.
wlesieutre - 4 hours ago
This was also published not too long after Snow Leopard
came out (August 2009), which is when Safari first split
plugins out to a separate process, as long as you were
running it in 64-bit mode. Before that it could bring
down the whole browser, after it would only kill itself
and require pages to be reloaded. So it's not like Apple
wasn't doing anything about it.Obviously a positive
change in general, but the push to prioritize that and
get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused
by Flash.And even after that was implemented, an ad
crashing flash in one window would still bring down a
video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still
a crappy user experience.
curun1r - 4 hours ago
It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple
animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the
high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and
would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the
animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable
degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered
whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded
Bitcoin Miner or other such code to make use of our spare CPU
cycles.
egypturnash - 4 hours ago
Flash has always been crap on the Mac. Always. I was
working with it around 2000-05 and the player was always
like half as fast as a similarly specced Windows machine.
Plus there were some wonderful Mac-only bugs in v5 of the
editor that cropped up when you tried to edit files big
enough to contain a whole cartoon. And by "wonderful" I
mean "I lost a week of my life to editing a cartoon in five
minute bursts of work, followed by having to reboot the
entire system because Flash had crashed so hard it refused
to run until I did that."
tracker1 - 4 hours ago
I remember Flash under Macromedia... I also started disabling
it after I found out that you could access the local file
system through some hacks. Actually had to do this for storing
state on a project (around 2002 iirc).I agree that it's great
for 2-d animation, one of the best tools around, and why it's
still used for education/training. Flex/Flash Builder also
wasn't bad at all, and AS3, while verbose was interesting.
Having XML as a first class citizen at the time was nice, and
paired really well with VB.Net on the server, where XML is also
first class.There are a couple Flash players in JS... I do hope
that Adobe opens the format up so a lot of the stuff made in
flash can be preserved... the content itself was so much
smaller than video files, and the interactions are much harder
to setup and match using JS alone. I'm actually a little sad
when I see converted flash animations to video (youtube) only
because the originals were significantly smaller, without all
the noise compared to video.When Adobe bought Macromedia, my
hope at the time was that the output format would evolve into
straight, browser runnable JS, vector, movie and audio assets
in a zip file with a manifest. So that the actual container
format could be built into and supported by browsers directly.
Where Adobe could concentrate on the tooling, which is where
they made their money anyway.The funny thing is, I thought
Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd wanted Flash to be, but
there was just no way it would take hold, as the tooling was
nothing close to Flash.
Marazan - 3 hours ago
The swf format has been open for years.
sillysaurus3 - 5 hours ago
There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way
that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone
makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)Looks like it's possible
:https://github.com/mozilla/shumwayhttp://mozilla.github.io/shu
mway/examples/inspector/inspecto...
ravendug - 4 hours ago
Not really. Looks like it has been abandoned (no commits in
over a year) and last I checked it was by no means a capable
replacement yet.http://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers
/9473-mozilla-k...
mbebenita - 2 hours ago
With some work, it can be revived and used to port old
content to the web. One of the difficulties with Shumway
was being but-for-bug compatible with the Flash player,
which turned out to be nearly impossible... If the
developer is in the loop, the task is a lot easier.
greggman - 1 hours ago
I don't have any numbers but my impression is the number of
people making games in unity dwarfs the number of people who ever
made games in flash. it's ridiculously easy now. any coffee shop
I visit I see several people in unity.
ovulator - 5 hours ago
It was also a scapegoat as a conduit for obnoxious ads. Nothing
about the technology made ads worse, the technology was easy to
use so people used it.Ads are as shitty as ever in HTML5.
laumars - 4 hours ago
You need to remember that at the time HTML5 wasn't around so if
a developer wanted something more "multimedia" then it meant
resorting to Flash. This meant that Flash ads had a lot of
annoying traits like audio effect which you wouldn't get with
HTML+JPEG/GIF ads.Plus even back then Flash had a tendency to
grind modest hardware to a halt (particularly if you were
running OS X or Linux).So Flash definitely made ads worse.
However whether you want to blame Flash or the developers for
that is really just a philisophical question. But suffice to
say the most annoying adverts around that time wouldn't have
been possible without Flash.
egypturnash - 4 hours ago
So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development
around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but
I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to
scratch the itch to make something move.The SWF format, and the
plugin that plays it, is going away.The program that started life
as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe
Flash, is not going away. It got rebranded as Adobe Animate last
year.Animators working on stuff for Youtube or TV probably
haven't touched a .SWF in years. You export a .MOV and post that
to Youtube. Or you drop it in a video editor along with the .MOVs
of all your other scenes for this project. The Los Angeles TV
animation industry still uses Flash for some projects; check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
sometime, you'll probably recognize a few shows you or your
friends love.If you're using it to make interactive content? You
can export to HTML5 now. And to WebGL and WebAssembly. I haven't
ever done that myself, I dunno how much hassle it is to convert
an old Actionscript/.SWF project to those platforms. I would
assume that the 'Animate' rebranding coincided with Adobe feeling
that the HTML5 capabilities for interaction were on par with
.SWF's; they've been working on that ever since Jobs refused to
let the Flash plugin onto iThings..SWF is dead, and good
riddance. Its plugin was a CPU-hogging binary blob that needed
regular updates. It was amazing back in 2000 when it was all we
had; it's a lot less amazing now.The program that compiled a
bunch of art and code into .SWF files will live on. The
penultimate sentence of Adobe's press release? "...we?ll continue
to provide best in class animation and video tools such as
Animate CC...". The tool ain't going nowhere. The tool's just
distancing itself from its now-much-loathed first export
format.But I would bet money that Animate's file format - the
.PSD to its Photoshop - is gonna continue to be called .FLA for
the next ten years.
prodikl - 2 hours ago
yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash
became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made
in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and
toolset, just the delivery format has changedthat said, i'm
really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript.
Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice
language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I
hope it still gets developed.i also hope they keep developing
and supporting AIR
rhapsodic - 2 hours ago
>i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIRFlash
support within AIR is going to
continue:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400
striking - 3 hours ago
You can use this handy tool to convert your SWFs to transparent
MOVs without importing to Adobe Animate/Flash:
https://github.com/AaronShea/SilkscreenYou won't get audio from
it, but a lot of other stuff works.
mikestew - 3 hours ago
There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who
learned Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that
knowledge is useless.One can say that about a lot of things.
FoxPro made me a good living for probably 6-7 years, and it got
me in the door at Microsoft. I would also argue that for creating
a data-centric LOB application, there are not better tools to
replace it (even to this day). But times changes, technology
moves on, yada, yada. Now I do other stuff with other tools. I
miss that little smirking fox logo, I miss slapping together a
CRUD app in no time at all, but FP had it's shortcomings, too, so
I try not to get too nostalgic about how it was better in the old
days.As for Flash, well, I try to stay away from web dev, but I
won't miss it taking down my browser on a regular basis. In fact,
I miss it so little that I haven't had Flash installed on a
machine in years (and promptly rip it right the hell off there if
a client's policy sticks it on the machine they hand me).
zackbrown - 2 hours ago
> The tools ... in Flash are far beyond anything else out there
from a creative standpoint.Very much this. The next-closest
tech, HTML5, offers the same multimedia capabilities and runtime
ubiquity as Flash? but no native tooling for
designers/animators.Instead, every design and interaction must be
funneled from design tool through code, handed off from designer-
brain to engineer-brain, across each and every iteration.
Productivity and creative expression are a couple of the
casualties of this "hand-off" workflow.> There isn't a product on
the market that comes even close.Have you seen Haiku?
https://haiku.ai (I'm on the Haiku team.) We're young but we've
got some funding, a functional product, and some big-brand early
users. We're going squarely after "modern Flash without the
plugin," integrated deeply with modern design/dev tools &
workflows.It's a hard problem we're tackling, and we've still got
some work ahead of us?but each of us on the team believes so
strongly in the need for a solution (as you outlined here) that
we're doing something about it.
notatoad - 4 hours ago
The tools still exist as "Adobe Animate CC". It exports HTML5
and video files now instead of *.swf.This is only the death of
the player software, not the toolkit.
fragsworth - 3 hours ago
Adobe's marketing team dropped the ball on this one, and now it
seems like there's a ton of FUD about what they're doing.In
2020 the Flash player shouldn't be needed any more, because
HTML5 will hopefully be good enough in every browser by that
point. All the rest of their tools are still going to be
useful.Why they didn't make this clear to everyone just baffles
me.
cpeterso - 6 hours ago
Flash also made distribution very easy: all the code and assets
could be bundled in one compressed SWF file. Now we have lots of
js files that are minimized and bundled and other loose asset
files.
ivm - 5 hours ago
And the size was great ? we were keeping many games with art,
animations, music, and effects under 1.5 megabytes.
pzone - 1 hours ago
This is the biggest letdown of Flash being discontinued. How
can an artist distribute interactives as a single file now? How
can a gallery site host user-uploaded interactive animations
without allowing its users a platform to inject arbitrary
javascript? (At least .swf provides an attempt at sandboxing.)
emehrkay - 5 hours ago
I agree with you. Before working with flash I scoffed at it, but
after I realized just how good the IDE was/is. Just how good the
resulting executable were (without the browser). Everything that
HTML5/CSS3 is trying to be, Flash has been for years. Yeah it is
closed and buggy, but it filled a gap that pushed the web
forward. And having to learn AS3 allowed me to easily get into
the newer JS stuff later
kbenson - 4 hours ago
You know, it's pretty easy to make a fast, responsive fun car
to drive if you ignore all the safety precautions required to
make it street legal. As a bonus, when all you have is a steel
tubing chassis and no body panels, working on the car and
adding new components is really easy. That doesn't mean we
should all drive that type of car, or allow them on the public
roads.
tareqak - 5 hours ago
Why can't they make Flash better and open like other people did
with JavaScript? e.g. emScripten, WebAssembly, and WebGLI left
this question intentionally vague / and possibly wrong in order
to give the person responding some leeway and the opportunity to
dispel some myths that people might have about JavaScript
technologies and the history of both JavaScript and Flash e.g.
me.
reboog711 - 3 hours ago
Flash player, by definition, is a browser plugin. Most
browsers are closing [or have closed] their plugin APIs so this
makes sense.I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is
basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".
rhapsodic - 2 hours ago
> I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically
"Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".That appears to be
the case:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400
simion314 - 6 hours ago
And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework
pier25 - 5 hours ago
Amen.AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to
use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with
many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available
in JS.I wrote this a couple of months back:
https://medium.com/@Pier/ecmascript-4-was-too-ahead-of-its-t...
simion314 - 5 hours ago
As others said Adobe is at fault here, same as Microsoft is
at fault of not open sourcing Silverlight and now we end up
with html5/js mess that was not designed for what is used.
Flex4 is really good and after you learn it you get good GUIs
that are efficient and that are easy to reuse and much more
efficiient then HHTML based GUIs
tracker1 - 4 hours ago
IIRC, the format for Silverlight output was well
documented, and open. It was a zip file with a manifest,
assets and JS. The down side is they didn't get the
penetration. Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd hoped
that Flash would have become when Adobe bought Macromedia.
Adobe was really pushing SVG before that, and my hope was
that flash content would become a zip, with assets and a
manifest, where 2D assets were svg, and the tweaning was
something similar to CSS.Either could have been adopted.
Would still love to see an HTML "package" format that was
similar, where the whole content and assets could be
downloaded as a single container, and run offline easily
like flash could.
titanix2 - 29 minutes ago
Only Silverlight v1 was Javascript based. From version 2
upwards a small CLR implementation was the runtime. It
allowed .net languages (C# and F# mainly) to be run.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
Silverlight was not open source though and it was not
cross platform either. Having Silverlight/.Net and
Flash/Flex/Air open sourced and competing would have been
great, as a copmpany I would have made money from the
IDEs and tools, why you need to keep it proprietary and
then kill it.
tracker1 - 1 hours ago
Silverlight was available on Mac and Windows, and
Moonlight was available on Linux. Again, the plugin
itself didn't have to be open-sourced, the format was,
which is why Moonlight worked.
scj - 4 hours ago
Having Flash on iOS, even through the browser, would have
allowed people to develop apps for iOS without going
through Apple. It would also allow trivial Android
porting. Flash was not in Apple's strategic interests.It
was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid
off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.In
retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source
Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007
or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to
reject). This would have required starting the process in
2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in
2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open
web standards were a joke.The original iPhone was amazing
in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I
don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning
behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the
contemporary case to save it...The real question I have is:
Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce
HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do
they provide most of the same features? I ask because that
shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top
priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).
reboog711 - 3 hours ago
Yes, the Flash IDE Tool has exported HTML/JS/CSS or video
files for many years. It was renamed Adobe Animate CC
recently.Additionally, I'll add that we can use Adobe AIR
to build native apps for iOS or Android or Desktop
computers and that's been around for even longer.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
Adobe opened some parts like a compiler they were working
on and the Flex SDK but Flash was not opened, this was a
mistake, I mean they announced a few years ago that HTML
is the future so why not put a few people work on Flash
code, remove the parts they can't open and make it open
source, similar with Open JDK. It is weird they support
AIR but Flex was donated to Apache.
valuearb - 3 hours ago
Flash was also hell on battery life.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
I agree, but look at electron apps, the situation is not
better, Flash is similar to a game engine so it had a
"game loop" running at a certain FPS. I coded AIR apps,
and I know Flash was misused in websites but we have same
misuse now with JS where sites with text and images don't
work without JS, You had the option to turn off Flash but
can you afford to turn off JS> Adobe is at fault, they
should have open source it or make improvements/
Joeri - 4 hours ago
I worked extensively with flex, and I think you give it too
much credit. Typescript beats AS3, and modern complete
frameworks like angular or ember are just as good as flex.
petetnt - 2 hours ago
Same. My first programming job was doing Flex stuff (Adobe
Air desktop apps in an enterprisy way) and after that I did
tons of Edge Animate work (in an environment where things
needed to run in IE9 at best). I am glad those helped me to
kickstart my career, but modern JS libraries, frameworks and
paragdims are so much ahead what we had then I can only
wonder if I have truly forgotten something really
magnificient.
sireat - 3 hours ago
It almost feels like we have regressed.Making simple CRUD SPAs
using HTML5/CSS3/JS/whatever frameworks is way more complicated
than using AS3 to do the same thing.It all feels like a giant
kludge.What have we gained by going into using modern web stack
to make application like pages?Perhaps source is shared more
freely and code is more "open", but as the React licensing
ruckus shows that is not clear cut.We have certainly not gained
more consistency over AS3.There really wasn't anything wrong
with the idea of flash compiler doing the heavy lifting for app
like pages.
whatever_dude - 5 hours ago
Not sure I agree. If you use some of the good transpiling
languages that output JS, the syntax is far better than what
AS3 had. In TypeScript/Flow, for example, you get "real"
generics syntax while in AS3 you had the magic Vector<> stuff
and that's it. And on top of that you have union types, dynamic
interfaces, etc.And thanks to JavaScript VM performance,
running the same code is ahead of what the Flash VM could
do.AS3 was way ahead of its time when introduced, but browsers
have moved past it since it stopped evolving.Flex vs frameworks
is more of a matter of preference and contextual requirements
so I can't comment on that.
disease - 5 hours ago
Flex had some good ideas but many things made it a pretty bad
experience to work with: Adobe abandoning WYSIWYG editing in
Flash Builder, having two ways to do everything (XML and code)
made things more confusing than it had to be, and the official
components from Adobe generally weren't very good. I much
prefer building by own in React.AS3 was awesome for its time
but TypeScript has surpassed it in my opinion.After building up
components directly in the language with React there's no way I
could go back to using Flex.
tracker1 - 4 hours ago
I thought the message on Flash vs Flash Builder was a bit
confusing.. but it came down to Flash being more for
animation tasks, and Flash Builder more for building crud-
like apps. There was overlap, but both targeted differing
audiences.I did find some object model inconsistencies
annoying all the same, and some of the security implications
in the early 00's frankly scared me. Even though I worked
with it, I disabled it.React + JS is nice, but the animation
tooling in Flash itself was second to none. And still better
than many options. If I still made a lot of elearning
content, I'd be much more upset by the fall of flash.
thebouv - 5 hours ago
I soooooooo miss AS3/Flex. :(
omg_ketchup - 3 hours ago
I LOVE VueJS. But you're right- nowhere near as easy as Flex
Builder with AS3.I built an app with Flex Builder that got me
my first job. The application is still in heavy use every day,
and I've never even once had someone report that something went
wrong with it.
GuiA - 6 hours ago
Not uncommon for these kind of giant step backwards in the world
of computing.I was in a plane the other day sitting next to an
elderly gentleman who saw me using Apple products. He then
proceeded to tell me how he's been on mac since 1984, and
absolutely loved Apple products before, but now he's stuck on OS
X 10.6 because it's the last version that supports AppleWorks, a
tool he's been using for over 20 years. No currently supported
tool gives him the flexibility and power he had with Apple Works
- embedding multiple documents of different types (spreadsheet,
word processing, etc) within one another, not to mention the
thousands of AppleWorks documents he's accumulated over the
years. However, most websites and new products don't work on
10.6, so he has another modern computer just for browsing the
web. (George R R Martin similarly has an old computer sitting
around just to use his favorite 20 year old word processor of
choice)Flash is similar - I have animator friends who maintain an
old copy of Windows XP because they love Flash's interface and no
other tool comes close.The news yesterday about MSPaint
potentially going away (I think MS back pedaled on it?) falls in
the same category - powerful tools that pretty much can't be
improved upon that get randomly EoL'd.Another thing that happens
pretty often - tools randomly losing functionality in an update
because the developer felt that it should be removed for whatever
reason.Maybe there would be a niche for a minimal Linux distro
that comes with a set of powerful, minimalistic creation tools
(office documents, multimedia manipulation + viewing, etc -
whatever covers the computing needs of 90% of the population)
that gets updated with security updates etc but has 1) backwards
compatibility and 2) a user interface that mostly never changes
as primary goals.
justinsaccount - 5 hours ago
> MSPaint potentially going away (I think MS back pedaled on
it?) falls in the same category - powerful tools that pretty
much can't be improved uponMSPaint is a powerful tool? Do you
also consider notepad a powerful editor?
adl - 4 hours ago
Being ubiquitous is a kind of power (just like Javascript).
akoncius - 5 hours ago
main reason why products are discontinued usually is that it's
not worth for company to maintain old product if user base is
small or decreasing and product is not profitable anymore. Even
if company is not actively developing new features in that
software, still it requires maintenance - fixing bugs, updating
libraries to keep it working with new OSes and so on, and it
has a huge cost, assuming that there are big teams dedicated to
products.Also sometimes vision changes for whole company and
existing products does not fit that vision anymore and company
decides to kill it.Regarding "never changing" software idea: it
inherently is doomed because by default user base will be
shrinking - majority of people would move on newer (with better
features) software and only handful of users would continue
using old "not changing" software. It's jut not worth it, and
is too small niche.
ianai - 5 hours ago
You can chalk that up to a market failure. Those products you
mentioned all "won" the market and enjoyed monopolistic power.
Had the economy allowed for more variety then their EOLs
wouldn't be fragmenting.
zippergz - 5 hours ago
My experience is that the "whatever reason" to remove features
is that they're a pain to maintain (often in ways that aren't
obvious to the end user) and only a tiny number of people use
them. It sucks for the people who do use them (and believe me,
I have been in that position myself), but it also sucks to not
have new development happen because all of the resources are
being consumed maintaining something that 10 people care about.
felideon - 5 hours ago
> tools randomly losing functionality in an update because the
developer felt that it should be removed for whatever
reason.More likely a Product Manager, rather than a developer,
prioritizing certain "core" features in a rewrite/redesign to
align with the product/corporate strategy better.(Unless you
meant "developer" in the very generic sense, or an indie
developer.)
dalbasal - 6 hours ago
Failure is a bit strong, IMO. Flash played a role, and now it is
done.Meanwhile, it was (as you say) years ahead of standards and
the most ubiquitous non-standard standard on the web. In early
years it let web designers expirement. Most of those expirements
went badly, but many ulitmately preceded and shaped the web of
the "future."Animated interactive UIs, video, audio, rounded
corners.... These appeared as flash first and challenged html+ to
keep up (with the better parts).We've all been talking s--t about
flash for years. But ultimately it was in use because it was
useful and the web may have turned out worse without it.On tools,
this is inevitable. Tools don't last forever and professional
these days need to retool periodically. As flash exits left,
there is room for new entrants into the 'tools for ex-flash
designers' segment.
thousande - 1 hours ago
I guess it played a role in getting html5/css3/web-standards
features up to speedThe Adobe Flex thing had lot of css3
features early. Funny to see how 'easy' it is to release specs
and implementation when you are the sole owner of the tech
Someone - 1 hours ago
"rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first"I doubt it.
The Mac had rounded corners in may 1981 (https://www.folklore.o
rg/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...), and the OS had
windows with rounded corners when it shipped in 1984 (for an
example, look at the calculator in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History)
[deleted]
baby - 1 hours ago
> rounded cornersI don't see this as being a flash thing. You
could do that in paint, photoshop or fireworks or ...
yoz-y - 6 hours ago
I wonder how hard would it be to recreate the Flash (application)
for HTML5 webgl and JavaScript. I know that there are some
converters and so on but from I gather the creator was what made
flash easy to use. I see very few HTML5 games out there though.
Maybe one of the drivers is that flash games were a single file
that could be moved around easily?
whatever_dude - 6 hours ago
Much like Unity today, one of the drivers of Flash popularity
was that you could hack something together pretty quickly in a
single interface. Throw a bunch of elements onto the "stage",
add some scripting, and you're done.In reality, though, serious
applications or games seldom used the Flash IDE other than for
designing/managing assets and packaging them (and sometimes not
even for that). It was pretty bad in many ways for serious
work. I used to create fully animated Flash websites and my
work was 100% using FDT (an Eclipse plugin) and the external
compiler (Flex SDK). It was way more sustainable.Stripping the
Flash IDE itself (or whatever it's called today) down to the
animation essentials and allowing it to export in a number of
formats (SVG, GIF, etc) would be the best thing for the app.
Not sure it's the direction they're going, however.
MattRix - 4 hours ago
Animate CC (the new name for the Flash IDE) can do what
you're talking about these days(exporting multiple formats,
creating animation texture atlases, etc).
Joeri - 4 hours ago
I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely
avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a
particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage,
one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with
all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I
edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk
eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even
using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In
the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG
subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations)
was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse
pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing
abilities locked into a compromised platform.
omg_ketchup - 2 hours ago
Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components
were nice.
[deleted]
shmerl - 2 hours ago
No one stopped Adobe from open sourcing those tools, and making
them produce JavaScript / WebAssembly instead of Flash.
seanalltogether - 6 hours ago
Flash/Flex had amazing tooling. I still pop open Flash from time
to time to make animated gifs. For building custom interfaces,
Flex was way better then what iOS and Android currently provide.
maxxxxx - 3 hours ago
I haven't worked with Flex that much but from what I remember
their tooling was pretty nice. I think if they had rendered
HTML instead of flash applets they could have done something
better than whatever a lot of the modern JS frameworks are.
talmand - 4 hours ago
No, the animation tools live on in Adobe Animate. The
announcement concerns the Flash Player.
petre - 6 hours ago
> And there aren't even better tools to replace it.Haxe?
http://haxe.org/
pier25 - 5 hours ago
I think Haxe (the language) is awesome, but the toolkit as a
whole has too many moving pieces.I tried to do some stuff with
OpenFL back in 2014, and sometimes the problem was in the C++
backend, sometimes in OpenFL, sometimes in Lime...It sounds
nice on paper: write in Haxe and the magic will convert it to
any target, but when each piece of a build chain that sustains
the toolkit is maintained and developed independently
(sometimes by a single dev) you really don't have assurances
about long term support.
Nav_Panel - 6 hours ago
This seems to have very little to do with "tools for 2D
animations and games". For starters, it seems to be a "toolkit"
and the first example is a piece of code.In Flash, you can open
up the program and make an animation without knowing any code
whatsoever. I can guarantee a site like Newgrounds would never
have existed if all those teenage flash animators needed to
understand object-oriented programming paradigms first.
Drakim - 5 hours ago
Haxe is an awesome programming language, but that's not really
what he was talking about:> The tools for 2D animations and
games
threeseed - 6 hours ago
They should've open sourced it and invested heavily in security,
stability and performance.People blamed Apple back in the day for
not including it on iOS but given that how many critical bugs
have been found in the time since then you can't blame them.
problems - 5 hours ago
If they would have open sourced flash player I think we'd be in
a much different place today. Not like they'd lose any ground
on their actual profit center - the Flash animation tool and
development environment, which is still seriously something
fairly unique.Maybe they can still reach that state if they
invest serious effort in making their tool able to export
HTML5.
rocky1138 - 6 hours ago
They still have time. There's nothing stopping them from doing
this. It would certainly help archival efforts and benefit
people who do animations.
sushisource - 5 hours ago
Not much money in it, though.
toyg - 5 hours ago
A company like Adobe, constantly struggling with
accusations of greed and carelessness, should consider this
as a PR exercise and budget accordingly.My guess is that
they won't do it because there might be proprietary stuff
they don't own, in the codebase. Macromedia wasn't that
huge a company, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they
embedded 3rd party components here or there. At that point,
untangling legals might become very hard.
gameshot911 - 5 hours ago
Vs all the cash in EOLing it? Unless the idea is to push
people to buy a newer product?
tracker1 - 4 hours ago
I wish they'd just come up with Flash X (sub X for whatever),
where the tooling was flash in a flash interface, and geared
towards react in a flex-like (flashbuilder) interface. Where
the output was a directory with assets that could run
directly in a browser/iframe, and svg for vector assets.
mstade - 4 hours ago
Someone from Adobe once told me the main reason holding back
open sourcing the player was licensing. Apparently the player
consists of quite a bit of licensed technology that Adobe
obviously couldn't open up, and some of these are so core to
the player that refactoring it wouldn't really be feasible or
not really worth doing. Rewriting it to not use these
technologies or use them in such a way that they could be
plugged in with alternatives would be too expensive and for
little apparent business gain.I paraphrase of course and I
can't really vouch for the veracity of these claims, but I'm
hoping someone with first hand information might be able to
corroborate or deny. Sounds plausible to me.
k__ - 5 hours ago
End of an era...I did my first project, when I was 14, with Flash,
simple animated cartoon. Was super easy and fun.Today I read we
would have Iron Man style UI if Steve Jobs didn't shot down Flash
with the iPhone. The reasoning was, nothing we have today had such
easy 2D/3D animation features, yes WebGL can do everything Flash
can, but it's waaay more complicated.When I started programming, I
liked the idea of Flex, but somehow that never cached on. Later in
2011, when I finished my CS degree, I moved to JavaScript because
it was open and rapidly catching up.I liked the whole openness of
JavaScript much more and like I said, the Web platform can
theoretically do everything Flash can, but we need better tools. I
can do rather much, because I'm a developer, but when I look at me
18 years ago, I didn't know anything about programming and still
got things done with Flash.I also met a few people who build their
whole career on Flash. Some media degrees here were basically 80%
Flash content creation and I'm still working with people who got
into IT by doing Flash, they miss it pretty much...
[deleted]
yoodenvranx - 6 hours ago
Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and
games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which
can be used to preserve them?
ekianjo - 6 hours ago
there is gnash on Linux.
larsiusprime - 6 hours ago
There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved
with some of those discussions.Nothing perfect and turn key
exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically
there.It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're
going after.1) "Emulation" style:-- Open source flash player (a
la Shumway)2) "Automated Conversion" style:-- Load-time
conversion to a different format (ie, HTML5)-- Ahead-of-time
conversion to a different format3) Convert by hand-- Rewrite in
JS/HTML5-- Rewrite in Haxe using a library like OpenFL (Haxe
compiles to JS/HTML5, C++, also Flash)There's a lot of options
available, and a lot of useful primitives. Parsing and rendering
Flash (SWF) content is basically solved (OpenFL has made
particular strong strides in this area, Shumway is impressive
too).The really big missing piece is ActionScript execution.
There are in fact various open source ActionScript VM's out
there, and there are ways to parse ABC (Action Script Byte Code)
and convert it -- either ahead of time or at load-time -- to
something else, whether that's directly to JS, or something like
Haxe (which then compiles it to JS or C++ or whatever), but to my
knowledge nobody has a working solution that as of today combines
Rendering + ActionScript Execution +
RigorouslyTestedConvenientUX.But all the pieces are there. You
just need someone motivated enough and well funded enough to put
it all together. Hopefully this news spurs that fire.
colanderman - 6 hours ago
There's nothing stopping you from just running Flash itself?
even in a Windows XP VM if necessary.
drak0n1c - 4 hours ago
Some kind of conversion is needed to help hosts keep their
flash content alive - visitors will ignore what is not
accessible.
mbebenita - 2 hours ago
ActionScript3 (or AVM2) is fairly well documented and Shumway
did a fairly good job executing ABC files, I think we got to
like 99%+ compatibility on the reference tests. Getting
Rendering + Timeline + Library working correctly, ... that's
another story. You have to bug-for-bug compatible AND do
different things for different versions of SWF and AVM
versions. If anyone needs a decent emulation of AVM2 bytecode,
Shumway has a pretty good one in there.
fuball63 - 6 hours ago
I seem to recall there was a way to play .swf files without a
browser. It might be cool to see a standalone flash player,
maybe a little like the Electron framework.
tekromancr - 6 hours ago
Isn't that what Adobe Air was?
http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html
OscarTheGrinch - 5 hours ago
Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go
wrong?
rhapsodic - 2 hours ago
> Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could
go wrong?It would be like any other desktop application.
You're running code of which you presumably know and trust
the provenance. It's not like a malware Flash ad written by
someone who found a security hole in the Flash player, that
is loaded into a random web page by an unsuspecting user.
icebraining - 4 hours ago
Except on Chrome, Flash always ran outside the sandbox,
AFAIK.
jle17 - 5 hours ago
The flash player itself can be launched standalone. On Linux
Adobe provides a separate archive with a flashplayer executable
that launches it without a browser : https://fpdownload.macrome
dia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/2...I recall seeing it on
Windows too.
hansjorg - 6 hours ago
There are several open source player implementations, but they're
quite incomplete so far: * Lightspark
http://lightspark.github.io/ * Shumway
http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ * Gnash
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
evincarofautumn - 3 hours ago
I used to work at a company called Spaceport.io (now defunct)
where we had a nearly complete implementation. It included an
impressive GPU-accelerated renderer and an optimising compiler
from AS3 to JavaScript?we could run on mobile, desktop, and
even WebGL, and do neat things like update over WiFi instead of
USB during development.It was intended for Flash game
development, and worked pretty well for that purpose.
Unfortunately, we spent a lot of time dealing with large
customers who wanted to use it to port existing Flash games to
mobile, which was basically a neverending treadmill of having
to implement obscure features that they didn?t even know they
were relying on. :/Parts of it have been open-sourced, but I
wish the parent company would just release the whole thing.
Last I knew, there was one guy maintaining it for one customer
after the main engineers were acquihired.
n-gauge - 2 hours ago
I see one of the investors was the BBC - so that's where my
licence fee goes :)" neverending treadmill of having to
implement obscure features that they didn?t even know they
were relying on,"I been coding emulators for fun (i.e. NES,
Scratch) and it's been an interesting journey with all the
gotcha's involved - however I don't think I have the
motivation for any flash based ones, the only exception I've
worked on my scratch2apk emulator (javascript) which has
plenty of games going for it!
shmerl - 6 hours ago
There was a good attempt (Mozilla Shumway), but Mozilla for some
reason dropped it. I guess it was too resource draining, and
wasn't their core priority.
jasonkostempski - 6 hours ago
Aren't there standalone flash player desktop applications?
reboog711 - 3 hours ago
It's called Adobe AIR and can also deploy to iOS and Android
devices.
rb2k_ - 6 hours ago
From what I recall there were quite a few, most of them
discontinued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Wallaby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_SwiffyThere's also
https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wikiI guess most of them are
more or less dead :-/
rodorgas - 6 hours ago
How come? It will stop receiving updates, not end.
donpdonp - 6 hours ago
The GNU Project wrote a version of Flash. That might be helpful
in the preservation of flash animations.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
rocky1138 - 6 hours ago
> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash
Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate
any existing Flash content to these new open formats.Why not open
source it and make Flash the open format instead?
ivraatiems - 6 hours ago
That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of
what most everyone in web development (and possibly on the web,
period) wants.
[deleted]
cookiecaper - 5 hours ago
There are a lot of bad things about Flash, but it still has not
been adequately replaced. AFAIK there is nothing web-centric
that comes close to the developer experience it offered.Yes,
things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite
exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own
tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much
less efficient than a unified write-once, run-anywhere platform
with an integrated development environment for all aspects of
the content, which is what Flash offered.That meant that Flash
didn't really do any one thing exceptionally well, but it
provided a way to reason about the program as a cohesive whole,
and from a very visual perspective. I think that opened doors
for a lot of people and I think the simplicity made it a
productive platform.I am no Flash fanboy, but there is a reason
it was so popular, and we're ignoring that with the HTML 5
platform, which ultimately just leaves an opening for a new
Flash imitator (Unity is the leading candidate, though it
hasn't really broached web in a major way yet), which means we
will repeat this cycle over the next 20 years.
icebraining - 5 hours ago
I think what you're missing is that the Flash editor lives
on, Adobe is just killing the format
itself.http://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
cookiecaper - 54 minutes ago
No, I'm aware of that. Animate's HTML 5 export only exports
the animations (in a relatively simplistic manner), leaving
all of the logic and interactivity in the dust.That's a big
change. It downgrades Flash from an all-in-one development
solution to a single piece of the art pipeline. Users are
left to their own devices to try to figure out everything
else.
yellowapple - 5 hours ago
People mainly want Flash to die because it's a closed
standard/platform that can't be improved by third parties and
has lagged behind modern web standards as a result. Opening up
Flash would address that problem and make the idea of Flash on
a modern website significantly less horrid.
acdha - 4 hours ago
Flash's selling point was compatibility, which is why people
put up with the clunky APIs, performance, etc. If you changed
very much of that you end up with something which isn't Flash
and is on a steep mismatch in resources versus the huge
investment going into web technologies. I don't think there
are enough places with massive Flash codebases to support
anything like the work going on in the web space.
chrischen - 4 hours ago
Whatever flash is, it?s the opposite of ?lagged behind modern
web standards?. If anything that was the one thing it didn?t
do in its lifespan since it enabled apps that are only now
html5 achieving parity.It enabled a consistent cross platform
interpreter for javascript and xml based apps.
Eric_WVGG - 5 hours ago
I wonder if protecting Adobe Air isn't another reason.
tapsboy - 1 hours ago
Interesting, that it will still survive in browsers till 2020. Co-
incidentally, today at A+E Networks, we finally migrated all our
web properties to HTML5 video playback.
xupybd - 1 hours ago
Flash ads were terrible, a blight on the web. But Flex is so much
more structured than any JS framework I've used. It wasn't super
pretty but it did the job.RIP a major Flex project I support :(
humptechtips - 2 hours ago
Too bad. Mozzilla will not ask me to update flash player as it is
literally gone now. I must there are too much memories with flash
player as there was a time when you couldn't play a video on
youtube without it. #ripadobeflashplayer
sashk - 5 hours ago
Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews
/thoughts-on-flash/
bdcravens - 3 hours ago
Worth noting that Adobe stopped distributing Flash Player for
Android in 2012, and final update was in 2013.
make3 - 5 hours ago
I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are
the best imho. The last part about the apps make Apple look like
they only want to protect their financial interests in a sort of
sketchy monopolistic way.
Joeri - 2 hours ago
The security argument was convincing.The battery argument was
weak and I'm sure Jobs knew. Video was a significant chunk of
flash's use case, but not the only part, and flash was much
more battery efficient than HTML5 at all the other stuff it
did. Even today you can't do buttery smooth flash-style
animations in javascript without some major hacks (like using
webgl). Even simple effects like full-screen fade-in that flash
could handle on a pentium can't be done smoothly at all in CSS.
menacingly - 5 hours ago
It always made me feel like the open web is implicitly viewed
as competition as well, but it's just not as palatable to the
public to bash it
yellowapple - 5 hours ago
Yeah, that last justification is one with which I
wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good
thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it
wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and
instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words:
"screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively
targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".
melling - 4 hours ago
What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?
secstate - 4 hours ago
Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have
done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for
native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid.Then
there's always Unity ...
cjensen - 4 hours ago
I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it
attempts to look as much as possible like a native app
rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and feel" like
Google has been doing lately.But it still feels wrong on
the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't done" on
the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on
everything means that when MacOS alters or refines a UI
element that Qt apps will still be doing things the old
way.
melling - 4 hours ago
Tcl/Tk. Yeah, I worked with it for several years. It
was great to work with and highly underrated.Safe to say
I would never write a commercial consumer facing app with
that.
ant6n - 4 hours ago
Opengl
melling - 3 hours ago
That?s pretty low level and I don?t think most people
would consider that a toolkit.
omg_ketchup - 2 hours ago
Definitely Unity.
natecavanaugh - 4 hours ago
Is there an example of "cross-platform done right"? I have
yet to see a case where an app is able to both exploit the
depth of every devices capability and the breadth of multiple
hardware and software configurations, without becoming a
platform unto itself. I'm not saying cross-platform isn't
possible, but "done right" is a pretty vague target to hit.
melling - 4 hours ago
Here's Jobs commenting on this:https://youtu.be/EMXwa9EtehE
baalimago - 3 hours ago
I'm foreseeing someone finding a hole in flash security around 2022
forcing adobe to update it again anyway, sorta like
wannadecryptorbut rip all the flashgame websites (if there even is
any left)
kfk - 6 hours ago
I had my 10 seconds of panic today with this title as I misread
Flash into Flask. Anywy, now I that I know it's Flash I am
perfectly fine.
gumby - 6 hours ago
What a shame. Not installing flash used to be an excellent way of
blocking shitty websites and annoying ads.
amelius - 4 hours ago
This is exactly why we shouldn't rely on closed standards and
closed viewers: at some point they stop to exist, and there will be
content out there that we can't view any longer.
amyjess - 5 hours ago
As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm
worried what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old
Flash games and other stuff out there that has never been ported to
HTML5 and have been abandoned by their creators. A decade from now,
we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run
this old content.We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and
this is just going to make it worse.
andrioni - 5 hours ago
It's actually pretty weird that would stop distributing it,
especially since they still distribute a Shockwave Player, and
well, Shockwave has been completely dead for long time now.
amyjess - 5 hours ago
Even if they continue distributing it, newer operating systems
and browsers may not be able to run it.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu - 4 hours ago
Shockwave Player is still supported. The latest version was
released ~40 days ago[1][1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave
/release-note/release-notes...
pera - 5 hours ago
I don't know if Adobe is planning to open source Flash, but there
is GNU Gnash: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
nileshtrivedi - 5 hours ago
It's an expensive lesson to the society, not to rely on
proprietary software for content creation. If we are willing to
pay heed to it.Now let me go back to my open-source community
discussions in Slack. ;-)
criddell - 4 hours ago
> A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old
OS in a VM just to run this old content.What's wrong with that?
Because that path is open, I think Flash games have a much better
chance of preservation than most SAAS-projects being developed
today.
baby - 2 hours ago
This makes me sad.The internet used to be less "flat". Every
website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it.
Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every
time but I was amazed a lot back then.I learned a lot of
programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy
to get into.I did my fare share of animating, just because it was
so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao was just amazing to me
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y).I did my fair share
of games as well, there were so many of them and publishing a game
on internet had never been so easy. Orisinal is beautiful
(http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/).Now where do people find such
mini games? On mobile. The big mini-game market has shifted and we
now have to pay, we now have to download each game individually.I
understand Flash has had a bad track of security vulnerability, but
the internet used to be magical, it's the end of an era.As
methodover says it here:> The tools for 2D animations and games in
Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative
standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even
close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.
j79 - 1 hours ago
While I agree, a lot of what you said isn't limited to the lack
of Flash, but just trends in general. Websites could be more
interactive, animated (even with sound, if desired...but
please...no), and have some dimension. Unfortunately, everything
looks/feels like Bootstrap-themes, because they are.I personally
started off animating in Macromedia Director. I played around
with Lingo. I moved to Flash / Actionscript and loved the change.
In a similar fashion, I'm totally excited about the future of
Animation / Games (and how Canvas plays into that). There have
been some huge strides by vendors and developers to improve
animation and gaming on the web, and I suspect that will continue
before Flash is EoL.Flash being discontinued makes me sad, but
purely in a sentimental way - I'm very excited about what comes
next :)
deedubaya - 1 hours ago
> interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensionsInteraction,
animation, sound, and dimensions have their place in the web.
That place is in a small percentage of websites. Very small.
Flash was possibly a better tool for that small percentage of
websites (games and something else I guess?).I, for one, am glad
I can read a fucking blog article these days without it being
rendered through an animated page flip which makes the shrill
sound of paper tearing each time a page is "turned" with no way
to mute.Yes, flat text suits me just fine.
digi_owl - 7 minutes ago
Now if only there were not a war of streaming protocols going on...
amitt - 5 hours ago
End of an era.We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still
think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used.
Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for
new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main
binary and assets)0% chance we could have built the game using any
other client-side tech stack available at the time.
boubiyeah - 1 hours ago
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at
the time it was SO much better than the web platform.BUT, AS3 was
not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure
you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and
all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's),
the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type
"Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type
inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face
it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is today
so much better than AS3 ever was.
slackingoff2017 - 22 minutes ago
God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so
long.Just needed to say that.
chrisan - 2 minutes ago
> the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type
"Function", not the actual arg and return value typesYou can
type args and returns. One of the biggest things I relied on
when I coded AS3
vr46 - 1 hours ago
Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that
didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash
runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a
language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who
worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.
ZenoArrow - 49 minutes ago
> "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful
programming."Haxe is probably something you'll be interested
in:https://haxe.org/
omg_ketchup - 2 hours ago
Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of
college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action
elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I
have AS3 to thank for that.It's a shame it's going away. Glad the
pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.
jchw - 2 hours ago
I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and
make it into one WebAssembled language...Well okay. That's
insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it
would go.
zackbrown - 1 hours ago
Maybe not all that insane, but TypeScript is already
essentially what you're describing.
jchw - 1 hours ago
TypeScript is typechecked only at translation time, as is
reasonable for any language you would compile to JS. (I guess
Elm breaks this mold, but at some great costs.) A side-effect
is that you don't have any type information at runtime, for
example.
slackingoff2017 - 17 minutes ago
This isn't as bad as it sounds in practice. I'm usually
glad it eliminates reflection which I've rarely seen used
honorably... I do miss it occasionally.Some popular typed
languages, notably Java, do type erasure on objects as
well. Extending that to value types feels right in a
strange way, more consistent at least.One thing I'll
mention to make The a better experience... The compiler,
even on the strictest options, will still let you do a lot
of hacky old school JS crap. I HIGHLY recommend integrating
TSLint with almost all rules turned on and Microsoft's
contrib extension. It makes Typescript code almost
bulletproof.Use the Typescript language service and
experimental plugin for VSCode to show both Typescript
errors and TsLint errors live with intellisense. It's a
pain to set all this up at first but the experience is
slick.
wooter - 1 hours ago
Isnt JS/ES approaching this? + the native stuff
jchw - 1 hours ago
More or less yeah. But I worry it will take a pretty big
change in direction before we can get something as crazy as
types in the browser. To be fair, I would have never guessed
browsers would be able to implement the current standards to
the degree that they have.
jmcdiesel - 4 hours ago
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they
say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is
changing in the web media space..
kotojo - 2 hours ago
I played way to much farmville around 2009 running a schools
front desk! Thanks for that!Out of curiosity what is your
language of choice now days?
amitt - 21 minutes ago
Mobile games/vr/ar - Unity or UnrealWeb Backend -
Elixir/Phoenix (we used PHP for FV), Python in some casesWeb
Frontend / Native Mobile Apps - React & React NativeJS has
effectively caught up to what AS3 offered back then minus type
safety (which TypeScript offers).
lynxaegon - 1 hours ago
Yes back than even AS2 was good. But now you have a lot of great
tools available for HTML5 and Unity. You can build anything you
would have in Flash.I wouldn't say AS3 is the best programming
language, but that's just my point of view. I, for one, don't
have a favorite language because i think that each language has
it's pros and cons and each language excels in a certain area.
Bahamut - 6 hours ago
I wonder how long will browsers keep Flash around though? I doubt
sites like Homestar Runner will just convert everything to
HTML/CSS/JS.
bsmedberg - 6 hours ago
All of the browsers have published roadmap updates. Basically
Flash will be disabled by default in mid-2019:Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-r...
and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap
Google: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-
flash... and https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-
roadmap Microsoft (Edge+IE):
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...
eridius - 5 hours ago
That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.
duskwuff - 4 hours ago
The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there
is Opera, and they're only barely hanging on. The numbers
I've seen peg them at roughly 1% of desktop browsers, mostly
in Europe.*: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another
browser on the list.
eridius - 4 hours ago
How about Safari?
bzbarsky - 3 hours ago
What they said so far is https://webkit.org/blog/7839
/adobe-announces-flash-distribut...Of course that
describes what they are doing now, not their plans.
Which is not surprising, because Apple never says
anything about plans, as a matter of corporate policy...
duskwuff - 1 hours ago
Whoops, I totally didn't notice that was missing from the
list.That being said, while Apple hasn't explicitly said
they plan to remove Flash from desktop Safari, they've
implicitly signalled it -- they've already got features
in place which make it often only load on demand.
bdcravens - 4 hours ago
Given that Safari on iOS is what set the demise of Flash
into motion I don't think Apple will remain a staunch
supporter :-)
HHad3 - 4 hours ago
Safari never shipped with Flash to begin with, and Apple
has regularly published metadata updates, which
blacklisted old, insecure versions of flash that the user
might have had installed.
geofft - 6 hours ago
New episodes of Homestar Runner are already being distributed as
normal videos, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU
(which is incidentally about the death of Flash)
gpawl - 5 hours ago
Videos aren't interactive. Homestar Runner animations were
interactive.
mikejmoffitt - 4 hours ago
More importantly, flash videos weren't riddled with 4:2:2
color compression and fixed resolution.
msla - 6 hours ago
There seems to be more discussion
here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840
cbhl - 4 hours ago
Rather than blaming Adobe, I hope some of you will be inspired to
go out and build the next vector animation format/authoring tool
for the web.
Itzcoatl - 2 hours ago
The cross platform apps arguments can easily being applied to all
the {"React native", "Xamarin", etc} bullshit. IMHO.
jordache - 5 hours ago
I would wager flash can still be used to develop movie set UIs, and
other internalized use cases. However those can also be utilized
outside the realm of web browsers.It's benefit is a powerful full
featured scripting language, in conjunction with a canvas that is
easy to achieve pixel accuracy.
smaili - 4 hours ago
For fun, here's the famous letter from Jobs himself on Flash -
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
sqeaky - 6 hours ago
I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there
anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?
pzone - 1 hours ago
Artists and animators. Deviantart, Furaffinity.
lj3 - 6 hours ago
Not since they bailed on stage3d. That was the beginning of the
end.
Someone - 6 hours ago
I thought this was the beginning of the end:
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
omg_ketchup - 2 hours ago
Only because Adobe decided to lay down and die after someone
said something kinda mean and kinda true.They could have
fixed most of it. Instead they were like "Nah, fuck it"
syshum - 5 hours ago
Sadly yes...VMWare is one large one.I know of a very large
company that has been over the last couple of years moving from
Java to Flash, so it will be amusing to what their reaction will
be to this news.
Karunamon - 5 hours ago
Supposedly upgrading the vSphere web interface to HTML5 is on
the roadmap, but I'm not sure when. I'm just happy that they
give you an external console app now.
vsphereclientpm - 2 hours ago
We've been working on it publicly for over a year now. Have
you had a chance to try the new HTML5 based #vsphereclient?
6.5.0b: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/03/first-
vsphere-clien... or the Fling: https://labs.vmware.com/flings
/vsphere-html5-web-client
draw_down - 6 hours ago
It used to be bundled with Chrome somehow so if you really needed
it, you had it. Now I just don't use it. If something requires
Flash then well, too bad for me.
zerocrates - 6 hours ago
Still is bundled with Chrome.
draw_down - 6 hours ago
Oh I see, it's behind a "click-to-play" thing. For some
reason I thought it was gone.
orbitur - 5 hours ago
I can understand why, I feel like the Chrome team has
announced 3 or 4 times over the last 5 years that Flash was
going away, but the only change was that you had to click
to play it, and the other announcements seemed useless.
nerdponx - 6 hours ago
Turner Classic Movies streams in Flash. Not sure how long that
tech has been in use, I only started streaming it recently.
FRex - 4 hours ago
Yes, games.http://www.kongregate.com/top-rated-
games?sort=newestAlthough it's not clear from just a game being
in Flash if it's in Haxe and compiled to Flash or actually in AS,
but still. It's so convenient for games.
slashzeppelin - 4 hours ago
Hotstar's (India's netflix) video player runs on Flash.
bdcravens - 4 hours ago
I know that DI.fm's web player requires it - it's the only thing
I whitelist Flash for.(though from my impression they have a
pretty good dev team, so surely they're working on a replacement)
iRobbery - 6 hours ago
If there is one, that must be an offline developer that doesn't
communicate with other developers and missed adobes' own
notification adobe adobe flash
(https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-an...)
asavadatti - 6 hours ago
I remember the Nike website being all flash even as late as
2009-2010. I'm glad this abomination is finally done with
codedokode - 4 hours ago
Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox
45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful.And by the way videos in
Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on
Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not
perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats
supported on this platform.
TheKarateKid - 1 hours ago
Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility.
The time to move on was years ago.
BatFastard - 4 hours ago
Flash is not dead, only the browser plug in is going away. AIR is
still alive and well, for both desktop and Mobile