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Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

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Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#131

Post by andybak »

elorant wrote: post #125
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…

This was the main factor that had developers cheering for Flash's demise. 1000 terrible restaurant websites plus the fear that it might catch on and supplant HTML thus ceding ownership of the web to Adobe.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#132

Post by Marazan »

Flash, specifically Flex, won the battle and then promptly lost the war as other companies remade the internet in Flex's image.

Adobe's sudden and not at all inevitable betrayal of Flex devs was a huge shock and absolutely killed Adobe in the field of Rich Internet Apps which at that point they were dominating.

If they'd pivoted Flex to compile to Javascript then the world as we know it would be a very different place, one where we would have been happily producing web apps in MXML markup for the last decade rather than recently rediscovering it through the medium of React and JSX.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#133

Post by deniska »

tomelders wrote: post #128
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

> Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash?

> Google Maps

Here you go.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#134

Post by deniska »

freehunter wrote: post #30
StillBored wrote: post #12

The question is, do any of the existing web stacks come close to the beginner friendly aspects of the original flash? I don't think so.. I can imagine any of my musician friends installing $FRAMEWORK and building a web site full of their own animations, menu's, and music playback.. Flash for all its "evilness" still IMHO hasn't been matched.

Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?

QtCreator has a similar feeling too it, albeit using much more convoluted language.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#135

Post by lmm »

tomelders wrote: post #128
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

A whole cultural generation of comedy happened on Flash; some of the early Flash pieces are touchstones that are still referenced today. Heck, professional cartoons were done in it, and its stylistic touches became established enough that even people working in other tech stacks adopted them - you can date a lot of animation from that era by the thick-outline style that comes from Flash. Programmers didn't create amazing programs in flash, but animators created amazing animation.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#136

Post by dspillett »

tomelders wrote: post #128
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

> Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash?

http://www.zombo.com/

Less facetiously many web based games would not have been possible with other options available at the time. I can't think of as many significant tools that it was in part responsible for and it massively outstayed its welcome (a few years before Google maps and http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ I expect flash or java applets would have been needed to achieve the same effect both because of browser performance & compatibility issues at the time and the fact then JS was disabled in many environments too), but thre were some things it was still the least bad option for until a few years ago, video (thing youtube and similar) being the main one.

> clunky, ..., CPU hammering

Definitely, though there were some great programmers out there making efficient things in flash, it had the issue of making it easy to create a sub-optimal mess (some would say the tooling made it overly hasslesome to create something efficient, though I was never a flash programmer so I can't comment there myself).

> contentless

The same can be said of a great many things not involving flash; before, during and after flash's heyday!

> folly

One man's folly is another man's comic (or otherwise artistic) genius. There was a lot of dross, but flash allowed the creation of some great pieces in its time.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#137

Post by Marazan »

acdha wrote: post #97
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it I forgot about that. Does anyone have any info about this? I didn't pay much attention at the time, but in retrospect it seems like it was one of the main reasons everyone stopped using flash. Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? The excuse Steve made at the…

Beyond the security issues, Adobe was just terrible as a platform maintained. Flash was the largest source of crashes in every browser until they moved it to a separate process, there were endemic performance issues even in core features (e.g. video playback was significantly more CPU intensive, and general code was well behind native speed), and most of the toolchain was in a state of obvious neglect, from the libra…

At the point that Jobs wrote his lie filled "Thoughts on Flash" Flash Player was vastly more performant at HTML5y things like animations, video and music playing than doing it in the browser.

I'm not going to defend the quality of the flashplayer architecture and implementation (due to it's crapness) but it was perfectly fine performance wise - it was a 'resource hog' because of the terrible, terrible code that people wrote for punch the monkey flash apps.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#138

Post by mattmanser »

elorant wrote: post #125
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;)

I actually think it didn't hurt the web, it was a massive driver for change, Flash highlighted the lack of functionality in html/js and was part of the reason that forced html to finally get canvas, etc.

If you're completely honest with yourself, you'll realise that html/js are still years behind what you can do in Silverlight and Adobe Air.

Now it's mobile apps that are forcing the web to carry on evolving and highlight just how backward html/js is. In years time we'll have people saying that phone specific apps were terrible, but in reality, without something to show us the flaws of html/js are, it wouldn't move forward.

Personally I'm no fan of the mono-culture of the web, the idea that you can only use one language, either for markup or for programming, should be anathema to all of us and instead it is bizarrely celebrated. I'd far prefer to be using Python or Ruby or whatever than javascript and in reality I think it's probably costing the world billions or trillions in wasted effort as we schlep around with javascript.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#139

Post by chongli »

tomelders wrote: post #128
dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

The Binding of Isaac [0] was created in Flash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Binding_of_Isaac_(video_ga...

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#140

Post by brusch64 »

mattmanser wrote: post #138
elorant wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

Somewhen around 2005 many bands had Flash websites. And this is pretty much the last time I've seen full blown Flash websites.

The only thing I'm using Flash now any more is watching videos. Where I'm living it is sadly still the standard for some TV stations video websites.

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