71–80 of 508 posts
I disabled flash on my browsers in 2014, and I have had to manually reenable it exactly twice in the last three years to get content I needed. Both times were for restaurant menus, of all things. I have fond memories of newgrounds and the real early explosion of browser games, but I'm not going to miss the lag, memory overhead, and security hell one iota.
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 g…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of games, but that's about it.
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 ha…
> 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.
Hopefully in their quieter moments they'll be reflecting on the wisdom of building on top of closed-source systems.
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.
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.
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.
How hard it is to EOL anything. How non-standard standards can play a giant role. How important deign/dev tools can be. How hard it is to get designers to accept limits (there were all flash websites just for minor design capabilities)..