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“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#101

Post by ivm »

cpeterso wrote: post #54
methodover wrote: post #12

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…

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.

And the size was great – we were keeping many games with art, animations, music, and effects under 1.5 megabytes.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#102

Post by amyjess »

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.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#103

Post by gothroach »

empath75 wrote: post #95
gothroach wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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?

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.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#104

Post by mattnewton »

wlesieutre wrote: post #65
djsumdog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yup

https://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. "

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#105

Post by simion314 »

pier25 wrote: post #84
simion314 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

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...

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

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#106

Post by amyjess »

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.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#107

Post by amitt »

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.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#108

Post by felideon »

GuiA wrote: post #63
methodover wrote: post #12

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…

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 c…

> 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.)

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#109

Post by Eric_WVGG »

ivraatiems wrote: post #67
rocky1138 wrote: post #64

> 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?

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.

I wonder if protecting Adobe Air isn't another reason.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#110

Post by TremendousJudge »

gumby wrote: post #90
seanalltogether wrote: post #8

> 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.

> 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.

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
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