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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”

#111

Post by tete »

dalbasal wrote: post #80

What an epic case study. 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)..

Yes and no. I agree that standards make things easier, but standards probably make it harder or at least not easier to really come to an EOL for dated technology.

See how browsers still have to support non CSS styling and similar.

What I meant with standards making it harder to EOL technologies is that a standard leads to more implementations, which is a good thing, but certainly not for EOLing a technology.

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

#112

Post by justinsaccount »

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…

> 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

MSPaint is a powerful tool? Do you also consider notepad a powerful editor?

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

#113

Post by andrioni »

amyjess wrote: post #102

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…

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.

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

#114

Post by pier25 »

petre wrote: post #26
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…

> And there aren't even better tools to replace it. Haxe? http://haxe.org/

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.

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by make3 »

sashk wrote: post #100

Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

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.

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

#117

Post by pera »

amyjess wrote: post #102

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…

I don't know if Adobe is planning to open source Flash, but there is GNU Gnash: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

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

#118

Post by jle17 »

dave5104 wrote: post #76

Anyone know of any command line tools available out there that can convert Flash assets to PNG assets? I have a large number of Flash assets that I will eventually need to (finally) convert over. Hoping there are some easy tools out there available.

swfextract from the swftools package should be able to do it.

`swfextract file.swf` should list resources in it, then `swfextract -p 12 file.swf` will get the PNG with id 12.

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

#119

Post by zippergz »

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…

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.
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