>Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for Flash “in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.” What did they mean by this line?
China.
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
151–160 of 508 posts
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#152The 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.…
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.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#153I wonder how long will browsers keep Flash around though? I doubt sites like Homestar Runner will just convert everything to HTML/CSS/JS.
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)
Videos aren't interactive. Homestar Runner animations were interactive.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is why they should open source it if they aren't planning to do anything with it.
They are doing something with it, they renamed it to Animate and made it export to HTML5. They're just killing the format.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#155As 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…
> 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.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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".
What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#157Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Here's Jobs commenting on this:
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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…
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).
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#159I 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…
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?
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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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".
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.