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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”

#191

Post by scj »

simion314 wrote: post #105
pier25 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having Flash on iOS, even through the browser, would have allowed people to develop apps for iOS without going through Apple. It would also allow trivial Android porting. Flash was not in Apple's strategic interests.

It was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.

In retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007 or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to reject). This would have required starting the process in 2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in 2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open web standards were a joke.

The original iPhone was amazing in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the contemporary case to save it...

The real question I have is: Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do they provide most of the same features? I ask because that shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).

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

#192

Post by HHad3 »

eridius wrote: post #175
duskwuff wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there is Opera, and they're only barely hanging on. The numbers I've seen peg them at roughly 1% of desktop browsers, mostly in Europe. *: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another browser on the list.

How about Safari?

Safari never shipped with Flash to begin with, and Apple has regularly published metadata updates, which blacklisted old, insecure versions of flash that the user might have had installed.

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

#193

Post by curun1r »

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.

It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded Bitcoin Miner or other such code to make use of our spare CPU cycles.

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

#194

Post by cestith »

Flash Player is not Flash. Flash was the name of the media creation software. Flash Player is not end-of-life because it sucks (which it does) but because in the days of HTML 5, CSS 3, ECMAScript 6/7, Canvas, WebGL, etc a plugin to show that sort of media is redundant to the browser.

The creation tool lives on, although rebranded.

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

#195

Post by Joeri »

whatever_dude wrote: post #46
yoz-y wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

I wrote a CAD viewer app on flash 7.2 / 8 and definitely avoided the flash IDE as much as possible since it wasn't a particularly good IDE. I had just two frames on the stage, one for a loading message, one for the app ui container, with all behavior and ui creation in actionscript files, which I edited with an external editor. I moved up to the flex sdk eventually, completely abandoning the flash ide and not even using the flex ui framework (since it was too bloated). In the end though, the entire CAD viewer (essentially an SVG subset parsing and rendering engine with some ui decorations) was a 91 kb .swf, including the assets (like custom mouse pointers). That was the mixed blessing of flash: amazing abilities locked into a compromised platform.

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

#196

Post by jmcdiesel »

amitt wrote: post #107

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.

It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..

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

#198

Post by secstate »

melling wrote: post #156
yellowapple wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid.

Then there's always Unity ...

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

#199

Post by kbenson »

mattnewton wrote: post #104
wlesieutre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. "

That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit).

All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping crap software from crashing your computer is one of the things the OS does.

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