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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”

#211

Post by egypturnash »

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…

So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to scratch the itch to make something move.

The SWF format, and the plugin that plays it, is going away.

The program that started life as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, is not going away. It got rebranded as Adobe Animate last year.

Animators working on stuff for Youtube or TV probably haven't touched a .SWF in years. You export a .MOV and post that to Youtube. Or you drop it in a video editor along with the .MOVs of all your other scenes for this project. The Los Angeles TV animation industry still uses Flash for some projects; check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... sometime, you'll probably recognize a few shows you or your friends love.

If you're using it to make interactive content? You can export to HTML5 now. And to WebGL and WebAssembly. I haven't ever done that myself, I dunno how much hassle it is to convert an old Actionscript/.SWF project to those platforms. I would assume that the 'Animate' rebranding coincided with Adobe feeling that the HTML5 capabilities for interaction were on par with .SWF's; they've been working on that ever since Jobs refused to let the Flash plugin onto iThings.

.SWF is dead, and good riddance. Its plugin was a CPU-hogging binary blob that needed regular updates. It was amazing back in 2000 when it was all we had; it's a lot less amazing now.

The program that compiled a bunch of art and code into .SWF files will live on. The penultimate sentence of Adobe's press release? "...we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC...". The tool ain't going nowhere. The tool's just distancing itself from its now-much-loathed first export format.

But I would bet money that Animate's file format - the .PSD to its Photoshop - is gonna continue to be called .FLA for the next ten years.

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

#212

Post by laumars »

ovulator wrote: post #92
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…

It was also a scapegoat as a conduit for obnoxious ads. Nothing about the technology made ads worse, the technology was easy to use so people used it. Ads are as shitty as ever in HTML5.

You need to remember that at the time HTML5 wasn't around so if a developer wanted something more "multimedia" then it meant resorting to Flash. This meant that Flash ads had a lot of annoying traits like audio effect which you wouldn't get with HTML+JPEG/GIF ads.

Plus even back then Flash had a tendency to grind modest hardware to a halt (particularly if you were running OS X or Linux).

So Flash definitely made ads worse. However whether you want to blame Flash or the developers for that is really just a philisophical question. But suffice to say the most annoying adverts around that time wouldn't have been possible without Flash.

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

#213

Post by acdha »

yellowapple wrote: post #136
ivraatiems wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People mainly want Flash to die because it's a closed standard/platform that can't be improved by third parties and has lagged behind modern web standards as a result. Opening up Flash would address that problem and make the idea of Flash on a modern website significantly less horrid.

Flash's selling point was compatibility, which is why people put up with the clunky APIs, performance, etc. If you changed very much of that you end up with something which isn't Flash and is on a steep mismatch in resources versus the huge investment going into web technologies. I don't think there are enough places with massive Flash codebases to support anything like the work going on in the web space.

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

#214

Post by bdcravens »

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?

Given that Safari on iOS is what set the demise of Flash into motion I don't think Apple will remain a staunch supporter :-)

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

#215

Post by KindOne »

WalterBright wrote: post #133

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

MS Paint is still going to be around.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa...

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225

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

#216

Post by melling »

secstate wrote: post #198
melling wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Tcl/Tk. Yeah, I worked with it for several years. It was great to work with and highly underrated.

Safe to say I would never write a commercial consumer facing app with that.

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

#217

Post by KindOne »

macspoofing wrote: post #200
WalterBright wrote: post #133

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

I don't know about MS-Paint, but there are a number of licensing issues with simply open sourcing Flash.

MS Paint is still going to be around.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa...

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225

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

#220

Post by bdcravens »

sqeaky wrote: post #2

I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?

I know that DI.fm's web player requires it - it's the only thing I whitelist Flash for.

(though from my impression they have a pretty good dev team, so surely they're working on a replacement)

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