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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”

#261

Post by evincarofautumn »

hansjorg wrote: post #36
yoodenvranx wrote: post #14

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

There are several open source player implementations, but they're quite incomplete so far: * Lightspark http://lightspark.github.io/ * Shumway http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ * Gnash https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

I used to work at a company called Spaceport.io (now defunct) where we had a nearly complete implementation. It included an impressive GPU-accelerated renderer and an optimising compiler from AS3 to JavaScript—we could run on mobile, desktop, and even WebGL, and do neat things like update over WiFi instead of USB during development.

It was intended for Flash game development, and worked pretty well for that purpose. Unfortunately, we spent a lot of time dealing with large customers who wanted to use it to port existing Flash games to mobile, which was basically a neverending treadmill of having to implement obscure features that they didn’t even know they were relying on. :/

Parts of it have been open-sourced, but I wish the parent company would just release the whole thing. Last I knew, there was one guy maintaining it for one customer after the main engineers were acquihired.

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

#262

Post by GirlsCanCode »

jakobegger wrote: post #176
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.

Yes. Flash was unusably slow on MacOS. Stuff that ran smooth on Windows would stutter and lag on the Mac.

Maybe, just maybe, that's because Windows is a better OS.

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

#263

Post by valuearb »

scj wrote: post #191
simion314 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 viabl…

Flash was also hell on battery life.

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

#264

Post by omg_ketchup »

simion314 wrote: post #62
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 AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

I LOVE VueJS. But you're right- nowhere near as easy as Flex Builder with AS3.

I built an app with Flex Builder that got me my first job. The application is still in heavy use every day, and I've never even once had someone report that something went wrong with it.

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

#265

Post by nardi »

kbenson wrote: post #221
mattnewton wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the operating system itself crashed

That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I find it hard to believe that it would have been accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me that means the likely explanations are that either it actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame to an application, which I think is pos…

As is common, Apple uses the term “panic” to describe the OS itself failing. “Crash” is reserved for applications.

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

#266

Post by Joeri »

make3 wrote: post #116
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.

The security argument was convincing.

The battery argument was weak and I'm sure Jobs knew. Video was a significant chunk of flash's use case, but not the only part, and flash was much more battery efficient than HTML5 at all the other stuff it did. Even today you can't do buttery smooth flash-style animations in javascript without some major hacks (like using webgl). Even simple effects like full-screen fade-in that flash could handle on a pentium can't be done smoothly at all in CSS.

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

#267

Post by mbebenita »

ravendug wrote: post #171
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o) Looks like it's possible: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/inspector/inspecto...

Not really. Looks like it has been abandoned (no commits in over a year) and last I checked it was by no means a capable replacement yet. http://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/9473-mozilla-k...

With some work, it can be revived and used to port old content to the web. One of the difficulties with Shumway was being but-for-bug compatible with the Flash player, which turned out to be nearly impossible... If the developer is in the loop, the task is a lot easier.

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

#268

Post by prodikl »

egypturnash wrote: post #211
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…

yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed

that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourced it and I hope it still gets developed.

i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR

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

#269

Post by zackbrown »

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…

> The tools ... in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint.

Very much this. The next-closest tech, HTML5, offers the same multimedia capabilities and runtime ubiquity as Flash— but no native tooling for designers/animators.

Instead, every design and interaction must be funneled from design tool through code, handed off from designer-brain to engineer-brain, across each and every iteration. Productivity and creative expression are a couple of the casualties of this "hand-off" workflow.

> There isn't a product on the market that comes even close.

Have you seen Haiku? https://haiku.ai (I'm on the Haiku team.) We're young but we've got some funding, a functional product, and some big-brand early users. We're going squarely after "modern Flash without the plugin," integrated deeply with modern design/dev tools & workflows.

It's a hard problem we're tackling, and we've still got some work ahead of us—but each of us on the team believes so strongly in the need for a solution (as you outlined here) that we're doing something about it.

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

#270

Post by omg_ketchup »

Joeri wrote: post #195
whatever_dude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Flex was a little bloated, sure, but the Spark components were nice.
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