Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.adobe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 508 posts

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

#281

Post by rhapsodic »

Marazan wrote: post #256

Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

> Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by).

Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an active developer community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and appear to work on Flex full-time.

Unfortunately, it seems the developer community is focusing most of their efforts on FlexJS, an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I don't see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework space.

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

#282

Post by kotojo »

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.

I played way to much farmville around 2009 running a schools front desk! Thanks for that!

Out of curiosity what is your language of choice now days?

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

#283

Post by liquidise »

Marazan wrote: post #256

Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

The Flex concept of variables being "observable" was about 8 years ahead of Backbone and later Angular, and now React-style UI updates from an event loop.

It was surreal working in the Cairngorm Flex framework briefly in 2000s and then see Backbone and Angular pitched as groundbreaking years later. Only now are we getting to a similar level of elegance with loop-style UI updates.

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

#284

Post by 5trokerac3 »

Marazan wrote: post #256

Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

Still haven't had a better development experience than Flex with the CLI compiler.

Built some of the first web based AR engines with it and alchemy. Built giant, 80"+ touchscreen, trade show interactives with it that nobody had a clue were Flash unless you told them. Was able to port just about anything to iPad with Air for Mobile and actually build IPA files on Linux.

All they needed to do was cross compile to HTML5 and barely anyone would be using Angular or Bootstrap nowadays.

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

#286

Post by favorited »

dandare wrote: post #285

> Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. Cringe! Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with Macromedia that invented them 10 year earlier.

But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included Macromedia after the acquisition?

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

#287

Post by mulmen »

favorited wrote: post #286
dandare wrote: post #285

> Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave. Cringe! Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with Macromedia that invented them 10 year earlier.

But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included Macromedia after the acquisition?

That's disingenuous. Adobe didn't invent Flash, they bought the company that did. Adobe's strategy is based on them having resources to acquire, not create.

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

#288

Post by Endy »

mrpippy wrote: post #142
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.

Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a 32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like nspluginwrapper. I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe…

I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux, etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be seen as a blessing.

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

#289

Post by dandare »

Kenji wrote: post #38

Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement . Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything re…

Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to AS3.

I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.

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

#290

Post by omg_ketchup »

tambourine_man wrote: post #226
oblib wrote: post #181

The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand why they care, but I don't. I decided not to invest in it back when Macromedia bought it because I knew it would be expensive and subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash" was great and had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's planned obsolescence and I…

>The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. And the ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few of my clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in the early 2000s. Every year I try to convince them that they need to switch, but they can't justify the cost.

Nobody "learned" Flash. You opened it up and you already knew what to do.

That's the real value it provided.

Post reply on HN