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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”

#341

Post by amitt »

kotojo wrote: post #282
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?

Mobile games/vr/ar - Unity or Unreal

Web Backend - Elixir/Phoenix (we used PHP for FV), Python in some cases

Web Frontend / Native Mobile Apps - React & React Native

JS has effectively caught up to what AS3 offered back then minus type safety (which TypeScript offers).

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

#342

Post by yuhong »

gmmeyer wrote: post #331
kakwa_ wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not agree more. The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages. Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12 This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC). I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash sou…

Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the... Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight . It worked gr…

They still have it today (it was never truly "discontinued").

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

#343

Post by slackingoff2017 »

jchw wrote: post #325
zackbrown wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not all that insane, but TypeScript is already essentially what you're describing.

TypeScript is typechecked only at translation time, as is reasonable for any language you would compile to JS. (I guess Elm breaks this mold, but at some great costs.) A side-effect is that you don't have any type information at runtime, for example.

This isn't as bad as it sounds in practice. I'm usually glad it eliminates reflection which I've rarely seen used honorably... I do miss it occasionally.

Some popular typed languages, notably Java, do type erasure on objects as well. Extending that to value types feels right in a strange way, more consistent at least.

One thing I'll mention to make The a better experience... The compiler, even on the strictest options, will still let you do a lot of hacky old school JS crap. I HIGHLY recommend integrating TSLint with almost all rules turned on and Microsoft's contrib extension. It makes Typescript code almost bulletproof.

Use the Typescript language service and experimental plugin for VSCode to show both Typescript errors and TsLint errors live with intellisense. It's a pain to set all this up at first but the experience is slick.

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

Someone wrote: post #306
dalbasal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failure is a bit strong, IMO. Flash played a role, and now it is done. Meanwhile, it was (as you say) years ahead of standards and the most ubiquitous non-standard standard on the web. In early years it let web designers expirement. Most of those expirements went badly, but many ulitmately preceded and shaped the web of the "future." Animated interactive UIs, video, audio, rounded corners.... These appeared as flash…

"rounded corners.... These appeared as flash first" I doubt it. The Mac had rounded corners in may 1981 ( https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_... ), and the OS had windows with rounded corners when it shipped in 1984 (for an example, look at the calculator in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_(Mac_OS)#History )

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by kbenson »

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…

> That's definitely not what that phrasing means

To clarify, because I think people may be misinterpreting what I meant by that. I wasn't implying a definitive intent to the statement, but stating that the suggested interpretation is not what that statement means in English, as the the subject is a "Mac", which could logically be construed as the OS, the hardware, or both, but not an application running on a Mac. So either it means something other than the suggestions put forth (that he's referring to application crashes), or it's a misstatement, on purpose or not.

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

#347

Post by chrisan »

boubiyeah wrote: post #323
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.

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…

> the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types

You can type args and returns. One of the biggest things I relied on when I coded AS3

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

#348

Post by BenjiWiebe »

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?

wxWidgets

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

#349

Post by nojvek »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #339
boubiyeah wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…

God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.

When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better.

Now it can die happily.

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

#350

Post by oblib »

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.

I've seen some beautiful work done in Flash but the costs were always very high for both producers and their clients.
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