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

blogs.adobe.com

361–370 of 508 posts

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

#361
post #300

This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao…

The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it.

You have just described what I profoundly loathed about practically every restaurant website in the early 2000s.

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

#362
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 option…

On that note I wish tslint would stop trying to do code formatting rules. prettier nowadays does code formatting far better than tslint ever did.

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

#363
post #300

This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao…

We came here to bury Flash, not to praise it.

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

#364
post #86
post #2

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

Sadly yes... VMWare is one large one. I know of a very large company that has been over the last couple of years moving from Java to Flash, so it will be amusing to what their reaction will be to this news.

Now that we're down to the last few sites running flash it really drives home what an annoyance they are. I don't run flash on my main browser (I work in security), so I have to keep Chrome handy to log into VMWare, and because even the login page is Flash there's little password manager support.

Then once I'm logged in the non-native styling and controls really drive me up the wall.

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

#365
post #298
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 wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.

That's basically Haxe, if/when it adds a WebAssembly target. It already supports regular JS.

www.haxe.org

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Who's the parent company? I know some stakeholders who would be very interested in hearing about this.

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

#367
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to?

That would be Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions The saga behind media conglomerates, tech firms, pornography distributors and the W3C is pretty unpleasant, and (suffice to say) it has brought us to where we are today. As fast in-browser decryption hits broader swaths of the world's internet users, we should expect to see more and more sections of the web walled…

EME is not even close to flash. not being able to steal netflix video is not the same as entire websites being written in flash

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Who's the parent company? I know some stakeholders who would be very interested in hearing about this.

YouWeb, an incubator. It was shut down in ~2013, but I think still exists to own the IP of the startups. The person to contact would probably be the owner, Peter Relan; I dunno what he’s doing these days.

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

#369
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..

The web has become less interactive, and less animated. It's all about static pages now (literally, not as .html)

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

#370
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.

AS3 was like learning Java, but with the lifecycle gotchas of JavaScript. Ten years ago it offered everything that JS did, except it required static compilation. The development speed of JS+CSS was vastly better than with pure AS.

I'll slightly mourne the passing of Flash.

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