What about Flash proper? I imagine sunsetting that would be devastating for the animation industry.
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
381–390 of 508 posts
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#382RIP Steve Jobs
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go wrong?
Except on Chrome, Flash always ran outside the sandbox, AFAIK.
'Ran outside the sandbox on everything other than Chrome', or 'on Chrome, Flash ran outside the sandbox'? Your comment seems a little ambiguous to me.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should've open sourced it and invested heavily in security, stability and performance. People blamed Apple back in the day for not including it on iOS but given that how many critical bugs have been found in the time since then you can't blame them.
Someone from Adobe once told me the main reason holding back open sourcing the player was licensing. Apparently the player consists of quite a bit of licensed technology that Adobe obviously couldn't open up, and some of these are so core to the player that refactoring it wouldn't really be feasible or not really worth doing. Rewriting it to not use these technologies or use them in such a way that they could be plug…
I worked at Adobe in those days and AFAIK this is correct. The Flash player includes a bunch of codecs (mp3, on2, nellymoser, sparc, and I think others), and I believe there's a variety of other licensed code but I don't remember the details.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#385End 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.
Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.
> "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming."
You still have Adobe AIR to target desktop and mobile GUI apps.
And you have a also the open source project Redtamarin
https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
for shell scripts, command-line tools, server-side, etc. in 32bit/64bit for Windows, macOS and Linux
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#386Earlier 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.
Check out flow-runtime [0] [1]. I've only poked around with it, but it seemed solid.
It supports pragmas so you can turn off assertions in production everywhere except in critical files.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#387Is 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 a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML…
I have seen experiment who took the code base of Redtamarin (based on AVM2 sources)
https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
and added native implementations to render UI with OpenGL API, QT API, etc.
Now, even if it is technically feasible it is not like providing a plugin for the browsers, so that would be mainly to target desktop GUI apps which Adobe AIR is already doing very well.
As for converting the whole Flash API to HTML5/JS, some parts could be done but many parts would be missing or would be impossible to port because the Browser API can not support some of those, TCP/UDP sockets for example (possible with chrome non-standard API but then does not work everywhere).
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework
Amen. AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available in JS. I wrote this a couple of months back: https://medium.com/@Pier/ecmascript-4-was-too-ahead-of-its-t...
Don't forget E4X, it's here in AS3 as a first class citizen, while every single browser vendors either did not bother to implement it (google) or deprecated it after some times (mozilla).
It was quite nice to use client-side in Flash and AIR for such things as SOAP etc. but it is also quite powerful when used server-side for web scrapping and HTML templating.
I see that every day with Redtamarin
https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
it does only AS3 on the command-line, there is no GUI rendering of any kind, and yet the programming language that is AS3 shine.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#389Earlier 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…
You have Flash on iOS with Adobe AIR which take your AS3/SWF and cross-compile them to a native iOS binary (ipa).
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#390Funny how they spruik their Creative Cloud applications in a message about EOL Flash. I'm guessing their marketing managers signed off on the message... "End with a positive note about how awesome we are, and how everyone can subscribe to our products and give us money on a regular basis no matter how infrequently they use the product."
Adobe are so... creepy. I won't miss the pre-ticked "you want McAfee fries with that" box when updating Flash. I wonder how many people didn't see the checkbox and ended up installing McAfee unintentionally.
I still use a browser extension to force Flash player on Youtube simply because it performs better than the HTML player, and provides more flexibility.