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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”

#451

Post by intoverflow2 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #65
djsumdog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

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.

Adobe always used to blame OS X for being literally half the performance of the Windows version claiming it wasn't their fault (Mac team was a fraction of the size I heard).

Then Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash" and magically a month or so later the Mac version ran a ton better and continued to get better for about a year.

Have little sympathy for such a reactionary approach to user experience when the majority of Flash authoring occurred in ad agencies running Macs.

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

#452

Post by intoverflow2 »

kakwa_ wrote: post #183
mrpippy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

>I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code.

We can hope but there were big-ish campaigns to get them to open source Freehand and then Fireworks and they just don't care and would rather you keep their monthly CC cheques flowing.

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

#453

Post by NoGravitas »

marcins wrote: post #418
cjensen wrote: post #208

I feel so bad for the Scratch language, which converted to Flash at exactly the wrong time.

Scratch is in the process of a HTML5 rewrite with the help of Google, which makes sense given that it's the key component of their CS First program. https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0 Sounds like it should be ready by 2020!

Honestly, I need it now. I tried to pull up Scratch for my child, and the "create" link went to a blank page without even an error message. Given that no browsers on my platform still support NSAPI plugins, there is literally no way for my child to use Scratch, and they are the perfect age for it.

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

#454

Post by prima-facie »

That's quite a commitment for a company, to maintain a piece of software for 25-ish years.

I have fond memories of using Macromedia Flash 4 and 5 many years ago to create animations and simple scripted pages. I loved how well integrated everything was. But I still believe that things are better as they are today: we have more choices in frameworks, better standards, and some great web services which work well on both mobile and desktop.

That being said today I uninstalled the Flash plugin preemptively on my machines just because I am not needing it for any website I commonly use.

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

#455

Post by reboog711 »

thebouv wrote: post #311
reboog711 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can turn Flex and Adobe AIR code into iOS / Android app...

Really? Once Flex went to Apache and FlexDeveloper was killed, I just stopped paying attention.

Yes, really. Adobe AIR has had supported for iOS and Android, practically since the beginning.

There was a big stink around Jobs "Letters from Flash" and all AIR applications were put on indefinite hold in the app store review queue with no explanation. Adobe stopped development of their iOS stuff. Then after a few months all the apps were approved, Adobe resumed development, and no one had a problem since.

What is FlexDeveloper? Do you mean Flex Builder [now Flash Builder]? It wasn't really killed, just abandoned, if there is a difference.

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

#456

Post by eadmund »

I miss Flash; it was nice to be able to browse the web normally, with Flash disabled, and then to enable it only for a single function on a single page. It was relatively rare, and it didn't destroy the web.

With JavaScript, I basically have to enable it everywhere, as the web has been destroyed and I must now grant practically every site execute permissions on my computer in order to read content.

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

#457

Post by tuarua »

prodikl wrote: post #268
egypturnash wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sourc…

AIR support remains and there are always features being added. AIR as a cross platform platform for Win/Mac/iOS/Android is still alive and has quarterly releases. Any missing functionality can be added via extensions written in native code. I've open sourced a few for desktop including a webview. It uses Chromium Embedded Framework (via C#) on Windows and WKWeview on OSX (via Swift) https://github.com/tuarua/WebViewANE/

Others include FFmpeg, libtorrent,toast ports as well as porting of the C extension interface to C# and Swift.

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

#458

Post by timwaagh »

WalterBright wrote: post #133

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

you could make a case for ms paint. its a simple program and ms could gain some easy points by doing this. but flash is a very useful thing. to open source it is to create a free competitor that will hurt your chances when you could release something similar. which adobe is likely to do.

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

#460

Post by flohofwoe »

thekevan wrote: post #459

I wonder what will happen to large Flash games sites like Kongregate.

Here's a recent Kongregate blog post about the topic. HTML5 game uploads have been growing steadily, and there are now more new HTML5 games uploaded than Flash games:

http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/

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