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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”

#471

Post by abiox »

evmar wrote: post #399
penpapersw wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried TypeScript yesterday and while I really love the language, the tooling was wayyyy too complicated and confusing. All I wanted was to make a dead simple hello-world node app that let me write it in VS Code, and recompile the TS to JS every time I saved. Suddenly I had to learn about tsconfig.json, had to install nodemon and have a process running in the background that I'm sure to forget to kill later, and I h…

1) tsc --init # creates a tsconfig.json, no need to edit it 2) tsc --watch # rebuilds every .ts file on save There is no step 3.

> 1) tsc --init # creates a tsconfig.json, no need to edit it

hm... i reckon that if one doesn't need to edit a 'default' config file, perhaps the file doesn't really need to exist.

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

#472

Post by abiox »

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

i invite you to learn about idioms! they're interesting.

equivocating over idiomatic language is basically a waste of time.

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

#473

Post by [deleted] »

kbenson wrote: post #345
kbenson wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#474

Post by _ea1k »

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…

I'm glad that someone else said that. I really hated AS3 as a language and was really happy that the ECMAScript spec didn't take their ideas. Typescript does everything that AS3 could do, but does it in a way that is much more friendly to the JavaScript way.

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

#475

Post by j45 »

While Flash Player is meeting it's end, the transferability of existing investments in AS3 to a new endpoint is tough not to imagine due to the kinship of ECMAscript with both JS and AS3.

If AS3 could compile to HTML5/JS endpoints, existing, or archival can in some part live on or be repurposed. The question will be how close it can get compared to existing solutions. There is likely several billions of dollars (likely more) of content that will need to be recreated, and not all of it will, or can be.

With Flash Professional becoming Adobe Animate CC, it wouldn't be surprising if this transferability becomes more of a prominent format. Adobe has been at the core of a lot of rich media formats both online and files with PDF and Flash, and I expect them not to disappear in the world of the tooling to create such experiences.

There is some stewardship and timing on this announcement from Adobe that says the right things to those those who are quietly very excited by WebAssembly, and now have Adobe and others starting to look at it the same way.

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

#476

Post by j45 »

kbenson wrote: post #199
mattnewton wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "

That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from…

IIRC at the time, Flash lite powered or existed on many more mobile phones than did iOS. Neat stuff to read into the history of. Many of the things in this letter were true, but Apple itself was holding back some things. iOS had it's own battery management issues at this time (even though it was 1-2 generations ahead of Android power management). Cutting to the bone of power management has paid dividends for Apple, the iPhone generally manages power much better than any Android phone I use. The latest Nexus phones from Google started to change that drastically and I hope that continues.

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

#477

Post by penpapersw »

evmar wrote: post #468
penpapersw wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this is pretty great, thanks! Dunno why I didn't consider it to be that simple. But it really is working. Well, along with `npm install @types/node --save` which I found somewhere else, so it quits complaining about 'require' not being found.

Glad it worked! I think it's a failure by the TypeScript team to not make this flow more front and center. You are right, I forgot about installing typings. Instead of require you should use ES6 "import" (which TS compiles to require anyway) to get more type checking. But when you do that you'll see more of my missed step, which is `npm install @types/XYZ` for each XYZ package you use. As soon as you start introducin…

This advice is gold, thanks. But what I'm finding is that it's too painful to create a TypeScript project that has both a front-end and a back-end by incrementally building it like this, unless the front-end is just a set of static files with no compilation steps.

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

#478

Post by j45 »

ikreymer wrote: post #143
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…

Webrecorder supports remote browsers that allow you to run older browsers pre-configured with Flash, as well as Java applets. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/oct/25/rhizome-releases-ma... Example: Record Flash: https://webrecorder.io/_new/temp/flash-example/record/$br:ch... An archived Java applet: https://webrecorder.io/demo/java/20170505193641$br:firefox:4... In this mode, the browsers run remotely and stream the…

It might be possible to also run Flash in a mini VM. Who knows, maybe someone will figure it out playing flash in WebAssembly in "legacy mode" which disables a vast swath of file and other security issues. Introducing sandboxing could be one angle, but I'm sure someone far more experienced has already thought of this.

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

#479

Post by eridius »

m_t wrote: post #438
eridius wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation please? This is the first time I've ever heard anyone claim that flash uses less battery than html5 and I'm extremely skeptical.

Just try it out, especially at the time Job wrote his piece. Of course your MBP would spin its fan and drain battery when playing a flash game. But it would do the same, and faster, when playing the same game implemented in Javascript, even more so at the time.

That's not actually evidence. I can't "just try it out", because I don't have a collection of flash games with html5 equivalents. And I still don't believe you.

Having my fans go on full blast because of Flash is something I remember happening quite often. Having my fans go on full blast because of html5 is not something I remember at all.

And your use of games here is a red herring. Nobody complained about games using up battery. The complaint was flash ads using up battery.

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

#480

Post by j45 »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #326
codedokode wrote: post #235

Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful. And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported on this platform.

Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility. The time to move on was years ago.

XP is still used in many countries around the world on older equipment for a variety of reasons.
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