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The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

gamasutra.com

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Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#21

Post by morrow »

ivansavz wrote: post #4

Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js? I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do…

I have done a few flash to HTML5 conversions without source code, and the method I've gone with is just to use the flash as a guide and write the HTML5 app from scratch. You end up with cleaner, more maintainable code that way than if you were to throw it into a converter and try to sort out what comes out, and it can end up taking the same amount of time as trying to fix whatever the converter came up with in the end. Do you have any links to the flash products? Might be worth putting what you have in a GitHub repo and see who can contribute. Maybe try https://www.codetriage.com/ as well. If you end up doing either, let me know and I'll try to help :)

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#22

Post by baldfat »

avodonosov wrote: post #12

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

That is why Haxe and OpenFl are getting so much attention and using flash develop. http://www.flashdevelop.org/

It basically just an open source alternative to Flash at this point.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#23

Post by edmccard »

georgeecollins wrote: post #16

This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson I used to work with at Activision. He was a stand up guy. But I really can't tell if that is who wrote this. What worries me is that companies push people in the game industry to write post-mortems promoting their technology.

>This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson...

In the article, the author's name at the top is actually a link to a short bio[1] which seems like it has enough information to identify him.

[1]https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#24

Post by baldfat »

lkrubner wrote: post #6

Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got st…

I really think where Haxe is going for Web development will actually fill this place. The game engines like Godot and unity have made game development easy for beginners. I think With WebAssembly we will have higher level languages that will make web development easier for people starting.

https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#25

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

blueprint wrote: post #18
jchw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haxe is pretty interesting. I really wish strongly that it was more polished and had a larger ecosystem, because it feels like a nice development environment and is quite nice to code in.

As a native mobile dev, I found myself unable to adopt it because I need and/or want direct access to the native platform capabilities, most especially when it comes to building GUIs. Write-once tends not to work so well when users are able to tell behavior, framerate, appearance, … differences in a split second and when optimal UX was my purpose in writing mobile apps in the first place. In the same way, learn-once…

Just to be clear, you’re talking about GUIs for applications rather than games?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#26

Post by protomyth »

I think the final legacy of Flash will be the knowledge that this was the first major piece of software locked out of a platform and we lost a lot of the history of the internet with its demise. As much as Flash was a pain, I'm not sure I like the idea that it is acceptable for Apple or anyone else to keep that software off their platform. I wonder if someone comes up with the next step after the web will it even be allowed to run?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#27

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

ChrisSD wrote: post #13
camus2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media. i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API were, and how different browsers implem…

> Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good tooling for creators and not just programmers.

We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#29

Post by jmull »

kennu wrote: post #11

I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5 as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5. The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this. I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar plat…

Yes, that bothered me too. They called that option “HTML5”, but they meant something more like native JavaScript & HTML.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#30

Post by disconnected »

EamonnMR wrote: post #7
ivansavz wrote: post #4

Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js? I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do…

Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere, I'm game.

> I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX.

Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done. No need to reinvent the wheel.

If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency, there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a container and you're set. The only niggle is that gnash is... kinda bad. It's slow and a bunch of swf files I have don't work (some don't work at all, others have weird graphical problems).

If you want to contribute, gnash would be a good candidate, I guess:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html

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