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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

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Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#131

Post by blackearl »

jack1243star wrote: post #120

What is the Internet Archive's stance on pornographic contents? A significant proportion of our culture, nonetheless treated as taboo and lost too often. Kinky animations and semi-interactive games were well suited to the Flash format, with its ease of distribution (small file size, single webpage/file) and multimedia capabilities.

Don't know the official stance but I uploaded a rip of a VHS tape from the 90s of a popular radio show's comedy bits. Being the 90s shock jock era of radio, there's quite a bit of nudity. Never had any issues with it.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#132

Post by spullara »

tapirl wrote: post #126
spullara wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Jobs banned it to kill it. https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...

I don't think this is the fatal reason Flash is stopped. Flash is only forbidden in mobile web browsers. Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.

It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#133

Post by cpeterso »

roca wrote: post #44
textfiles wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say Lightspark has failed at all, they're progressing nicely. Others are too. I heard a rumor Shumway was abandoned as a project by Mozilla because ex-Adobe engineers were steering the project and Adobe issued concerns; they probably could have been worked out, but you know, Mozilla. Since then, Flash has been end of life'd more aggressively, so I think Shumway could return. Flash files should be like musi…

A Flash player is a lot more like a Java virtual machine + libraries or a Web browser than it is like a video codec. I have not heard that rumor about Shumway. As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer, I think I would have. Thanks for pointing out Lightspark is progressing. I thought it had stalled, but I was wrong. Still, if Lightspark is doing well it's not ideal to split efforts into multiple projects.

I’m a program manager at Mozilla and I helped manage the Shumway project for a year or so. A couple jobs before Mozilla, I was an engineer on the Flash Player team at Macromedia and then Adobe. Since I was not writing Shumway code or guiding the team’s implementation decisions, Mozilla’s lawyers did not feel there was a conflict. If Adobe really wanted to shut down Shumway (or Ruffle or Lightspark), they could cite numerous obscure Flash patents regardless of who’s working on the project.

Mozilla stopped working on Shumway primarily because:

1. Flash compatibility was going to be a lot of work and full compatibility was impossible (e.g. matching Flash bugs, closed-source codecs, system APIs not available to JavaScript)

2. Content creators were already moving on from Flash. They were slowly heeding the “Flash is a dead end” messaging from browser makers and Adobe itself.

So Mozilla saw multiple engineer-years of work ahead to support a proprietary technology that was shrinking and decided the Shumway engineers’ time would be better spent on other Mozilla projects. Even if Firefox bundled a Shumway with great Flash compatibility, content creators would choose a technology that is going to work in Chrome and IE.

Fun fact: before working on Shumway, one of the engineers built another JavaScript Flash Player called Gordon. The Shumway name is thus derived:

Flash -> “Flash Gordon” -> Gordon -> “Gordon Shumway” (the alien ALF’s real name) -> Shumway :)

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#134

Post by bigbubba »

webmaven wrote: post #116
mschuster91 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe just couldn't get it done. They should have fully open sourced it, at least the runtime.

> > Adobe just couldn't get it done. > They should have fully open sourced it, at least the runtime. Rumor had it that there was code in there that Adobe (or more likely, FutureSplash) had licensed and couldn't release.

Something like that doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker. Part of Doom 3 was patent encumbered, but Id released the rest of the engine with that bit removed. Releasing part of the software in a nonfunctional state is much better than nothing.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#135

Post by windsurfer »

userbinator wrote: post #91
echelon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard They did open it up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/a…

> (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)

Adobe themselves pushed for using open web tech. I was working at Adobe in AS3/Flex during the transition and they were going to great lengths to promote and encourage development of open standards.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#136

Post by Kye »

grishka wrote: post #45
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #4

All Your Base Are Belong To Us... preserved forever: https://archive.org/details/flash_allyourbase

Oh. For some reason I very much like the memes from that era, and I've seen this particular one for the first time.

You might like The $20,000 Zig, a Smurf-themed variation.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/19369

It's not on archive.org yet as far as I can tell.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#137

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

etrabroline wrote: post #118
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, interesting you don’t know that one. Memes had a bigger impact then: there were fewer of them, they were more unexpected (because they were newer), and in fact the word meme either did not exist or, if it did, it was certainly not in widespread use. Anyway: “ On June 1, 2006, YouTube was taken down temporarily for maintenance. The phrase "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" appeared below the YouTube logo as a plac…

That's because it was probably just one guy who had the authority to put that there without any threat of getting fired. Google today would set up a committee with diverse groups represented (including HR, PR and Legal) to focus test any and all potential "hate joke incidents" to ensure bland and inoffensiveness to all. The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well. I have to thank the Japanese for ha…

> The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well.

Do you have a link for this? I’d like to read more about it. Searching for YT Rewind gave me the Wikipedia article and some scrubbed articles that don’t include stuff a out a fiasco.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#138

Post by Confiks »

endgame wrote: post #74
Confiks wrote: post #14

There's an enormous cache of historic SWFs hosted here [1] and it would be awesome if the Internet Archive could archive them, so they won't get lost. However, there are far too many to individually add. My personal favorites would be the Demented Cartoon Movie [2], Weebl and Bob's transdimensional portal [3] (which is located under the stairs) and of course The End of the World [4]. They all load perfectly in Ruffle…

I still joke about TDCM with some of my friends, but sometimes I wonder about Brian Kendall. Imagine if the most impactful artwork of your career was a dumb flash movie you made when you were a kid? The archive only has a single animutation too, which is a bit sad. Some of them are uploaded to youtube, but that loses any hidden interactivity that some of them had. Hopefully someone can find the original SWFs and uplo…

> but sometimes I wonder about Brian Kendall

No need to wonder; you can read his reflection on it here [1], although it's unclear when exactly it was written.

[1] http://briankendall.net/animation/tdcm.htm

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#139

Post by stronglikedan »

breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

It's still used in quite a few business environments, both bespoke and enterprisey, and there's a significant amount of devs crapping bricks right now.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#140

Post by p1mrx »

Zelphyr wrote: post #51

I'm glad to see The Internet Archive doing this. There's a flash animation I used to enjoy back around 2000 and I have been looking for it for almost as long. It was basically a showcase animation sequence done by what I think was a Japanese designer. I don't remember the full sequence but it was an anime style animation and at the end was a girl standing on a cliff with her hair blowing in the wind. I'm really hopin…

If it was reasonably popular, you could try asking https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
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