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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

#171

Post by Marazan »

olau wrote: post #164
Marazan wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry. As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%. All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering. At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better. But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name…

Abobe's failure to switch the flash tools to targeting HTML5 is one of the most inexplicable decisions of all time.

In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development.

And they just abandoned it.

In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#172

Post by jacobush »

I worked for a digital signage place in 2012. I coded something which pretented to be a web browser with the NSPlugin interface. Then I loaded the Linux Flash plugin in that, and iterated frame by frame, and encoded the frames with ffmpeg to mp4.

This way we didn't have to support Flash on the Digital Signage player hardware, but could still accept Flash animations from the ad agencies.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#173

Post by demurgos »

Congratulations to the Ruffle team!

I maintain Open-Flash [1], another project around maintaining Flash. It was started following the discontinuation of Mozilla's Shumway emulator.

I wanted to write a Node.js program to parse and merge SWF files. I hoped to import Shumway's parser and reuse it for my own project but it turned out that Shumway wasn't modular enough. This prompted me to write my own parsers and emitters for SWF and AVM1 (the actionscript bytecode used by Flash I wrote a small renderer and VM, and was able to render a few simple files [2]. This happened around 2017-2018, before Ruffle was announced. Unfortunately I was only working on this project only during my free time while I was studying: I did not have much time to dedicate to it. Running a few SWF files is quite easy, but implementing the whole Flash API is a large task hard to achieve alone.

When Ruffle was announced, I was happy that there were other people working on a Flash emulator, backed by a company. Ruffle moved fast and quickly surpassed my player. It required me to rethink my goals: there was no point in competing with them. I moved to other projects, but still maintain Open-Flash from time to time: it now pivoted to be more focused on its original goal - processing SWF files. I am using it to analyze SWF files, extract assets, replace assets, recompile the bytecode, decompile it back to ActionScript, etc. My end goal would now be to provide a way to convert SWF files to no longer need a full Flash emulator (for example we could keep the Flash renderer but use JavaScript directly instead of the ActionScript bytecode bu processing the files ahead of time).

There's still a lot of work to do, but today I am happy for Ruffle: the project continues to advance and it bought us time to save Flash files and avoid us from losing part of internet's history.

[1] https://open-flash.github.io/ [2] https://open-flash.github.io/domu-player/

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#174

Post by rypskar »

wbl wrote: post #158
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…

Canvas should aim to be as close as possible to this. I think with a bit better animation support they would be there, but I really don't know much about the domain.

With frameworks like PixieJS and Three.js it is there, but requires more coding to start, instead of using a simple GUI to get started and then add code as needed

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#175

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

abdusco wrote: post #166
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #152

In a certain sense, I created the very first Flash animation. I was working at Macromedia and happened to be in the office earlier than usual that morning. Our SVP came to my boss and said basically “We bought Futurewave, we’re announcing it today, and we’re renaming FutureSplash to Shockwave Flash. I need somebody to throw a quick animation together for the press gathering, and none of the creative services people a…

Unrelated, but is there a meaning to your username? Or is it just a random string?

No, it’s just random.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#177

Post by midgetjones »

Sunspark wrote: post #143
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…

You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3

For most of Flash's lifespan, laptops and smartphones were not really a thing.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#178

Post by apignotti »

textfiles wrote: post #39
roca wrote: post #36

What reason is there to believe that Ruffle will succeed where other Flash emulators (Shumway, Swiffy, Lightspark, ...) have (apparently) failed?

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…

Hi, original author of Lightspark here. There is certainly value in OSS implementations of Flash, but the reality is that reaching accurate support for all the SWFs out there is a titanic effort. The sheer size of the runtime library of ActionScript 3 makes it a massive project, and on top of that the documentation/specification is most often vague or missing altogether.

Lightspark is something I started 10 years ago, back in my University years. Nowadays, I am working on the problem of Flash preservation and life extension from the perspective of compilers and virtual machines at Leaning Technologies. If you want to read more about our approach:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/announcing-cheerpx-for-flash-...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#179

Post by kwhitefoot »

jonah-archive wrote: post #2

Really excited about this, and so happy we were able to roll it out before Flash's official deprecation at the end of the year. If you have old SWFs you'd like to share, these are the directions for uploading them so that they'll be emulated in-browser: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...

Archive.org is one of the modern wonders of the world. Let's hope it lasts.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#180

Post by Mizza »

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #152

In a certain sense, I created the very first Flash animation. I was working at Macromedia and happened to be in the office earlier than usual that morning. Our SVP came to my boss and said basically “We bought Futurewave, we’re announcing it today, and we’re renaming FutureSplash to Shockwave Flash. I need somebody to throw a quick animation together for the press gathering, and none of the creative services people a…

This is wonderful, thanks for sharing.

Any chance you've got a copy of that on an old hard drive somewhere? I bet the IA folks would love to highlight that.

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