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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#111

Post by cpeterso »

kmeisthax wrote: post #67
Bakingpotato wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is sp…

I was a software developer of the Flash Player team at Macromedia and Adobe, specifically on the team porting it to Windows CE/PocketPC and then Android. What you describe is correct as far as I can remember, though I hadn’t heard the Apple “begged” Adobe to support iPhone.

I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code with Apple, but heard Apple assigned an intern to try porting it to iPhone. The Adobe developer working with Apple told me the ported code Apple sent back to Adobe didn’t even compile, so we don’t know if they even tested it on a real iPhone. We jokingly called the iPhone port “Project Boomerang” because the code that came back was basically the same that we sent them. :)

The Flash Player’s source code was ugly, but you have to remember that its roots trace back before Macromedia to SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for the PenPoint OS in the early 1990s. The core rendering and scripting code has since been ported and squeezed into new platforms and applications. And then the dot com boom happened. The development team grew to about a hundred developers and no one person understood the entire code base. Code was copy/pasted freely for fear of introducing regressions that would break existing Flash content.

Multiple rewrites and grand new engines that would live alongside the legacy engine were attempted but failed due to backwards compatibility, the second system effect, and product management’s pressure for new features.

To make matters more challenging, Adobe was losing interest in funding Flash development because revenue didn’t scale with Flash Player usage, only with sales of the Flash authoring tool to a small audience of Flash content creators. That’s when rev share schemes for 3D APIs, DRM, and asm.js-like C++ cross compilation (Alchemy and CrossBridge) were hatched.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#112

Post by cyberax »

derefr wrote: post #32
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime . (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was no…

> Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos

While it WAS true, it's not COMPLETELY true. The first versions of Flash had very little scripting support, it was basically limited to switching between scenes. The first Flash that could do something non-trivial was Flash 5, released some time in 2000 and by that time Flash domination had already been established.

The secret was in its authoring tools and the concept of timelines. Basically, you inserted "key frames" and Flash interpolated between them automatically. So if you need to draw a triangle moving from point A to point B, you just add it to the timeline at the starting position, then move down the timeline, insert a key frame and drag the triangle to point B.

And these timelines can be composed, looped, triggered by scripts, etc.

Here's an example video that shows that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOPCPZO5YOA

And that's it. No need to write any fancy code. Flash would do everything for you, and it's baked right into the file format, that was specifically designed to be compact and concise.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#113

Post by babypuncher »

themagician wrote: post #40
CSMastermind wrote: post #16

I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage.

Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.

At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#114

Post by Bakingpotato »

mwcampbell wrote: post #92
irrational wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia…

> We created all kinds of training content in it How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.

now that is the real flaw of flash, and the most overlooked bit. all the while people (and adobe) were making login pages and security within flash (which is insane, you don't use an animation tool for those!) they should have focused on accessibility. Adobe promised the world when they bought macromedia and instead did nothing.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#115

Post by justinclift »

readyplayernull wrote: post #88
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe... I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed o…

Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#116

Post by justinclift »

Alifatisk wrote: post #27

Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there. Hopefully we'll get it back soon.

I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there.

Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something?

aka Flash Done Right :)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#117

Post by phendrenad2 »

jonplackett wrote: post #59

The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool. It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites. I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t. I wish Adobe had do…

It's not just flash, all of web development has become very complex. In the early days, people would learn to make websites because they wanted to be web developers. They could make something in 5 minutes that was reasonably similar to what they would make if they achieved their goal of getting a job doing it. Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing. People either do this and give up, or they get lost in a maze of studying (bootstrap vs MUI??? Tailwind vs SASS??????) and emerge a fully-formed web designer (having made no cool personal site along the way).

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#118

Post by justinclift »

diggernet wrote: post #86

Sadly, flOw still doesn't work. https://archive.org/details/flash_flow In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.

Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be running ok.

At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is.

There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#119

Post by xp84 »

nolok wrote: post #68
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around. But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

Suddenly everything makes so much sense!

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#120

Post by phendrenad2 »

I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were entirely made in flash (or java applets), and the content that Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file. Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript engines.
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