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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#141

Post by 4RealFreedom »

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…

I don't think this is right. RTMP was the protocol for sending videos over the wire and was developed by Macromedia. We didn't have any good replacements for some time.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#142

Post by dumpsterdiver »

Possibly an unpopular opinion:

Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#143

Post by chongli »

wkat4242 wrote: post #132
Bakingpotato wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.

Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf

Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally inexcusable!

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#144

Post by Pxtl »

cyberax wrote: post #112
derefr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'm surprised I haven't seen a similar SVG editor for kids. All the kids I know who are into animating are using pirate Adobe software.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#145

Post by pan69 »

justinclift wrote: post #115
readyplayernull wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash.

According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#146

Post by eropple »

noduerme wrote: post #97
themagician wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.

Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.

> If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.

Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#147

Post by vGPU »

babypuncher wrote: post #113
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. 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…

> because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.

And then Google amp came along.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#148

Post by tagyro »

I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today.

Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).

And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.

I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.

Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#150

Post by IIsi50MHz »

weard_beard wrote: post #79
nolok wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

cough cough Magento cough cough

Magento? The…eCommerce platform that did a small fraction of what Fishbowl did?
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