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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#161

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…

They also had a competitor in the form of Microsoft's Silverlight, right? What happened to that?

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#162
post #61
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.

Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things. Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND... It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.

"It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck."

Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't mean you should.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#163
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content…

No, it's definitely correct, they definitely supported HTML/CSS/JS at some point, not flash-only content - I myself published a normal SPA back in ~2010, and looking back it's actually kind of insane how similar Adobe AIR is to Electron.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#164
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content…

But still a security nightmare yeah, though with less "remote compromise" possibility?

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#165
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content…

Your parent comment is correct. I did develop small AIR desktop apps some years ago with html+js, not flash, and I did switch to electron/nwjs later.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content…

No, it's definitely correct, they definitely supported HTML/CSS/JS at some point, not flash-only content - I myself published a normal SPA back in ~2010, and looking back it's actually kind of insane how similar Adobe AIR is to Electron.

Ohhh, I think one of the OS-integration features was that you could invoke an instance of the OS's web component, is that what you mean? AIR itself didn't do anything with html/js but you could render web content at runtime via the OS component.

Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you forget in ten years..

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#168
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago. Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone Ruffle.rs client

did you report that to the bug tracker?

Looks like someone already did!
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