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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#171

Post by versteegen »

fenomas wrote: post #160
experimenting wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of…

> because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times. Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensicall…

To fill in some details (but IANAiOSdev): Apple first disallowed interpreted code [1]. (Wow, I had forgotten how much I loathed Apple for that.) Later in 2010 Apple loosened it to allow interpreted languages as long as you didn't download new code from the internet [1]. The exception was that you could use WebKit to run JS in a webpage in your app. I guess their excuse was security, so they could ensure the app they approved was the one you ran. In 2017 [2] they loosened it further to allowing downloading or importing code in some circumstances. The most important limitation now is that you can't generate executable code on iOS, which disallows JITs and makes everything other than WebKit a second-class citizen.

[1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license...

The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application.

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_develop...

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#172

Post by simion314 »

pan69 wrote: post #145
justinclift wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>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.

When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI component library that you could use to create advanced and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).

When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you can't do instant searches and filtering on.

ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were actually used to improve performance.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#173

Post by rhn_mk1 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #58
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites. CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.

> CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well. That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious' sites, there are enough sites now what treat you like a 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a landscape orientation. If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years already, so I can't accept your 'blov…

I'd like to reply, but I'm not sure how to read this comment.

There were always user-unfriendly sites. It used to be possible to easily block the nasty content (Flash), now it's rather hard. It used to be possible to extract the interesting content (Flash) and save it without the junk website. Now it's not. Separation was an advantage.

I agree that the Web is narrowing itself down. One of the symptoms is not having interactive content clearly delineated from the rest.

You seem to come from the same premises but arrive at the opposite conclusion, and I don't understand your reasoning.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#174

Post by Aleklart »

pyeri wrote: post #161
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…

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

As usual, some vp ate another vp in executive jungle floor over chunk of budget and silverlight was promptly forgotten and corpo push “you need silverlight to run this” reversed after a while. Not if it was valuable software, but it can happen with everything eventually as it happening with windows server, exchange, sharepoint and other “essential business productivity” offers.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#175

Post by hutzlibu »

Pxtl wrote: post #144
cyberax wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The best I know of is

https://www.wickeditor.com/

It is free, open source and surprisingly good(for simple things), but developement is on hold or abandoned. (I looked at the source and it is not great, but not horrible either, but with the original creators not around anymore and lack of documentation, would be a pain to overtake)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#176

Post by j45 »

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…

It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either.

At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.

At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.

Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.

If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.

Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#177

Post by j45 »

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…

I'm wondering if some of this might be referring to Flex, which then also touched with AIR.

Careful when looking up Flex, it might trigger the past, and then seeing echoes of it present in today's techs :)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#178

Post by pan69 »

fenomas wrote: post #154
pan69 wrote: 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…

As the Wikipedia page I linked points out:

"HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included in AIR."

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#179

Post by j45 »

experimenting wrote: post #99
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 thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of…

The app store didn't exist when the iPhone launched.

Neither did third party developed apps, only what apple put on the smart phone like a featurephone.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#180

Post by j45 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #104
dylan604 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than on…

> If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence , just as ActiveX and Java applets were. The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA…

Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back then in some way?

Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.

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