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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#181

Post by j45 »

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…

As much as people might not like to hear it, I believe Flash Videos were how Youtube initially started.

Very little could handle buffering videos that well, or at scale.

Since people kept computers longer, and I was involved in online education/training delivery online in those years, flash video provided more backwards compatibility in a decade where IE4 wouldn't die, then IE6 wouldn't die.

Flash Media Server too, did some pretty interesting things. There were open source options like Red5 that were worth trying out.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#182

Post by j45 »

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.

Tweening and animation programs are hard to find for young people.

I remember one I saw running in a video on an Atari ST that pretty much outdid anything I've ever seen since, indie developer too. Wish I could remember the name, maybe he made another version.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#183

Post by j45 »

nemo44x wrote: post #89
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…

Personally I’d rather read text and/or watch a human present slides/demo than watch an animated thing for training.

It's good to offer both, not one over the other.

I think the point that gets missed with the power of today's devices is how much could be delivered on device, and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or engaging way.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#184

Post by fenomas »

versteegen wrote: post #171
fenomas wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's a separate unrelated issue. The terms I'm taking about dictated what language the app could be "originally written" in, regardless of what happened at runtime. Technically, if you prototyped an app in some other tech and then manually ported it to objective-C it wasn't even clear if that would satisfy the terms as written.

(In practice of course it didn't matter what the terms precisely meant, because Apple never enforced them apart from removing flash-based apps.)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#185

Post by stuaxo »

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…

They did this just after I had started learning C# with Xamarin for iOS dev, it's why I got out of mobile development and am now a python/Django developer.

Edit: I forgot, at the time I was between jobs (2008) and had used a chunk of my money to buy an iPhone to learn iOS Dev on, they wasted a load of my time, and money.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#186

Post by inferiorhuman »

dharmab wrote: post #158
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…

I was inside Adobe during the final death of Flash. Adobe as an organization is fully capable of maintaining a frighteningly complex product; Document Cloud is a testament to that. Steve Jobs and Apple's decision that iOS should be focused on mobile web (and later, the App Store) without Flash is what directly led to the end of the project.

I think that's a bit backwards. Flash provided a solidly mediocre experience. Non-native widgets (and consequently input issues and accessibility issues), high cpu usage and generally poor performance for things like video playback, poor security track record… on desktops. Avoid that on a more constrained platform was a no brainer.

Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a competitive product killed Flash. Jobs' unwillingness to hitch his wagon to Flash was a symptom not a cause.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#187

Post by swilliamsio »

mynameishere wrote: post #13
haunter wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the Dark Souls of flash games https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126 They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)

Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head. That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.) And yet... And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-les…

A shockingly large amount of music used in old flash games and in old YouTube videos is by Kevin MacLeod, whose released thousands of high quality tracks of all styles under CC-BY.

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#188

Post by b112 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #186
dharmab wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was inside Adobe during the final death of Flash. Adobe as an organization is fully capable of maintaining a frighteningly complex product; Document Cloud is a testament to that. Steve Jobs and Apple's decision that iOS should be focused on mobile web (and later, the App Store) without Flash is what directly led to the end of the project.

I think that's a bit backwards. Flash provided a solidly mediocre experience. Non-native widgets (and consequently input issues and accessibility issues), high cpu usage and generally poor performance for things like video playback, poor security track record… on desktops. Avoid that on a more constrained platform was a no brainer. Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a competitive product killed Fla…

And the relentlessly CVEs! It was banned on every corporate network at the time.

Once flash was used for ads, that didn't help either. It wasn't just "flash was slow", it was "webpages with a dozen yelling, flashing, dancing, cpu sucking flash ads" slow.

I wouldn't want that crap on my new shiny phone either.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#189

Post by b112 »

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.

No, they mostly spend their time in the security sphere, with endless banks, and others, using them to detect "suspicious behavior" in browsers.

It sounds like a joke, it isn't.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#190

Post by andrepd »

noduerme wrote: post #95
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 was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at th…

Reading this thread has been unexpectedly depressing.
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