Internet Archive expands Flash support

Post by anthk » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 11:48 AM UTC

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…

Post by fenomas » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

pocketarc wrote: post #192

fenomas wrote: post #166

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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..

Yeah, same! I didn't remember that it had been a wrapper (to be honest I have very little memory of -how- we did it), but I suppose it makes sense. TweetDeck was Adobe AIR too at the time, no?

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #39

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.

Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 1:48 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #42

justsomehnguy wrote: post #33

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Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.

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.

Post by kalleboo » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #159

eropple wrote: post #146

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> 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…

If you're doing motion design, I'd agree, I guess you're stuck with Adobe. In the realm of print, we are so close to never needing them again. Affinity is great. The only problem is that vector groups are lost when you need to import or export to Illustrator/PDF. Adobe is fully aware of this and makes their bespoke file format as difficult as possible to parse. When you're working with a dozen designers and 6 separat…