131–140 of 322 posts
I once read an ebook that was formatted by a guy who had only ever done magazines and it was a huge mess. 2 columns of text per page. No auto scaling. The best ebook format I have ever experienced is .txt and just let the software figure out where the text needs to go.
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> People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.
Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery. Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment? Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity? I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that m…
People loved flash for what flash was good for (creative toys) they disliked flash when certain sites started making it the core of the navigation etc.
When people are nostalgic for flash it's for finding random toys from other people who weren't "IT people".
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> People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.
Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet
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What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.
The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine. Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the co…
Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…
The author says that "In a perfect world, RMSDK would just stop living in the CSS stone-ages or at least provide some kind of error handling instead of dropping the whole book, but I’m not holding my breath." This is blatantly wrong. In a perfect world, RMSDK wouldn't exist in the first place and Adobe would have gone bankrupt and become history at least 10 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
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Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…
Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support.
The entire browser ecosystem started out closed source. Even JavaScript was written to interact with closed source Java Applets.
> Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns
Browsers still are the goto target for contests like Pwn2own. It is almost like inviting the entire world to run untrusted code on your computer is not a great idea, no matter how many security buzzwords browser makers like to throw arround.
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> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
Flash had its problems but as a user, it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites. And its editor gave non-tech users ability to create amazing animations, interfaces, and even games.
I didn't get into flash games at all, but I used to watch Flash animations.
Like, for instance, Salad Fingers: https://archive.org/details/flash_salad-fingers
This was intended for a slow 2004-era computer with a 4x3 (probably 1024x768) display, where it worked very well.
But it's not 2004 anymore; things are much faster and screens have gotten a lot bigger. Here in 2026, Salad Fingers renders out fine at higher resolutions, and at different aspect ratios. It works great on my desktop at 1080p, without stretching [and with some probably-unintentional extra content on the sides]. It even works on my pocket supercomputer's 3200x1440 20:9 display.
Vectors are fun, and they scale as technology improves. The lines remain smooth and defined. And with Flash, that's a built-in: An unaltered 22-year-old digital animation still looks crisp.
For contrast, if Salad Fingers had been published on YouTube way back around that time, it would have been in chonky fixed-pixel 320x240. Maybe that would be as good as it would ever get unless it were rendered and uploaded at higher resolutions later.
BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached. [EDIT] Great experience blogs on the PineNote https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/ https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...