The ironic thing is that ActionScript is being reinvented once again in form of TypeScript and its siblings.
Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
141–150 of 201 posts
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#142I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…
The restaurant websites that required flash were a pain in the ass, for sure. But there were some amazing experiments in pushing the boundaries of what I considered a website to be. This is an archive of one of my favourites, the Requiem for a Dream website:
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#143The question is, do any of the existing web stacks come close to the beginner friendly aspects of the original flash? I don't think so.. I can imagine any of my musician friends installing $FRAMEWORK and building a web site full of their own animations, menu's, and music playback.. Flash for all its "evilness" still IMHO hasn't been matched.
Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?
https://www.xojo.com
Been around for a long time, was formerly called RealBASIC.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#144I loved Flash - back in a time when there was only a few DHTML tricks and JavaScript was not a proper programming language, also the lack of proper CSS.
The year I speak of is 2001 and my task as an intern was to create a CMS for the company that could power a "plain" website at the same time as dynamic content for the fancy Flash website. It was hell of a lot of fun coming up with a solution that made this possible. Even managed to make the company migrate from PHP3 to PHP4 for it.
But not so soon after (let's say 2005? 2006?) I wasn't missing Flash (or it's cousin, Shockwave) anymore. Good for games, but the more I did proper web development the more it showed that it was just interactive movies (surprise) and not so good to work with for plain (html) text.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#145Flash was awesome for learning script and rendering. Plugins in the early days of the web '95-'05+ were needed to push the web. HTML5, WebGL, Canvas, SVG are all heavily inspired by Flash. Mobile and smaller hardware really put a pause on Flash's blaze of glory that was all the way up until '07/flex/air etc. Adobe did not move to cross-compilation fast enough nor did they improve hardware rendering early enough, Flash was largely run on CPU at the time and mobile performance was poor. Adobe also really took it hard that ES4 was shutdown and ActionScript was really the only use of that, I particularly liked it alot, ActionScript3 was a great language for interactive and web game development.
Flash also allowed creators to publish, many cartoon shows today still use Flash [1]. Many have moved to ToonBoom or others but many still use it.
Flash will always be an impressive moment in the web and interactives/games.
Macromedia was quite the company, Flash/Director both really died from Adobe's hands. I wonder if Microsoft would have bought Macromedia if it had gone different. Macromedia really created fast web video with Flash/ASF formats/RTMP streaming and saved us from Real Player, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player. Flash made possible Youtube.
Flash is still around as Adobe Animate and OSS as OpenFL[2], lime[3], Haxe [4] and more. Though it is more focused on compilation to target platforms natively from script and AOT compiling or WebGL/html5 output rather than to the AVM or runtime ActionScript.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#146I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…
> You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities
You're describing modern, client rendered web applications.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs detailed his reasons on the open letter Thoughts on Flash ( https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ ).
In his biography, he didn't get along well with Adobe. That's the reason he did it. For all other technologies, Apple creates their own competing product. Why didn't they just do that for Flash (creation side and delivery side)?
The writing was already on the wall for 'applet' based web content I think. It was clear HTML/JS was going to take over on the Web, and Apple were trying to push native apps for as much as possible too.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…
> You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities You're describing modern, client rendered web applications.
At least one of those things is significantly reduced with modern client rendered web applications: security vulnerabilities.
I wholeheartedly agree the host of power than Flash brought, but I'm glad for its demise because — among other reasons — of this: that rich interactivity on the web is now largely standardized and open.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beyond the security issues, Adobe was just terrible as a platform maintained. Flash was the largest source of crashes in every browser until they moved it to a separate process, there were endemic performance issues even in core features (e.g. video playback was significantly more CPU intensive, and general code was well behind native speed), and most of the toolchain was in a state of obvious neglect, from the libra…
At the point that Jobs wrote his lie filled "Thoughts on Flash" Flash Player was vastly more performant at HTML5y things like animations, video and music playing than doing it in the browser. I'm not going to defend the quality of the flashplayer architecture and implementation (due to it's crapness) but it was perfectly fine performance wise - it was a 'resource hog' because of the terrible, terrible code that peopl…
At no point did I benchmark playback of H.264 in Flash being anywhere near native speed - huge deal on battery powered devices, or simply playing >15fps without dropping frames. WebM's software playback was roughly as slow but nobody used it and Google did optimize it over time, which is the kind of maintenance which Adobe was uninterested.
Similarly, the fact that Flash was competitive with IE5 is the problem: browser vendors invested heavily in making that platform faster and richer. Adobe executives thought they had a monopoly and did not.
Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
#150> In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different. Without Flash you couldn't do anything at zombocom[1]! [1] http://zombo.com // Now that HTML+JS has has the features necessary to implement the "flash intro page" experience, I have yet another reason to leave javascript disabled.
Even zombocom moved on.