141–148 of 148 posts
I kind of miss that era of the internet where there were random, niche sites you would fall in love with and it wasn’t all just a post on YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or something.
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Because it was a security nightmare
No it was a usability nightmare. Watching Flash Youtube on Android technically worked but it was a horrible experience. Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.
> Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities.
>Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...
Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
I'm jealous. My files from those days did not survive; too many hard drive failures and lost or destroyed CDs. This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.
It was such an impressive piece of art for younger me (12 years old then and just getting started with this „internet“ thing) that apparently it made some lasting memories. Made my day to revisit these videos after such a very very long time. Thanks!
I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.
Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer…
- Vector drawing and rendering for extremely fast performance and file size
- Visual authoring tool that invited creative, non-technical people to the party
- Deep support for managing state changes over time
- Gradual ramp of complexity that balanced ease of entry without overly constraining expertise
Were most Flash apps slow and buggy? Yes
Did Flex have tons of bloat and memory leaks? Yes
Did Flash create a cambrian explosion of creative and fun projects that inspired a generation of young people? Yes
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None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying…
> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plu…
Can you name some renowned such creative works that were "weaponized against a huge swath of internet users"?
I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.
The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.