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“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#171

Post by ravendug »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #83
djsumdog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o) Looks like it's possible: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/inspector/inspecto...

Not really. Looks like it has been abandoned (no commits in over a year) and last I checked it was by no means a capable replacement yet.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/9473-mozilla-k...

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#172

Post by Joeri »

simion314 wrote: post #62
methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

I worked extensively with flex, and I think you give it too much credit. Typescript beats AS3, and modern complete frameworks like angular or ember are just as good as flex.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#173

Post by tracker1 »

simion314 wrote: post #105
pier25 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available in JS. I wrote this a couple of months back: https://medium.com/@Pier/ecmascript-4-was-too-ahead-of-its-t...

As others said Adobe is at fault here, same as Microsoft is at fault of not open sourcing Silverlight and now we end up with html5/js mess that was not designed for what is used. Flex4 is really good and after you learn it you get good GUIs that are efficient and that are easy to reuse and much more efficiient then HHTML based GUIs

IIRC, the format for Silverlight output was well documented, and open. It was a zip file with a manifest, assets and JS. The down side is they didn't get the penetration. Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd hoped that Flash would have become when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was really pushing SVG before that, and my hope was that flash content would become a zip, with assets and a manifest, where 2D assets were svg, and the tweaning was something similar to CSS.

Either could have been adopted. Would still love to see an HTML "package" format that was similar, where the whole content and assets could be downloaded as a single container, and run offline easily like flash could.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#174

Post by icebraining »

Kenji wrote: post #38

Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement . Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything re…

Flash (the editor) wasn't killed, Adobe renamed it to Animate and now exports to other formats.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#175

Post by eridius »

duskwuff wrote: post #170
eridius wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.

The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there is Opera, and they're only barely hanging on. The numbers I've seen peg them at roughly 1% of desktop browsers, mostly in Europe. *: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another browser on the list.

How about Safari?

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#176

Post by jakobegger »

wlesieutre wrote: post #65
djsumdog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.

Yes. Flash was unusably slow on MacOS. Stuff that ran smooth on Windows would stutter and lag on the Mac.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#177

Post by tracker1 »

disease wrote: post #146
simion314 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

Flex had some good ideas but many things made it a pretty bad experience to work with: Adobe abandoning WYSIWYG editing in Flash Builder, having two ways to do everything (XML and code) made things more confusing than it had to be, and the official components from Adobe generally weren't very good. I much prefer building by own in React. AS3 was awesome for its time but TypeScript has surpassed it in my opinion. Afte…

I thought the message on Flash vs Flash Builder was a bit confusing.. but it came down to Flash being more for animation tasks, and Flash Builder more for building crud-like apps. There was overlap, but both targeted differing audiences.

I did find some object model inconsistencies annoying all the same, and some of the security implications in the early 00's frankly scared me. Even though I worked with it, I disabled it.

React + JS is nice, but the animation tooling in Flash itself was second to none. And still better than many options. If I still made a lot of elearning content, I'd be much more upset by the fall of flash.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#178

Post by guessmyname »

I have a bad experience every time I have to declare taxes because the interface was built on top of Flash; many parts of the platform are broken (missing images, inconsistent styling in sub-pages, JavaScript exceptions) and I wonder what the government will do to overcome this change, three years is not much time by government standards.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#179

Post by notatoad »

methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

The tools still exist as "Adobe Animate CC". It exports HTML5 and video files now instead of *.swf.

This is only the death of the player software, not the toolkit.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#180

Post by FRex »

sqeaky wrote: post #2

I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?

Yes, games.

http://www.kongregate.com/top-rated-games?sort=newest

Although it's not clear from just a game being in Flash if it's in Haxe and compiled to Flash or actually in AS, but still. It's so convenient for games.

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