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

blogs.adobe.com

271–280 of 508 posts

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

#271

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML…

ActionScript3 (or AVM2) is fairly well documented and Shumway did a fairly good job executing ABC files, I think we got to like 99%+ compatibility on the reference tests. Getting Rendering + Timeline + Library working correctly, ... that's another story. You have to bug-for-bug compatible AND do different things for different versions of SWF and AVM versions. If anyone needs a decent emulation of AVM2 bytecode, Shumway has a pretty good one in there.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So hi, I made a living doing Flash animation and development around 2000-2007. I don't do it any more, I draw comics now, but I still keep the Flash editor installed just in case I need to scratch the itch to make something move. The SWF format, and the plugin that plays it, is going away. The program that started life as FutureSplash Animator, and became Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash, is not going away. It got…

yeah i think people forget (or just don't know) that flash became animate. Most of the "html5" animations we see are made in animate. so in a way, it's all still in the same family and toolset, just the delivery format has changed that said, i'm really curious as to what's going to happen to actionscript. Starling really ran with that and it's an otherwise really nice language (as3, that is). i'm glad they open sourc…

>i also hope they keep developing and supporting AIR

Flash support within AIR is going to continue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they make Flash better and open like other people did with JavaScript? e.g. emScripten, WebAssembly, and WebGL I left this question intentionally vague / and possibly wrong in order to give the person responding some leeway and the opportunity to dispel some myths that people might have about JavaScript technologies and the history of both JavaScript and Flash e.g. me.

Flash player, by definition, is a browser plugin. Most browsers are closing [or have closed] their plugin APIs so this makes sense. I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".

> I assume the Adobe AIR will live on, which is basically "Flash Player for Desktop and Mobile Apps".

That appears to be the case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851400

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

#274
Too bad. Mozzilla will not ask me to update flash player as it is literally gone now. I must there are too much memories with flash player as there was a time when you couldn't play a video on youtube without it. #ripadobeflashplayer

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

#275
post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Hot damn, an actual Farmville developer. My big plan fresh out of college was to make a Farmville-esque game with some action elements. Got WAY further along than I rightly should have, and I have AS3 to thank for that.

It's a shame it's going away. Glad the pros from that time feel the same way I do about it.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".

What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?

Definitely Unity.

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

#277

Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by). Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally. Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

>> Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

"Adobesque"?

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what Adobe Air was? http://www.adobe.com/products/air.html

Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go wrong?

> Letting flash run outside the browser sandbox, what could go wrong?

It would be like any other desktop application. You're running code of which you presumably know and trust the provenance. It's not like a malware Flash ad written by someone who found a security hole in the Flash player, that is loaded into a random web page by an unsuspecting user.

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

#279

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…

No one stopped Adobe from open sourcing those tools, and making them produce JavaScript / WebAssembly instead of Flash.
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