Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

gamasutra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 203 posts

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#31

Post by Kajayacht »

lkrubner wrote: post #6

Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got st…

The problem is when tools that are targeted for rapid development start getting used for large, mission-critical applications. The people using these tools professionally often are not the greatest engineers and you end up with a giant mess of an application using technology that is no longer supported. The company I currently work for is in this situation right now with Oracle Forms.

Going with your specific example of beginner web dev, the basic HTML site of today is Wordpress

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#32

Post by blueprint »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #25
blueprint wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native mobile dev, I found myself unable to adopt it because I need and/or want direct access to the native platform capabilities, most especially when it comes to building GUIs. Write-once tends not to work so well when users are able to tell behavior, framerate, appearance, … differences in a split second and when optimal UX was my purpose in writing mobile apps in the first place. In the same way, learn-once…

Just to be clear, you’re talking about GUIs for applications rather than games?

No, I have built and have had need to build all kinds of applications. And even games have 'views' and 'controls' within them.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#34

Post by camus2 »

kennu wrote: post #11

I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5 as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5. The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this. I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar plat…

> I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar platform, although it would probably not be very optimized for games.

Would be mostly useless if canvas or webgl is the target.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#35

Post by kyle-rb »

I feel like the author and/or the team is confused about what HTML5 actually is. They're probably right to conclude that JavaScript/HTML5 won't perform as well on lower end devices, but a few things struck me as odd.

They mention Facebook switching away from HTML5, but I think Facebook is using the actual DOM, whereas their game would be using the canvas part of the HTML5 spec.

Later they mention WebAssembly replacing HTML5, but what it's really replacing is JavaScript, and the actual canvas that you're rendering to will stay the same afaik. The impact on performance would probably be as they predict, but overall, their issues seem to be with JavaScript, not HTML5.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#36

Post by dilap »

desireekdlo wrote: post #19
avodonosov wrote: post #12

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On th…

Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right.

Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid.

https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued?

(The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#37

Post by austincheney »

kyle-rb wrote: post #35

I feel like the author and/or the team is confused about what HTML5 actually is. They're probably right to conclude that JavaScript/HTML5 won't perform as well on lower end devices, but a few things struck me as odd. They mention Facebook switching away from HTML5, but I think Facebook is using the actual DOM, whereas their game would be using the canvas part of the HTML5 spec. Later they mention WebAssembly replacin…

> but what it's really replacing is JavaScript

That is a common misconception, but there no evidence of this. WASM replaces Flash and Flash never replaced JavaScript.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#38

Post by bsimpson »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #27
ChrisSD wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good tooling for creators and not just programmers.

We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.

For those that don't remember/weren't online then, Shockwave was the brand that Flash originally shipped under. It's where the "sw" in "swf" comes from.

For an even more thorough history of Flash, this is a great (and relatively quick read: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-throu...

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#39

Post by egypturnash »

ivansavz wrote: post #4

Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js? I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do…

You might be able to do this with the official Flash editor. Hold on, lemme check.

1. Acquire Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash)

2. Make a new HTML5 project

3. file>import>import to stage

4. file>publish, this sure can take a while, it’s been stuck at 80% on the file I pulled out to test this on for some time.

Caveats:

* Some SWFs are "protected" and won’t be loaded by the editor, you can find tools online to crack that protection pretty easily IIRC. Or at least you could back in the day.

* This won’t get the sound.

Installing Animate also gets you the Flash Player, which will play any .swf; you could conceivably record the screen as a .mov or whatever. Though a cursory google search reveals multiple websites that claim to be able to spew out a video file from your uploaded .swf.

You could also acquire a swf decompiler and use that: decompile .swf, load the resulting .fla into Animate, export as canvas. I don’t know which decompilers are currently the best, it’s been years since I last did Flash.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#40

Post by theandrewbailey »

fenomas wrote: post #33
jancsika wrote: post #28

So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?

It has tons of of licensed code. I worked at Adobe at the time, and everyone I knew on the Flash team would have loved to open source the player.

I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
Post reply on HN