31–34 of 34 posts
Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
I never worked with Flash/AS, but I remember some tools targeting SWF (OpenLaszlo, Haxe). Did they reverse-engineered the spec? Or was there some sort of Flash specification available in some form?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crash…
Definitely. And Director, which extended to 3d! At the time it was more for interactive cds, but the potential for a Unity-like experience was there.
Later on, right after Adobe released the last version of Director; they tried to market Flash itself as a platform for cross-compiling games to. Except they wanted to charge money for it, in a way that severely pissed off Flash developers and drove even people who did not care about mobile off the platform.
[0] Formerly known as FutureWave Splash
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely. And Director, which extended to 3d! At the time it was more for interactive cds, but the potential for a Unity-like experience was there.
The problem with Director was that most of it's market had switched to Flash at this point. Early on, Flash was a competitor[0] to Director that outcompeted it to the point that Macromedia just bought it out. The way Macromedia differentiated two very similar products was that Director was for bigger projects Flash couldn't handle. Which meant that as Flash got more features, Director made less and less sense to use.…
Flash for long running applications leaked so much memory. I remembered developing an electronic information panel for screens in flash. We needed to use mdm (a product that extended flash capabilities) and restart the app automatically to avoid it to run out of memory. Fun times. Haxe was, and is, cool too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Steve Jobs' defense, he begged Adobe to make Flash work on iPhone like four times and they couldn't make it work. This isn't because Flash on phones would just never work[0]; but that Adobe was unresponsive to Apple's concerns. They viewed the iPhone as "just another thing to put Flash on" rather than something that absolutely needed special attention from the Player team. And it absolutely did need special attent…
I worked at Adobe at the time, adjacent to Flash, and as far as I know nothing you've written here is true. To answer only technical points, Flash for iPhone (which existed, and worked) was built off Flash Lite , which supported touch events and had hardware video (naturally, it's not like software decoding was an option). OTOH StageVideo and Stage3D play no role in this, as they came along ~5 years after FlashLite o…
When Adobe partnered with Google and shipped Flash on Android, the experience was predictably terrible and support was pulled in a year or two.
I mention Stage3D because it was emblematic of Adobe's approach to handling Flash Player performance issues: hand the developer the tools to make new content performant, and rely upon them to make their movies run fast. The most egregious example of this, to me, is Starling Framework; a complete and total drop-in replacement for the Flash display tree in AS3 that redirected everything to the GPU.
Apple took the opposite approach: performance was built in to the most basic display primitives of the browser. Critically, this meant that even crusty old legacy content would run well in Mobile Safari. Instead of requiring, say, every website ship a virtual DOM just to get decent mobile performance, they implemented hardware layer compositing so that websites would work unchanged.
The Flash equivalent to this would have been integrating hardware acceleration into the native display tree so that everything - even crufty old AS1 movies - would play efficiently. I don't have access to Flash Player internals, so obviously I don't know for certain if this was eventually done. However, the impression I got was that if you wanted GPU compositing, you had to use Stage3D; Flash Player didn't just give it to you.
As for the non-technical points, my citation is this Twitter thread by a (former?) Apple engineer who was involved with much of the engineering on the original iPhone: https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/806098650094940160
"Adobe is a shitty partner" corroborates well with their later behavior with regards to Flash developers, such as...
1. Attempting to charge a 10% revshare for using Stage3D from cross-compiled code
2. Removing the ability to install old versions of Flash/Animate from Creative Cloud, to try and dodge legal liability from the Adobe/Dolby lawsuit
3. Providing a substandard Flash Player exit strategy for developers that wanted to embrace HTML5
4. General lack of polish and maintenance in subsequent versions of Adobe Animate
All of the technical points I mentioned (which, again, are paraphrasing almost a decade's worth of history) are downstream of this. Adobe makes strategic blunders in the name of cost control.
[0] If you count early versions of Flash Lite that only ran on Japanese smartphones next to a bunch of really solid console game spinoffs that westerners never got
[1] From personal experience working on Ruffle, the limiting factor with turning on new features is almost invariably MobileSafari. Also, web push notifications have been a thing for years by now, but Apple still does not support them on iOS.