The irony is that AS3 felt more Java-esque than JavaScript.
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
371–380 of 508 posts
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…
> the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types You can type args and returns. One of the biggest things I relied on when I coded AS3
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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#373This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao…
> interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions Interaction, animation, sound, and dimensions have their place in the web. That place is in a small percentage of websites. Very small. Flash was possibly a better tool for that small percentage of websites (games and something else I guess?). I, for one, am glad I can read a fucking blog article these days without it being rendered through an animated page flip whic…
Well, the new trend is to hijack your scrollbar. You scroll down and things start go left and right. Not much better.
There will always be some retarded "UX" designers for breaking things that work.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#374End 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.
I just have to throw in my 2 cents here. Actionscript outclasses any other language I've used for building custom UI components or just plain experimentation (I'm looking at you in particular, C#). My favorite experience with the language - building a dynamic GIS mapping engine using item renderers. It pains me to no end to watch this designer-friendly* language fade away into oblivion. Thanks Adobe.
*at least for me
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#375I 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…
I'm not so sure Adobe failed. It was ahead of it's time, and the slowly but surely the market caught up. And then Jobs put the nail in the coffin.
Some technologies are meant to come, leave their mark, and then go. That's just the way it is sometimes. But that doesn't mean Adobe failed.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about Safari?
Whoops, I totally didn't notice that was missing from the list. That being said, while Apple hasn't explicitly said they plan to remove Flash from desktop Safari, they've implicitly signalled it -- they've already got features in place which make it often only load on demand.
There's not much to remove. You install Flash on macOS separately and Safari will load that in as a plugin. It seems obvious that Safari will remove that plugin functionality on or before 2020.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#377What about FrameMaker?
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#378This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao…
This has nothing to do with Flash, but a move in design trends.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#379End 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.
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…
To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.
Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
As is common, Apple uses the term “panic” to describe the OS itself failing. “Crash” is reserved for applications.
If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if…
You need to let this go. You're trying to argue something that everyone understood well at the time. Thousands of news stories followed up on every detail in that letter and it was very clear what Apple meant.