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

blogs.adobe.com

61–70 of 508 posts

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

#61
post #6

I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.

Lots of games, but that's about it.

It was a path to programming for a lot of artistic minded kids who enjoy learning things on their own. They could start by slowly adding programming to animations until it became a game they could share with their friends. A lot of these people grew up into development jobs. I think if the barrier to learning was picking up ES6 and React or Unity before being able to make a functional game, a lot of them would not have gotten started.

This is not a small thing.

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

#62

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

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

#63

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…

Not uncommon for these kind of giant step backwards in the world of computing.

I was in a plane the other day sitting next to an elderly gentleman who saw me using Apple products. He then proceeded to tell me how he's been on mac since 1984, and absolutely loved Apple products before, but now he's stuck on OS X 10.6 because it's the last version that supports AppleWorks, a tool he's been using for over 20 years. No currently supported tool gives him the flexibility and power he had with Apple Works - embedding multiple documents of different types (spreadsheet, word processing, etc) within one another, not to mention the thousands of AppleWorks documents he's accumulated over the years. However, most websites and new products don't work on 10.6, so he has another modern computer just for browsing the web. (George R R Martin similarly has an old computer sitting around just to use his favorite 20 year old word processor of choice)

Flash is similar - I have animator friends who maintain an old copy of Windows XP because they love Flash's interface and no other tool comes close.

The news yesterday about MSPaint potentially going away (I think MS back pedaled on it?) falls in the same category - powerful tools that pretty much can't be improved upon that get randomly EoL'd.

Another thing that happens pretty often - tools randomly losing functionality in an update because the developer felt that it should be removed for whatever reason.

Maybe there would be a niche for a minimal Linux distro that comes with a set of powerful, minimalistic creation tools (office documents, multimedia manipulation + viewing, etc - whatever covers the computing needs of 90% of the population) that gets updated with security updates etc but has 1) backwards compatibility and 2) a user interface that mostly never changes as primary goals.

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

#64
> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

Why not open source it and make Flash the open format instead?

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

#65

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…

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.

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

#66

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?

From what I recall there were quite a few, most of them discontinued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Wallaby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy

There's also https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki

I guess most of them are more or less dead :-/

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

#67

> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats. Why not open source it and make Flash the open format instead?

That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of what most everyone in web development (and possibly on the web, period) wants.

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

#68
post #59

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…

Looks dead, but https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon

More up to date, but still looks dead: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

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

#69

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?

How come? It will stop receiving updates, not end.

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

#70
post #59

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…

Looks dead, but https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon

Shumway was a followup to this. Flash -> Gordon -> Shumway ;-)

But they're all dormant/dead. Compatibility is really hard.

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