[HN Gopher] Tracing the Sprawling Roots of Flash Preservation
___________________________________________________________________
Tracing the Sprawling Roots of Flash Preservation
Author : cpeterso
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-03-19 03:48 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| cft wrote:
| Flash is better than HTML5. If Google instead of Adobe bought
| Macromedia, and open sourced it (at least in the read-only mode
| like Android), things could have turned out very different: it
| could have been a part of Chromium and a web standard.
| ksec wrote:
| >it could have been the part of Chromium and a web standard.
|
| This. Or Adobe could still open source it now.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Adobe only really cared about Flash as a video player the
| rest of it got more and more neglected as time went on.
|
| I feel maybe when they were given the ultimatums to optimize
| it for mobile the talent just wasn't left on the team to pull
| it off.
|
| A lot of people forget but a few years before the iPhone they
| did have a similar problem it used to run atrocious on Macs
| vs PCs even at similar specs but Apple managed to strong arm
| them into finally optimizing it properly to work the same.
| egypturnash wrote:
| They cared about it as a write-once-run-everywhere
| platform, too. There was a phase where they were pushing
| the heck out of that. They even crammed a few Flash
| palettes into Illustrator (and probably some of their other
| tools, but that's what I mostly use) - you'd know you'd
| opened one of those up when there was suddenly a weird
| little UI that was just different enough from the rest of
| the computer to drive you nuts, and your fans would spin
| up.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I think that flash palette stuff was just a case of
| building that is easier for developers at the expense of
| users. They still do it today but with HTML, you can feel
| it booting up browsers just to display a few buttons out
| of laziness.
| echelon wrote:
| Flash needs to come back. It was incredibly elegant and easy to
| author. The format is open, so there's no reason we shouldn't
| resurrect it.
|
| HTML+JS+CSS is such a crappy alternative for animation.
|
| Looking forward, it'll be incredibly hard to archive our "modern"
| web animations. Everyone does it differently, and the results are
| spread across dozens of files and a hodgepodge of libraries.
| Flash is self-contained in a single file and the platform has
| everything you need baked in. Easy.
|
| You didn't even need a website for flash. You could download the
| swf and play it locally, like a movie file or gif. And you could
| even share them with friends. It was amazing.
|
| The only reason we don't have Flash is because of Steve Jobs. He
| killed it out of greed so he could gatekeep his platform.
| ksec wrote:
| I just wish Adobe Open Source Flash.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > He killed it out of greed so he could gatekeep his platform.
|
| And maybe out of spite... I heard from an Adobe exec that it
| was payback for not agreeing to make Flash exclusive to mac
| (something Jobs had requested many years earlier).
| prox wrote:
| I don't feel flash necessarily needs to come back, but if we
| look at current content creation for the web, it is indeed poor
| in terms of animation or even experiments that can be easily
| authored. The web is made for coders one could say, not
| artists. Currently I work with Godot and I hope their html5
| export might bring back some of that magic.
| brk wrote:
| _Flash needs to come back._
|
| I always associate Flash with security issues and massive
| resource utilization. While it made some thing easier to
| implement on a page, the "applet" concept of embedded things
| like Flash and Java also seems antiquated right now.
|
| Not really of a fan of resurrecting Flash.
| zackbrown wrote:
| "Flash" was the creation environment: code IDE + vector
| design + timeline animation tool. "Flash Player" was the
| portable applet-style runtime.
|
| > not really a fan of resurrecting Flash
|
| Sounds like you're not a fan of resurrecting Flash Player.
| The previous poster (GP) was pining for a resurrection of
| Flash. You're talking about different things.
| brk wrote:
| Fair point, but I don't recall Flash "things" ever being
| usable in anything other than some form of a Flash Player,
| so if the player was suboptimal, it kinda ruins the whole
| thing, no?
| zackbrown wrote:
| > so if the player was suboptimal, it kinda ruins the
| whole thing, no?
|
| Agreed! Flash is dead for a reason, and that reason --
| while manifold and complicated and political and
| commercial -- really boils down to Flash Player.
|
| Back to OP's claim: "Flash needs to come back". I believe
| they're really pining for (because I pine for) "a
| creative environment where design, animation, and code
| coexist -- and where every project can be deployed to any
| device." That was the fulfilled promise of Flash&Player
| in the 90's/00's.[1]
|
| It will look technically different next time around
| (WASM? Native mobile targets? Native desktop targets?
| Modern collaboration/version control?), but I firmly
| agree with OP that creative environment needs to happen
| -- will happen -- again.
|
| [1] Incidentally, that's the presently fulfilled promise
| of Unity3D for games.
| ihuman wrote:
| > "Flash" was the creation environment: code IDE + vector
| design + timeline animation tool
|
| I thought that still exists? Adobe renamed "Flash
| Professional" to "Adobe Animate", and they're continuing to
| update it.
| zackbrown wrote:
| Adobe Animate is a zombie.
|
| After Effects overshadows it for animation and Animate's
| "interactive application development" story is bloated
| and crufty. It's not adapted to the present-day
| software+hardware ecosystem like Flash&Player were in the
| 90's/00's -- and it never will be.
| aeontech wrote:
| I agreed with everything you wrote wholeheartedly except for
| the very last line. The fact is that Adobe tried for years to
| get Flash to be stable and performant on Android... and failed.
|
| So, yeah, there were good technical reasons not to have it on
| mobile devices in that state.
|
| Adobe couldn't hack it, and they refused to open source it so
| that anyone else could give it a shot. It's sad, truly. They
| could have gifted it to the community once it became clear that
| they were not going to make any more money on it, and there
| could have been an evolution over time - certainly there were
| enough passionate developers who loved the platform...
|
| There's been nothing like Flash since then for ease of use and
| creativity... I know multiple people whose entire careers
| started with messing around with it as ten year old kids... Now
| kids are putting that creativity into Roblox or Minecraft I
| suppose, but it doesn't seem like the same sort of thing.
| _shakes fist at cloud_
|
| Although, on the bright side, Haxe [1] still exists, and is
| very very cool.
|
| [1]: https://haxe.org
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Not sure Flash has to come back, lots of obvious problems and
| evolution dictated otherwise.
|
| Someone mentioned "web is for coders, not artists"
|
| Unfortunately true. And moreso very recently.
|
| The influence of engineers and dev culture on "web design" has
| turned it into a very dev-heavy, over-engineered, coder paradise
| -- and killed a large chunk of the 'art' of web design. And taken
| flash with it of course. There's no tools for the artistry that
| Flash provided and so it's gone to the wayside. Hopefully moves
| with animation libraries and webgl etc will change that, seems to
| be a growing movement/increase in capabilities as far as ease of
| use/tools etc...
| King-Aaron wrote:
| This was a real hit of nostalgia for me. I also started my web
| development career by building flash games and movies, and still
| haven't found any technology that comes close to being as 'easy'
| to work with.
|
| I've got so many half-finished movies and games I'd love to dust
| off and finish, but I guess they're all condemned to memories
| these days.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > I guess they're all condemned to memories these days
|
| Don't let them fade away! As mentioned in the article... check
| out ruffle: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
|
| I was able to drop that on the page of a flash movie that I
| have hosted for nearly 20 years and it's working again without
| the flash player. It was insanely easy and works great!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-19 23:03 UTC)