[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why Adobe still can't figure out Flash on WASM?
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Ask HN: Why Adobe still can't figure out Flash on WASM?
Figma was just bought by Adobe, we all know that. Word "Adobe"
brought back to me the memories of early days of my career when I
was a Macromedia/Adobe Flash developer and I was working on
websites very heavyweight both graphically and animation-wise. In
2022 we have SVG, WebGL, canvas, sound API and we can practically
rebuild many of those Flash websites. They were accessibility
disasters, but today we can do much better. All this makes me
think: why Adobe haven't finished yet Flash export to HTML5/WASM
which is easy and popular? What's stopping them? Money or technical
obstacles? I can imagine the targeting all the browsers both
desktop and mobile and QAing all of that is hard, but feels like
doable and web platform is pretty reliable these days? And the
final question: can people from Figma help Adobe to make Flash
actually work? Figma is one of the best WASM/WebGL apps out there
which (I presume) very experienced engineering team. I've read the
blog post when they were running JS interpreter compiled to WASM in
a web worker to create secure sandbox used as plugin environment.
All of it just works. Can they help?
Author : bartq
Score : 152 points
Date : 2022-09-19 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
| Fiahil wrote:
| > In 2022 we have SVG, WebGL, canvas, sound API and we can
| practically rebuild many of those Flash websites.
|
| Note that Ankama is still using Flash for its MMORPG, Dofus.
|
| They're moving it to Unity, FWIW.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Agree with the other comments that WebAssembly is the future of
| rich interactive content on the web. You don't have to look any
| further than the mega acquisition of Figma last week to know the
| growing importance of cross-platform applications powered by
| standards like WebGL and WebAssembly.
|
| Developers are getting more and more fed up that they have to go
| through walled gardens in order to distribute games and apps to
| reach their users, while forfeiting 30% of their revenue. A
| powerful, easy to use content creation tool with a discovery
| portal on the web represents a large opportunity to disrupt all
| of the walled gardens.
|
| Unity and Unreal haven't historically had great developer tooling
| and exporting support for the web, but mark my words that this
| will rapidly change moving into 2023.
|
| As a sort of litmus test, who here would use an editor that
| itself is web based, for authoring interactive 3D content for the
| web that could itself be published HTML5 via WASM and WebGPU?
| Think "Figma or Canva for real-time 3D". It would have strong
| UI/UX, and open up the market to more than just creators and
| software developers. East to use drag and drop tools, with
| scripting and plugins available for the technical community.
|
| Upvote this post or leave a comment if this is something that you
| would use.
| bartq wrote:
| Yes, tell more.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| Besides reasons that are already listed here keep und mind that
| Flash offered more APIs that browsers still don't have - and so
| you can't translate them to anything. RTMP based video streaming
| was one of those. Some other networking APIs might be other
| cases. Of course you could make it work with less APIs - but the
| usage ping of ,,your app might or might not work when translated"
| is a bit smaller
| knicholes wrote:
| Adobe created a tool similar to flash that exports in web
| technologies. It's called "Adobe Animate."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not a new tool, it's just the evolution of the old Flash
| Editor.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I doubt it's a technical or staffing issue but more likely lack
| of a clear business incentive and internal politics issue.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| What's in it for them? Flash is dead, creators and (web-)app
| developers moved on to HTML5+ APIs and JS libraries/frameworks.
|
| Why would anyone go back to flash, even if it became available
| again?
| bartq wrote:
| People would return to the great animation timeline and vector
| graphics. And all of this is scriptable. You don't have
| something like this today outside of Flash (Adobe Animate)
| really.
| randomdata wrote:
| If you build it, they will come is a fun premise for a movie
| but in reality the market just isn't there. Better video
| delivery means that animations have moved there, better
| HTML/Javascript/CSS means that interactive applications have
| moved there, games have moved to game development
| environments (Unity, etc.), and where there is no clear
| alternative the work is thought to be kitschy and outdated
| these days so those works have largely disappeared. Animate
| serves what niche audience remains.
| warent wrote:
| Seems like a project they would have to take on out of the
| goodness of their hearts, because I don't see how it makes their
| business meaningfully more valuable. Basically I'm not sure I see
| how the investment in this technology makes any business sense
| for them
| DonnyV wrote:
| That boat sailed a looooong time ago.
| delirehberi wrote:
| dead must stay dead
| dathinab wrote:
| Counter question: Why should they spend money on it?
|
| When they discontinued Flash WASM wasn't an option.
|
| Now they already have abandoned Flash, told everyone to move one
| and most of the monetary profitable ecosystem _did_ move on.
|
| And while there are probably still some companies willing to pay
| for new flash support for their legacy application it's unlikely
| to be worth it for Adobe.
|
| Lastly even if you could create Adobe Flash WASM it's non trivial
| to make it down to bug compatible with Flash. But exactly that is
| the kind of compatibility is what remaining legacy customers
| want.
|
| So IMHO it's less that they can't do it but more that for the for
| profit company Adobe it makes little sense.
| pier25 wrote:
| The Internet Archive uses Ruffle to do just that:
|
| https://ruffle.rs/
|
| See the famous Badger SWF:
|
| https://archive.org/details/flash_badger
| andrew_ wrote:
| Ruffle seems to have some issues on Brave on archive.org.
|
| _TypeError: Failed to execute 'compile' on 'WebAssembly': An
| argument must be provided, which must be a Response or
| Promise<Response> object_
| josefx wrote:
| https://z0r.de/0 also uses it to keep its collection of flash
| loops running.
|
| Edit: Warning some of the loops may be considered NSFW, most
| have sound.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Homestar Runner is doing the same thing. The entire site has
| been revived using Ruffle.
|
| https://www.homestarrunner.com/
| sp332 wrote:
| As the Ruffle page says right on it, Action Script 3 API
| support is at 5%. If they had the original source code and only
| had to cross compile to WASM, this would go a lot faster. Which
| is what OP asked.
| lightspot21 wrote:
| It's much more than that. The homepage hasn't been updated in
| ages. Recently they had the first fully playable game
| (Wonderputt): https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/577928,
| with more partially playable.
|
| Still needs work but it's exciting stuff.
| adrian17 wrote:
| Dev here: that "5%" number was way overdue, I just bumped it
| :) After over a year of slowly adding bits and pieces without
| anything actually working, we finally had a breakthrough with
| some nontrivial games starting to work this month. Still a
| ways to go though.
| sp332 wrote:
| Hey, good to hear!
| kraig911 wrote:
| I too was there. But I think you're neglecting to realize that
| today people aren't necessarily attracted to flash sites anymore
| (unfortunately) with the advent of the current convention of web
| user interfaces things like flash made don't fit in. I wonder if
| in 15 years we'll be asking what happened to
| bootstrap/material/ant ui frameworks much the same way.
|
| On your point though for actual apps in WASM that are more than
| just making a 'cool popping interface' there is a future. I also
| can attest that Lottie in icon design and animation is super fun.
| Also the sound API still sucks.
| sbarre wrote:
| Flash had terrible accessibility support, and with the
| increasingly mandatory use of Internet sites and resources for
| everyone, including those needing accommodation, it's best that
| Flash stays dead, at least in its previous incarnation.
| bsder wrote:
| Erm, this exists and it's called Ruffle:
| https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
|
| It works quite decently, but they can always use help.
| null_object wrote:
| For those people in the thread talking about Adobe Animate or
| AirBnB's Lottie - Flash was capable of so much more than frame-
| by-frame animation.
|
| As long ago as around 2001, with ActionScript 1 or 2, I was
| already building smart drag-and-drop calendar applications, where
| conference attendees could book all their sessions online in an
| easy-to-use and intuitive interface, that included tips, and
| complex hover states, with extra information at user's
| fingertips.
|
| I'd say web-apps are almost getting to the same state of
| sophistication and user-friendliness around about now.
|
| After that, with ActionScript 3, I was building interactive and
| immersive promo sites where users could explore alternative
| environments, build their own 3D worlds, or do crazy stuff like
| mash-up their own facial features (captured through their webcam)
| together with different celebrity musician's faces, and then do a
| remix of the musician's music (for an 'art' event that the
| musicians were taking part in).
|
| There were masses of other capabilities - both serious and
| playful - but I must admit, even though I'm sometimes sad we lost
| Flash, in the end - especially when it was obvious that Adobe had
| let it drift - it was a shitshow of insecurity and bandwidth-
| waste.
| dvirsky wrote:
| AS3 was really great for its time. 15 years ago it had stuff
| we've seen go mainstream afterwards - the language was like
| modern Typescript, it had components and React like behaviors,
| I did a couple of projects on it and it was a joy - besides the
| VM being crappy. HTML and Javascript today are better than what
| it was then, but it was years ahead of web technology at the
| time.
| laundermaf wrote:
| As you probably know, what you describe has already long been
| possible without Flash too, just look at FWA. Immersive 3D
| experiences "in HTML5" are now 10 years old on FWA. I know
| because I was there. The only difference is that they now cost
| more, but also are not as requested, as mentioned in a comment
| in this thread:
|
| > heavy, high-gloss interactions akin to what Flash afforded
| and what could be accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what
| people want in their mobile browsing experience
| dekhn wrote:
| Flash is EOL and Adobe no longer supports it. Why would Adobe
| want to continue with Flash? It was a mistake. They have disowned
| it because to own it would be to own a dumpster fire that keeps
| on burning.
|
| If you have SVG, WebGL, canvas, and sound API just use those
| directly, don't make a flash portability layer.
| trynewideas wrote:
| They don't want to.
| thomasqbrady wrote:
| There are a lot of answers here I partially agree with, but
| there's an overarching concept that I think they're missing:
| there's no market for it. Adobe never stopped working on such a
| tool, as others have pointed out below, in that they still ship
| Flash's successor Animate. They kept Flex going as long as they
| could, too.
|
| I think the reason people aren't terribly aware of Animate, and
| why there isn't a competitor product--whether open source or
| commercial--with a big name is that we don't need/want it. I
| haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but last I checked most
| web traffic was coming from mobile devices, and heavy, high-gloss
| interactions akin to what Flash afforded and what could be
| accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what people want in their
| mobile browsing experience. They want fast. WASM/WebGL may be
| pretty efficient, and may be the best way to accomplish the sorts
| of things Flash was used for in much more efficient ways, but
| they're still not the best way to render text with a few buttons
| and images (i.e. a typical web page). The use-cases that had us
| reaching for Flash in the "aughts" just don't come up very often
| in web development these days.
|
| When users DO want heavy, high-gloss interactive content, they're
| going to the App Store/Google Play to find it, not the web. This
| gives the developers the choice of building those experiences
| with WASM/WebGL if they like, but the vast majority are choosing
| native SDKs or a game engines. Against those options the
| WASM/WebGL offering is just not competitive, yet (the APIs,
| tooling, community is just not as good, yet).
| rchaud wrote:
| > I think the reason people aren't terribly aware of Animate,
| and why there isn't a competitor product--whether open source
| or commercial--with a big name is that we don't need/want it.
|
| I disagree. I think the reasons Animate didn't take off are
| three-fold:
|
| 1) Developer Attrition from 2010-2015: HTML5/CSS3 features did
| not match 1:1 with what was possible in Flash alone. There was
| also far more fragmentation in mobile browser support than
| there was on desktop, making mobile compatibility a risk. Which
| leads us to:
|
| 2) Push to develop for native mobile platforms: Flash was a
| major game dev platform. If you wanted to sell games on iOS,
| you had to use their platform and nothing else.
|
| 3) Creators focused on video, not web: the 2000s were a great
| time for interactive content because the desktop web was the
| one medium through which everybody accessed information online.
| If you made a great Flash project, it'd find its way around the
| world. The 2010s changed that by putting Youtube and a
| cameraphone in everyone's hand. People were able to monetize
| videos in ways they never could with Flash, so that was another
| nail in its coffin.
| paulgb wrote:
| I think something like what you're wishing for will happen, but I
| don't think it will come from Adobe.
|
| I explored a bunch of apps in this category over the weekend and
| was pretty impressed with what's out there, although it still
| feels early. Rive (https://rive.app/) is probably the one I'm
| most excited about; their state-machine approach is novel (at
| least to me) and feels like a solid approach. Unfortunately they
| don't support text yet, which is a deal-breaker for what I wanted
| to do, but they say it's coming.
|
| The Lottie (https://airbnb.design/lottie/) ecosystem is also
| interesting. Funny enough, Adobe still seems to dominate as a
| pipeline for generating Lottie files (Illustrator -> After
| Effects), even though you need a third-party plugin to do it.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| It's weird that I don't hear much about Lottie. Maybe it just
| hasn't hit the network effect yet, but it's pretty exciting.
| And (IIRC) the low level rendering engines like Skia are
| implementing it.
| cahoot_bird wrote:
| The closest I've seen to original flash animation development
| interface is wick editor https://www.wickeditor.com but it
| doesn't seem to have a lot of support or be well known. It's
| probably better for targeting games and animation.
| davidork wrote:
| Adobe flash was like lead paint, irradiated water and asbestos
| insulation... at one point in time it seemed like a good idea,
| but in hindsight they were terrible ideas and should just be left
| behind.
| dralexmac wrote:
| I worked at Adobe on a project called Alchemy (just like WASM,
| but for compiling c/c++ to actionscript to run inside the flash
| player). One of my internal demos was the flash player compiled
| into a SWF running Flash inside Flash. So if someone currently at
| Adobe wanted to dredge up my old branches they'd have a good
| starting place :)
| numair wrote:
| Wow. The fact that you did this work, and Adobe didn't do
| anything useful with it, indicates that you had some extremely
| lousy managers and executives above you in the org chart. I'm
| glad you left, for your sake!
| dralexmac wrote:
| Not at all, I worked with some amazing people there, but the
| writing was on the wall for Flash - Alchemy was moderately
| successful (we showed the unreal engine running in a browser
| via it ages ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywh9KJ7a_Bk)
| numair wrote:
| I guess you're right... but there really isn't anything
| that has replaced the ease of use and functionality of
| Flash. It is a definite loss for society, as large numbers
| of non-programmers are unable to use a tool to create rich
| interactive environments that can be used by large numbers
| of people. I suppose this was always going to happen given
| that we were entering a mobile-first world, but it's sad!
| jonplackett wrote:
| I still miss flash. I mean, it was crap it a lot of ways. BUT it
| brought creative people and the ability to create a website (or
| other interactive fun thing) closer than they've ever been.
|
| Why adobe didn't create a great html5 authoring application
| (basically the same as flash) I'll never know.
| mdasen wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out what you're arguing for. A) Exporting
| legacy Flash apps from 15 years ago to WASM; B) Relaunching Flash
| as an active development platform on top of WASM.
|
| If it's A, then there's no money in it. There might be some
| nostalgia in resurrecting old Flash apps, but it just isn't worth
| Adobe putting in all that work.
|
| If it's B, I think there's a host of issues to relaunching Flash
| as an active development platform.
|
| First, I think the biggest thing is that the development
| community likely wouldn't want to buy into a proprietary system
| again. Yes, it would compile to WASM, but you'd be on the hook to
| Adobe for the future of whatever you were building. That might
| have been ok back when there weren't other options to create that
| type of media. I don't think you could get enough buy-in today.
|
| Second, WASM isn't just perfect. I'm very bullish on WASM's
| future, but to pick on one example: it doesn't have a garbage
| collector. That means that any runtime that needs GC needs to
| ship its own GC. Instead of a lightweight JS payload, people have
| to download your garbage collector in addition to the code.
| Likewise, many languages often come with standard libraries so
| you're shipping your implementation for `List`, `Set`, etc. along
| with the code of the actual application. With JS, the browser
| already has the built-ins.
|
| Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into Blazor on WASM
| (allowing developers to write C# with Razor templates that
| execute in the browser to compete against things like React).
| It's been a pretty big effort and as of .NET 6 it's still around
| half the speed of React+Redux. Worse, its startup time is 3-6x
| worse depending on whether you're using AOT compilation or not.
| Ahead of time compilation helps it run faster, but it also means
| having to download a lot more. Even without AOT, Blazor could
| weigh in close to 10x React+Redux.
|
| Again, I'm very bullish about WASM's future. .NET 7 (releasing in
| a month or two) should have nice improvements for Blazor.
| However, it's not easy to simply target WASM if you're looking to
| create a platform that people are wanting to actively use. I
| think that Blazor is going to be a wonderful long-term investment
| for Microsoft. WASM is looking to add GC capabilities so that
| languages don't have to ship it. Languages are getting better at
| figuring out which pieces of code are actually being used and
| need to be shipped.
|
| However, does Adobe want to put all that money and effort in when
| it seems like the industry won't be beholden to a proprietary
| standard in the future? Probably not.
|
| I think the big issue is that there's a large gulf between "this
| works" and "this is performant and efficient enough to compete
| with alternatives." Again, I think WASM is an excellent long-term
| investment for the web. If WASM had started in 2000 or 2005, we
| probably wouldn't have seen such amazing work on JS engines like
| V8. However, WASM needs to compete against incredibly advanced JS
| engines that are at the top of their game. It will happen and I
| think it's already great for languages like Rust and C. I just
| think that it wouldn't be trivial for Adobe to relaunch Flash as
| an active development platform.
|
| Adobe wouldn't just need something that worked, but something
| that's a compelling alternative to modern development. Flash pre-
| dates jQuery by a decade. In the '90s and early 2000s, Macromedia
| and Adobe were offering an interactive, rich-media system that
| pre-dated anyone really using Ajax. I'm not saying Flash offers
| nothing today. I never developed for Flash so maybe it was a nice
| development environment. However, we're able to make the same
| rich, interactive experiences without Flash today.
|
| Finally, on a legal level, it looks like Adobe may have licensed
| Flash to Harman/Samsung:
| https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe. Maybe that doesn't
| preclude Adobe from resuming Flash development in the future, but
| maybe it does.
| SimianLogic wrote:
| My favorite recent take on the "why" if you want to dive down a
| rabbit hole:
|
| https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-future-of-games-is-an-in...
|
| I think the development community would absolutely buy into a
| proprietary system again. We haven't seen a good 2d vector
| engine for games to replace Flash, but screens keep getting
| bigger and denser.
|
| I mostly prototype in typescript/Pixi these days when I tinker
| on small games, but the workflow is nowhere near as nice as
| "author assets in Flash -> import directly in AS3." Flash was
| also a game engine and asset pipeline. I'd be super pleased if
| someone built a typescript version of Flash's display tree +
| vector rendering + authoring tools.
| bartq wrote:
| I'm arguing for B.
|
| What I care about is timeline, assets, library, keyframes,
| movie clips, drawing tools, text formatting, tweening and much
| more. All in one package, cmd+enter to see the output. Maybe
| even these days cmd+enter is too much, the output should be
| immediate and even better - live. Bret Victor would not be
| happy about not-live (dead!) scene. Definitely I don't want to
| resurrect old Flash. TypeScript is much nicer than AS3, even
| though AS3 had E4X which I remember to be quite powerful even
| compared do poor JSX.
|
| I think you're right about missing GC and shipping `List`,
| `Set` etc. to the user as a part of the runtime. But, if that
| can chunked out and be stored on a CDN and downloaded only once
| for a browser session, then this problem won't hurt that much.
| Once GC is added to the platform I'd love to see Figma-quality
| reincarnation of Flash in an B-option (from your post) manner.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Adobe Flash was rebranded Adobe Animate and does exactly what you
| are asking about, except the WASM part, I believe.
| miedpo wrote:
| It was licensing issues. Their audio system used some proprietary
| stuff, for instance. I remember reading somewhere (perhaps here)
| that some of the Adobe Developers wanted to open source flash in
| the 2011-2012-ish time period, and it was the licensing that
| prevented them from doing that. Can't find the reference though
| (sorry!).
|
| Now most people just do things in other languages. Flash was a
| very nice platform to target though. It got a lot of things
| right.
| easrng wrote:
| There is a company that got Flash working in WASM but they don't
| have public pricing so it's probably crazy expensive.
| https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
| captainmuon wrote:
| I believe Flash was killed in agreement with Apple. The big app
| store players can't allow Flash (or HTML5) apps to be just as
| good as native apps, or they would lose their walled garden. This
| is especially true for Apple.
|
| I can imagine there was a secret deal to uncerimoniously run
| Flash down. What did Adobe get in return? Maybe the assurance
| that Apple doesn't make iCloud the only allowed cloud service, so
| that Adobe could make profit with CC subscriptions?
|
| A graphical RAD tool would have a big market, if you think of how
| widespread Flash was. Or if you think about old VB6, Delphi, and
| the raise of no-code. There is really a need for a simple
| interaction design tool that lets you click together a working
| graphical interface. (Now that I think about it, maybe this could
| grow out of Figma?)
| 60654 wrote:
| About ten years ago Adobe made a strategic decision to kill
| Flash.
|
| They stopped working on ActionScript tools (Flash IDE, AS3
| compiler, etc) and switched all their web designer tooling (web
| animations etc) to Javascript. For a while they kept pushing out
| Flash security updates, but only because they had an enormous
| existing install base - but even so, that happened with a
| skeleton crew, and I'm not sure it's still being maintained.
|
| So yeah, there's nothing stopping them now - because they already
| stopped years ago.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >About ten years ago Adobe made a strategic decision to kill
| Flash.
|
| And they did good. Flash was buggy af.
| InitialBP wrote:
| It's worth noting that there was a lot of pressure from the
| major browsers to deprecate flash due to security issues
| throughout the years. Flash produced a lot of great media but
| in the end it wasn't built with security in mind, and security
| is much more important today than it was 10 years ago. I don't
| know what it would take to revamp and then port flash over to
| some other platform, but I imagine that they'd be better off to
| just build a new system from scratch and aspire to capture a
| bit of that old flash magic.
|
| List of CVEs for flash player - lots of 10s in there.
| https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...
| cogman10 wrote:
| From what I've heard, it wasn't adobe that made that decision
| but rather apple. Apple disallowing flash on iOS was what
| caused adobe to kill flash.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ultimately, it was Adobe. Jobs tried at length to get Adobe
| to produce a Flash runtime that was efficient enough for
| mobile battery use, and they just wouldn't/couldn't. So he
| just gave up and didn't support Flash. But he had no choice
| because it was such a battery hog, but end users wouldn't
| understand and would blame Apple for poor performance.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Adobe decided to promulgate a cesspool of insecure code. They
| did it to themselves.
| nimbix wrote:
| They made a suite of replacement tools under the name of "Adobe
| Edge", then they killed those as well.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Flash Player is still being maintained but only for the Chinese
| market and that contract expires next year. Adobe AIR is now
| owned by HARMAN because apparently a bunch of car infotainment
| systems used it.
|
| Adobe's official answer to Flash on HTML5 was "rewrite your AS3
| app in CreateJS and use Animate's HTML5 exporter to export your
| timeline as a series of bitmap spritesheets". This is not at
| all what Flash developers needed, but Adobe is a terrible
| steward of their own platforms, so its what they did.
|
| As a result it forced a lot of Adobe's own customers to jump
| ship for greener pastures. The game developers jumped to Unity,
| the web developers to Lottie and GSAP, and the animators to
| Toon Boom.
| derefr wrote:
| > This is not at all what Flash developers needed
|
| I mean, the product was already Adobe _Animate_ for years at
| that point -- a tool for animators, not IxD developers; where
| the intended export product is a video raw to be fed into
| AfterEffects, and any ActionScript support only existed to do
| things like character rigging automation, mouth-flap
| sequencing, etc. In other words, for replay-time (= render-
| time) computation, not for interaction.
|
| The Animate runtime had essentially, at that point, evolved
| out of being a _software_ runtime per se, and had become
| something rather more like a custom demoscene "demo" runtime
| -- an abstract machine tuned for compactly representing
| instructions to procedurally generate a video+audio stream
| when executed. Something more closely related to mod-tracker
| abstract machines than to a thing like the JVM.
|
| I'm not surprised that everyone else left; the product for
| IxD folks ceased to exist in 2016, when it was renamed. That
| it still _kind of_ worked if you did this or that was a
| coincidence, not intentional.
|
| I _am_ surprised that the animators themselves then left.
| What made them leave? The whole product still works just fine
| (if not better) for their use-case.
| Malic wrote:
| Car infotainment systems use Flash!?
|
| That's ... terrifying.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Not as terrifying as the fact that my new BMW has a
| node_modules.
| cprecioso wrote:
| And also video game menus for most of the 2000s
| elzbardico wrote:
| Probably not modern systems. I hope.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| What's terrifying about it? Those are closed off systems
| hat provide exactly the user interface they are supposed to
| do. It's not like they would run arbitrary code or are in
| any way modifiable by end users.
|
| I've worked in Adobe air based infotainment systems 10
| years back, and it was a great technology.
| Actionscript3/MXML was at that time far more advanced than
| JavaScript. It took maybe another 5 years and typescript
| and react to catch up.
| 60secs wrote:
| Cars aren't closed systems. They have bluetooth/wifi.
| Increasing the attack surface on a vehicle security is
| negligence which can easily result in loss of property
| and life.
| YbW4PaUX7AjenKB wrote:
| Ah, yes, those closed off systems that are usually
| exploitable because no one designing them thinks about
| security... as shown by decision like _using Flash_.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| At least in the projects I've been involved with a lot of
| thoughts went into system design and security. The flash
| layer is really just a user interface. It renders nothing
| else than whatever UI code was developed. To interact
| with other components in the car (whether it's adjusting
| temperature or playing back music) it makes IPC calls to
| services which are responsible for that. So even media
| playback and potential associated security issues won't
| have anything to do with the UI. It's no better or worse
| security wise than if you would do the UI in QT or any of
| the proprietary frameworks that had been used before. It
| just provided way better tooling and graphical
| capabilities.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| bitmap spritesheets? Wouldn't that be converting vector
| graphics into a bitmap format? So a huge step backwards?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes. And also yes.
|
| The graphics primitives the web provides are actually not
| that great at emulating Flash's specific graphics model.
| SVG and canvas differ from Flash in a few key areas,
| especially to do with masking; and WebGL/WebGPU are very
| low-level and rendering vectors on GPU is hell.
|
| This could have been fixed by having Animate switch to an
| SVG+SMIL renderer for HTML5 projects, but Adobe wanted a
| quick fix to keep Animate relevant beyond Flash Player.
| [deleted]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Unity is way too heavy to replace the types of games that
| used to exist on Flash. And Lottie, GSAP, Framer Motion et
| al. don't really approach the comprehensive platform that was
| Flash. They're good animation primitives in their own right,
| but nothing to me has ever felt as intuitive as piecing a few
| key frames together in Flash and outputting a single file
| that could be dropped into a webpage with no scripting skills
| necessary.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've been thinking about mobile web UIs that lean heavily
| on WebGL and borrow ideas from video games and AR. I like
| the way some Nintendo DS games (say Paper Mario and Mario &
| Luigi) use touchscreens and also the Unreal framework's
| ability to animate humanoid characters.
|
| I haven't seen it all put together into something that's
| really web friendly though.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Playing with Godot is the first time I've felt like I had
| the power of Flash again. Though I never actually managed
| to write any games in flash, just animations, I had a
| pretty good idea of what you could do, and wanted to, but
| then flash died so I learned other tech.
| randomdata wrote:
| Steve Jobs declared Flash dead. Whether by his influence, or
| simply good timing, the world agreed with him and moved on. What
| market remains is small and not worth putting a lot of effort
| into.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Flash is dead. It's not appropriate for the modern world anymore.
|
| If you want to run it in a VM running a legacy OS, in order to
| play an old game for nostalgic reasons, you have that ability.
| That's different from demanding the whole thing be ported to more
| modern technologies so it runs on modern systems.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Flash was also a fantastic UI toolkit by the way with Flex, so it
| could have actually lived outside the browser and power desktop
| apps, but I guess there is no market in that today.
|
| Flash is long dead, that's your answer and Adobe isn't doing
| anything with it now.
| intrasight wrote:
| Flex was great and was the basis for two of my products. I
| think WASM just arrived too late.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| HTML5 was enough to support Flash content on a browser
| without Wasm. The Haxe folks proved that many times over.
| croes wrote:
| Flash's dead baby, Flash's dead.
| ajxs wrote:
| I'll preface my comment by saying that my earliest experiences
| with programming came from using Actionscript in Macromedia
| Flash. I loved how artistic the internet was in this 'full
| multimedia' era, and I have very fond memories of both the
| internet, and cutting my teeth in web design, and programming.
|
| I see no reason why Adobe would want to. I don't think this is
| how websites are designed these days, or what consumers expect. I
| don't think people want to navigate these kinds of sites anymore.
| The internet is not designed to be an 'experience' these days,
| it's designed to facilitate consumer needs quickly with minimum
| friction. Which is pretty much the opposite of what the high-
| multimedia websites built in Flash were designed to do. Users
| want fast load times, and instant response, not interesting
| animation.
| apignotti wrote:
| From the point of view of Adobe, Flash is a legacy technology.
| Simply put, there is not enough business to be made with it at
| Adobe's scale.
|
| It is safe to assume that the Flash team has either left the
| company or moved to other roles in the meantime. The Flash
| codebase is gigantic, evolved over decades and probably includes
| IP with non-obvious licensing restriction (RTMP is an example
| that pops to mind). Porting to Wasm such a big codebase would
| require assembling a new team and figuring out some legal
| aspects. Both these things are expensive.
|
| At the same time, FOSS efforts to replace Flash can at best
| achieve partial support for SWF content in the wild. The API
| surface is just too massive and poorly documented. I speak from
| personal experience here, having founded the Lightspark project
| when I was younger and with a lot of time on my hands.
|
| Our opinion (at LeaningTech) is that Wasm can solve the Flash
| preservation problem by virtualizing the original, unmodified
| Flash x86 plugin. We wrote at length about our approach here:
| https://medium.com/p/eb6838b7e36f
|
| The resulting product (CheerpX for Flash,
| https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/) is available to
| companies that needs to use Flash (and particularly, Flex)
| business applications.
|
| Since the SWF effectively runs using the original Flash plugin
| the accuracy is optimal. On the hand, licensing the plugin itself
| is required, which means that the solution is not viable for end-
| users. As much as we'd like this to be different, it's
| unfortunately outside of our control.
|
| Full disclosure: I am founder and CTO of Leaning Technologies,
| and lead developer of CheerpX
| apignotti wrote:
| Shameless promotion: a technology like CheerpX has many more
| uses
|
| Our latest demo (PythonFiddle) is discussed here:
| https://leaningtech.com/pythonfiddle-fully-private-client-si...
|
| Direct link: https://pythonfiddle.leaningtech.com
| andrew_ wrote:
| Unsolicited feedback: That's a mouthful of a product name
| there. I can't reason how to properly pronounce it, and it's
| incredibly awkward to read visually. If you're looking for
| adoption and engagement with the project, I'd suggest
| crowdsourcing a new branding.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's clearly pronounced CheraaeerpexxXX. Not awkward at
| all!
| jacob019 wrote:
| I would read it as cheer-pex.
| rtev wrote:
| That makes sense. I feel like it should be spelled
| CheerPex
| cogman10 wrote:
| Someone I know worked on flash at adobe. Long before it was
| "dead" it was "dead". What killed it? According to my
| acquaintance it was Apple. Apple disallowed flash on iOS which
| adobe was counting on as being a big expansion of the flash
| market.
|
| As for the dev environment around flash, according to them it
| was a nightmare codebase not for the faint of heart. It isn't
| surprising that adobe decided not to port it to WASM because it
| was a spaghetti mess.
|
| There's a reason Flash was often a virus vector back in the
| day.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Apple definitely accelerated the process a lot, but Flash on
| Android was abysmal so I think people would have moved away
| from it eventually anyway.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Same with Flash on Windows Mobile before it. Even if Apple
| allowed it (and I shudder to imagine an alternate timeline
| where they did) I doubt Adobe could have made it much
| better.
| titzer wrote:
| I've heard similar anecdotes about the VM being a mess.
|
| Where Adobe seems to have royally screwed up is creating an
| unambiguous specification for SWF format, and also
| disallowing other implementations of SWF. Instead, they
| become beholden to a codebase that no one could make heads or
| tails of, with no way of creating a clean rewrite that was
| guaranteed to replicate the behavior.
|
| In designing Wasm we were very conscious of this, which is
| why Wasm has a very, very explicit specification that is
| simple with only the minimum non-determinism (some NaN
| issues) and no UB.
| masklinn wrote:
| > What killed it? According to my acquaintance it was Apple.
|
| It was definitely what drew the first blood.
|
| But in fairness, a lot of people were crying for blood, flash
| had issues all over, and it was a complete security disaster.
| Apple's decision basically gave everyone the OK to dump on
| it.
|
| It also happened at a time where the idea of open web was
| ascendent, MSIE was being actively fought against, and the
| people involved were out to excise proprietary platforms.
|
| Also all mobile platform flash implementations had been
| absolutely awful, barely usable battery killer even ignoring
| that the UI affordances were just not adapted for mobile
| touchscreen devices.
| deckard1 wrote:
| people that romanticize Flash are selectively remembering
| the cool uses such as Newgrounds and Homestar Runner. They
| are forgetting Flash ads, which were stuffed on a page to
| the point they would crash your browser. Or the constant
| fun of hunt-the-talking-banner. You could always tell when
| you landed on one of these pages by how fast your CPU fans
| started spinning. If your PC sounds like a jet engine,
| you're on a heavy Flash site and should close your browser
| ASAP.
| egfx wrote:
| It's not just about AlbinoBlacksheep and NewGrounds.
| Flash was the most consequential technology on the web's
| frontend prior to and even after html5. It was enabled on
| a staggering 98% of web browsers. So much so it was
| basically synonymous with web browsing. You can trace the
| trail of flash to the invention and adoption of social
| media. There would be no MySpace, no YouTube and Meebo.
| The internet would have had a completely different story.
| rchaud wrote:
| Blaming Flash for talking ads of the mid-2000s is like
| blaming the cement on which a toll booth was erected.
|
| Flash is dead. Autoplaying ads still exist.
| YbW4PaUX7AjenKB wrote:
| To be fair, now those ads are JS and do the same thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Now they get ads using WebAssembly and WebGL instead,
| what an improvement!
| josefresco wrote:
| > It was definitely what drew the first blood.
|
| Lack of iOS compatibility was the nail in the coffin. Our
| web agency already hated Flash because it lacked any SEO
| capability, and the editor was shit. When the iPhone
| dropped it we had already been building websites without it
| for a couple of years. It was just a nice accelerator and
| allowed us to deny clients who requested Flash much easier.
|
| Fast forward a couple more years and security became the
| main issue. Many of our clients were infatuated with their
| Flash websites and didn't want to move on. I _just_ took
| down a Flash website (replaced with HTML /CSS/JS) in...
| 2022!
| phire wrote:
| It might not be quite correct to describe it as the final
| nail in the coffin, but it absolutely was the killing
| blow.
|
| Flash had been on shaky grounds for years. It was obvious
| that it had a limited lifespan, and that it eventually
| needed to die. I think even Adobe recognised this. But
| Apple accelerated it's death massively, and everyone
| seems to be very thankful for that.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The UX of Flash and Flash-dependent sites was often bad,
| too. Late in its life, full-Flash sites were the only ones
| that I had to sit and watch a progress bar to load...
| regular HTML/CSS/JS sites, especially with an adblocker,
| loaded instantly.
|
| For sites that used a Flash component (e.g. YouTube), the
| plug-in was fussy and flaky and would sometimes not work
| for any discernible reason, sometimes requiring an update
| to fix it. HTML5 replacements have been far less
| cantankerous.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Late in its life, full-Flash sites were the only ones
| that I had to sit and watch a progress bar to load...
| regular HTML/CSS/JS sites, especially with an adblocker,
| loaded instantly.
|
| Well...yeah. Flash sites usually make use of graphics,
| fonts and videos, all of which use bandwidth. They serve
| an entirely different purpose than regular HTML/CSS/JS
| pages.
|
| Flash loaded everything at once, so that the experience
| was instantaneous and fluid, once it loaded. It would
| continue to work if you disconnected. There wouldn't be
| any buffering or lag due to network issues.
| irrational wrote:
| It was definitely Apple from my perspective. We had this
| amazing training site built in flash. I'm taking full on
| animated storylines, professional voice talent, everything.
| Our animation teams were releasing new content every three
| months with new product seasonal launches. We won lots of
| awards. Then... Apple launched the iPad. All of our retail
| partners announced they were going to adopt the iPad to train
| sales associates. And the iPad doesn't run flash. Well...
| crap. We laid off the animation teams and told the voice
| talent there would be no more work. All of the content
| switched to plain plain html - text and static images. So
| boring. We saw massive drop in usage, especially in Asia
| where they lived the animated stories (the flash animations
| were translated into 40 languages). It has been 10+ years now
| and the site is around, but it is still boring plain text and
| static images. Flash had problems, but it was also something
| really special that has not been replicated since Apple
| killed it.
| rchaud wrote:
| A modern version of Flash is precisely the type of software
| you would think Apple would have created. They acquired
| Hypercard after all.
|
| Sad that the best they can do is Swift Playgrounds for
| iPad; creating what is essentially a JSFiddle/Codepen for
| apps that can't be deployed without first paying their $99
| dev fee toll.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Adobe Animate _is_ Adobe Flash and it exports to HTML5
| and so on. you can even export to .swf files if you want.
| rchaud wrote:
| Adobe Flash died before becoming a forever-subscription
| product.
|
| In that spirit, I use Tumult Hype, which truly _is_
| Flash, and can be acquired without a pesky subscription.
| irrational wrote:
| In some ways it is too little, too late. There was a
| plethora of vector animators that probably could have
| moved over to animate, if it had existed back then. But
| it didn't. So they moved into video as the YouTube era
| took hold.
| YbW4PaUX7AjenKB wrote:
| You could do animation and audio without Flash 10+ years
| ago. :shrug:
| irrational wrote:
| LOL. Please. What tools, other than flash, were animators
| using to make videos for the web back then? Remember that
| they can't be saved as videos since video streaming
| hadn't come into its own and video file sizes were too
| large for our Asian retailers. The nice thing about flash
| animations is they were vector graphics. Super small file
| sizes.
| dosshell wrote:
| This is outside my expertise but i remember doing svg
| animations, web gl animations and unity animations
| roughly ~10 years ago. But maybe that was a few years to
| late or not applicable to your case?
|
| But an app with vector animations should have been doable
| (not to hard in theory) if you could have found the
| investment for it, right?
| irrational wrote:
| Professional animators are artists. They need
| professional animation tools, like flash, to work with,
| not svg/webgl/unity that a programmer would be more
| comfortable with. They need things like a timeline,
| character library, animation pallet, built in tweening
| tools, etc.
| dosshell wrote:
| Ah, I understand. thanks for the clarification :)
|
| (Unity do have animations tools for artists (it is partly
| made for artists) but not so good for vector graphics and
| not close to flash, and definitely not back then.)
| [deleted]
| auggierose wrote:
| So it was deemed too expensive or risky to just turn it
| into an app? Sounds like you had your business model
| already figured out, building the app sounds like the easy
| part.
| irrational wrote:
| Flash file sizes were very small (they were basically
| just vector graphics). We tried making them into videos,
| but the file sizes, even greatly compressed, were too big
| for our Asian retailers. This was in the days before
| video streaming really came into its own. If we were
| making the decision in 2022, we probably would have gone
| with videos.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| There was never any simple way of turning it into an app
| with these sort of products. Flash had a very unique set
| of functional/creative affordances that have never since
| been replicated in an authoring tool. I worked on many
| bespoke solutions to migrate Flash animations to apps and
| the lack of proper integration and ecosystem supporting
| the workflows made it far too impractical to try and
| reproduce much of Flash's functionality. It many
| instances the business objectives were tied directly to
| the capabilities of Flash. Flash also had an extremely
| robust means of loading isolated application modules that
| helped businesses isolate their workloads and scale their
| applications. Solving that problem once Flash was gone
| was beyond the capabilities of many businesses that
| relied heavily on Flash.
| weberer wrote:
| Why didn't you make them videos?
| irrational wrote:
| We tested it. File size was too big. Internet speeds were
| too slow in much of Asia back then (I don't know how it
| is now). Flash file sizes were extremely small (it was
| basically all vector graphics).
| dataangel wrote:
| > It isn't surprising that adobe decided not to port it to
| WASM because it was a spaghetti mess.
|
| Business people never use this as part of the decision making
| process. If there's a market they will throw programmers at
| it and ignore their warnings.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Business people don't know WTF a WASM is.
|
| I'm sure "we should get flash mobile" was pitched at one
| point in time and the "we'd have to rewrite everything in
| Javascript" was ultimately what killed those sorts of
| notions. Because, business people care that "this will be a
| multimillion dollar investment"
| strangattractor wrote:
| In addition Flash was a battery killer if my memory does not
| fail me.
| yardie wrote:
| Okay but Android phones of that era did support Flash and it
| was one of the advantages Android had at the time (Motorola
| Droid era) that they were advertising heavily. The iPhone
| doesn't support Flash, Android does. Therefore you want an
| Android phone to access Flash content.
| monocasa wrote:
| I had flash on a Motorola Droid and it was awful. Not only
| did the VM have questionable compatibility for some reason,
| it also completely destroyed battery life. Cute trick, but
| not really usable for day to day.
| rchaud wrote:
| The same could be said of mobile YouTube back then. Or
| mobile browsers in general. They were luxuries, to be
| used sparingly on low-power hardware.
| mind-blight wrote:
| I was a contractor at the time of that announcement, and I
| remember using Apple's announcement as leverage to convince a
| customer to fund migrating their learning app from flash to
| html/JavaScript.
|
| Given how difficult it was to maintain a flash codebase well
| with multiple developers jumping in and out of the project,
| we pushed that angle pretty hard
| mwcampbell wrote:
| THe unmodified Flash plugin that you're running presumably has
| to run on an emulated OS. So for this application of CheerpX,
| are you emulating Linux or Win32? I've already seen the WebVM
| demo, where it looks like you're doing Linux syscall emulation.
| apignotti wrote:
| We emulate a Linux system indeed
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Adobe renamed the Flash editor to "Adobe Animate" and it now does
| exactly what you want... Let you develop with the flash tool and
| export to HTML5, WebGL, etc. There are some very limited GFX
| rendering features that aren't supported but it works... But
| people don't want it.
|
| Somehow though there is a cognitive gap there and people's brains
| just go "zzzzzz" and they just don't perceive it, no matter how
| you present it to them, if you are tactful, gentle, forceful,
| rough, whatever. It reminds me of a friend of the family who had
| epileptic seizures and would drive off the highway into the
| shoulder of the road and deny that it happened, crash a bunch of
| shopping carts into somebody's car and say it never happened,
| burn down the building he lived in and not remember it, ...
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Animate is trapped behind the wrong payment model with no
| marketing. I don't think there's a lack of desire by an
| audience.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A _lot_ of people subscribe to Creative Cloud and have access
| to animate.
|
| People who were subscribed to CC would have been upgraded to
| Adobe Animate and could have kept using it but it seems they
| didn't.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| A great deal of why anyone still cares about Flash is the
| _huge_ amount of amateur animations & games that were made
| with it.
|
| Much (most?) of that was made with pirated copies. Is there
| a way to use Animate for free?
|
| I doubt Flash would have been half as prominent, nor that
| we'd care about it half as much today as we still do, if
| they'd had some kind of perfect, flawless DRM on it.
| gs17 wrote:
| CC apps are still pirateable AFAIK, but it's nowhere near
| as easy as, say, Flash 8 was.
| flomo wrote:
| The banner ad people have moved on to Animate. The 'flash
| splash' thing went away due to iOS. The people who were doing
| actual ActionScript dev are using JS now. I'd guess people are
| just nostalgic for those homemade flash minigames and cartoons
| and the like.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I don't think it's unreasonable to be nostalgic for those
| things though. We had a period where animation and game
| production was democratized, where the promise of computing
| was actually realized. And what did we switch to, but
| consumption devices where the only capacity to create is a
| camera for glamorizing your life or creating parasocial
| relationships.
| belthesar wrote:
| I often wonder if Animate was a victim of responding too late
| to the mass exodus of Flash. I feel like had they put the time
| in to building a transition strategy using Flash/Animate
| towards HTML5 instead of betting that Apple's "Flash Bad, HTML5
| Good" strategy would ultimately fail, Animate might have
| continued to be a stronger player in the web interface and
| gaming space.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Did they even try to? The issue isn't likely to be technical.
| bartq wrote:
| Btw, just googled for "Famo.us" which I remember as 3d library
| looking for its use case. I googled it and google gave me...
| this: https://amaze.co/.
| rikroots wrote:
| I remember famo.us - "a free, open source JavaScript framework
| that helps you create smooth, complex UIs for any screen." as
| they say on the 'deprecated' website:
| http://deprecated.famous.org/
|
| I never signed up for their pre-release access program thing. I
| only learned of their existence when the company's twitter
| account, and then the company's founder's twitter account,
| started following me. I was, of course, very flattered - I had
| less than 30 followers at the time! Six months later the
| company pivoted and most of the devs got fired. These two
| events are in no way related!
| moreira wrote:
| I remember the hype behind that one! "pure DOM animation in
| 60fps buttery smooth" or something along those lines, right?
| They had that periodic table demo.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| re: All this makes me think: why Adobe haven't finished yet Flash
| export to HTML5/WASM which is easy and popular?
|
| Your theory, your foundation, in 2022, is flawed. There's simply
| not enough market for Adobe to justify the expense. Furthermore,
| it's obviously not a growing market. It never will be. Factor in
| the opportunity cost and there's simply no good reason to invest
| in such a thing.
|
| Editorial: While I'm not going to blame the tool, there were a
| lot of gawd-awful experiences built with Flash. Some have learned
| from that, others have not. Let's hope we don't go back to a day
| when pointless eye-candy was confused with good design and an
| effective UX. I'll hang up my mouse-pad if that happens again.
| [deleted]
| elforce002 wrote:
| If you want the flash experience, go with Flutter. Excellent for
| Mobile Dev. Awful for Web Dev.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| WASM _is_ the new flash. It has the right level of abstraction it
| 's properly developed in the open (yes, big corps are at the
| table, but still) and it's not tied to any high level programming
| language.
|
| If you are missing the Flash developer experience, then you are
| still in luck, we are going to see many options for WASM as a
| target.
|
| https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
|
| Flash died for a good reason, let it rest in peace :)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| The tooling to create Flash stuff is long dead and unmaintained.
| Even if there were a platform to run it, there's not good story
| or even group of folks trained to make Flash content anymore. The
| web won--HTML + CSS + JS is the web platform (thankfully).
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| What's in it for Adobe, optimized Newgrounds cartoons? They're a
| business, they won't figure it out unless there's benefit.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because they sell Animate,
| https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html, and there are
| products like CheerpX, https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/
|
| EDIT: And one could argue that Unity is the new Flash.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Unity is way too heavy for the web to be considered the new
| Flash.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except that is where all indie game devs went to after Flash.
| nomel wrote:
| Unity was notoriously bad at 2d games, in the beginning,
| since it was made for 3d games. First party 2d
| tools/workflows weren't introduced until _2013_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which was 9 years ago....
| HanClinto wrote:
| Yeah, but it's still too heavyweight for simple games.
| Call me crazy, but I still don't think it's inviting to
| sit down and make a 2d game with Unity. Not like it was
| with Flash...
| claytongulick wrote:
| I just miss AS3.
|
| It was a really great language. Typed by default, but easy to do
| squishy dynamic types when you want. Easy to do FP things or
| traditional OOP, and to mix and match based on the problem.
|
| Also, while the performance wasn't great, I did some very cool
| things with e4x binding in Flex.
|
| We had reactive UIs back before that phrase was coined.
|
| Query an API, update a xml variable with the results, and the
| entire UI would update based on bound e4x expressions.
|
| It may be one of the reasons why I enjoy vanilla web components +
| lit-html for rendering. It feels a lot like having that same sort
| of simple, elegant and powerful rendering capability without the
| cruft of big frameworks.
| Kukumber wrote:
| This, no language come close to AS3 in term of scripting and
| ease of use
|
| Clearly ahead of its time, unfortunately, its fate was poorly
| managed, they should have went open source and a clear focus on
| WASM/WebGL and now WebGPU
|
| Luckily some folks went ahead and created Haxe [1], they even
| used it for world class game titles, engine fully open source
| [2]
|
| There is even an open implementation of Flash API [3]
|
| [1] - https://haxe.org/
|
| [2] - https://heaps.io/
|
| [3] - https://www.openfl.org/
| Frotag wrote:
| I gave Heaps a try because I wanted an engine that wasn't
| tied to any specific editor but ultimately gave up on it. I
| put in a few weekends of effort but the documentation was
| just way too minimal [0] and turns out it can't really target
| mobile platforms out of the box [1]. Even the main developer
| apparently just outsources mobile ports to another company.
|
| [0] - https://heaps.io/documentation/h2d-introduction.html
|
| [1] - https://github.com/HeapsIO/heaps/issues/422
| Kukumber wrote:
| That's unfortunate, mobile developments is a pain, i can
| only be compassionate
| bitwize wrote:
| Because they don't want to.
|
| Back in the day -- the mid-90s -- there was a DOS compatibility
| layer for Linux called DOSEMU. It's still around, but back when I
| was playing with it -- '96 or so -- it was good enough to run
| Doom at full speed, with sound. Windows NT, from the makers of
| DOS, could also run Doom -- but it was choppy and had no sound.
| Microsoft had the money, resources, and the exact programming
| talent needed to make a DOS compatibility layer that flawlessly
| ran on Windows NT with support for virtualized sound and other
| peripherals. They just didn't want to. For whatever reason, they
| decided that those resources were better applied somewhere else.
| And that's one reason why we got shitty Windows 9x -- it was more
| convenient for Microsoft to extend the DOS+Windows 3.x model for
| a few more years rather than translate everything to NT in such a
| way that the DOS stuff still ran well.
|
| And that's what the Flash situation looks like. With Apple
| cutting off Flash on iOS, Adobe just decided they didn't want to
| port it or even maintain it beyond the bare minimum. Flash's
| successor is Adobe Animate, and that _does_ export to HTML5, but
| Flash itself... the effort isn 't there from the parent company
| so it died.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You don't need wasm to implement flash. All you need is canvas as
| that's ancient tech. They just don't want to.
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