[HN Gopher] Internet Archive expands Flash support
___________________________________________________________________
Internet Archive expands Flash support
Author : sogen
Score : 487 points
Date : 2023-07-14 19:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mastodon.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.archive.org)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Does this mean that previously archived sites that use Flash will
| now be viewable?
| lucgommans wrote:
| That would be nice. I was recently trying to play
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie...
| via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself
| does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to
| view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply
| does nothing.
|
| (Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936)
|
| I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic
| of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a
| living, so that's not infrequent)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every
| tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally
| intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari
| works if you enable developer extensions and download our
| macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work
| normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0].
|
| https://ruffle.rs/#downloads
|
| [0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/
| lucgommans wrote:
| Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it
| doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in
| general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version,
| it's possible that either newer versions have a
| regression or you have a really old extension version.
| lucgommans wrote:
| Omg, it works! Why does this work? It doesn't work on
| Firefox ~4 on Windows XP with a real Flash player
| installed, nor does it work on MSIE8 on that system. I
| tried on the original site as well as on a custom file
| that embeds just that flash file, but no dice.
|
| I suppose it's worth uploading the swf to archive.org and
| seeing if it will work there as well. Edit: https://archi
| ve.org/details/newyorktimes-2010-interactive-ro... says
| "failed to download game data" but I'm not seeing a
| failed request in the developer console. Not sure if
| that's a problem with my upload or if IA hasn't finished
| processing it or something. /edit
|
| It's not fully functional by the way: the computer is not
| being animated at all, the text areas are too small, the
| score counter doesn't update... but it runs! Thank you :)
| nosamu wrote:
| I've opened some new Ruffle issues so we can hopefully
| fix the problems you mentioned:
|
| https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/12071
| https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/12073
|
| As I noted on those issues, this game uses multiple
| assets, so downloading and playing just the main SWF file
| won't work. You can play the game by loading the URL of
| its main SWF file in the Adobe Flash projector, which can
| still be downloaded from here: http://web.archive.org/web
| /20220401020702/https://www.adobe....
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| I think so. They had it before, but it worked kinda funky it
| should be better now.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Hope this means that I can play Attak by Johnny Two Shoes
| again.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20161126122429/http://www.johnny...
|
| There was a time when I used to play that game every day.
| endgame wrote:
| Wow, there are a few animutations in their big "unsorted"
| collection:
| https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted .
| Rewatching them brings back so many memories from High School.
| a1o wrote:
| Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to
| some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games
| there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no
| one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities
| worked.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index
| the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were
| _entirely_ made in flash (or java applets), and the content that
| Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file.
| Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript
| engines.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| while that might be true, its probably more true that they want
| to own the internet (see: nonstandard changes within chrome,
| forcibly making chromium dominant, the AMP debacle) and adobe
| SWF files aint google
| pests wrote:
| They started to index flash software in 2008 and I even
| remember seeing flash in search results sometimes
|
| https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| At some point Flash emulation would solve all the biggest
| troubles of the original Flash and.. became a new standard for a
| web-based inter/animation? Of course, having a VM with XP with
| Macrmedia director would be a problem for Apple M1/2/3 owners,
| but nothing a modern emulation couldn't solve...
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| would it solve the problems? absolutely. would browser vendors
| pick it up for a standard? almost definitely not.
|
| though, nothing is stopping anyone from creating new flash
| games, videos, etc. the software is out there, and NG already
| does flash game jams.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of
| things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the
| remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools
| and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would
| had exploded already.
| bamfly wrote:
| Flash is to web dev as Excel is to desktop applications: it
| "sucks" but is also arguably the single best tool the
| entire field has produced. The technologies that might
| replace Flash are "better" but also so much worse that they
| aren't even close to actually replacing it, years on--and,
| yeah, that's mostly about the authoring tools, which were
| not just excellent, but also _de facto_ free for hobbyists
| (thanks, piracy) when Flash was in its prime.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| not only that, the shovelware scene proved that it was
| piss easy to use, and powerful (especially in the later
| years) see as many html5 gaming webpages lately? yeah,
| no. the 'death' of flash killed the browser game and
| rapid prototyping that flash offered, and there is
| nothing on that level in this age.
|
| the problems that html5, css and javascript could in
| theory 'solve' are a moot point when the switch to those
| technologies killed any enthusiasm for it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| And so many of the Flash web games could be saved because
| they were completely self-contained units.
|
| Today? Just forget about saving some web based game
| someone makes because it's probably streaming its assets
| from some dynamically computed URLs
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| that's true. I think a few flash games did a split swf
| thing for DRM purposes, and yeah. look where that got
| them... lost media ahoy for html5
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage
| of Flash is that it was _not_ JS or HTML. Meaning that you
| could block it easily, when it offended your senses
| (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the
| functionality of most web sites.
|
| CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without
| destroying the web site as well.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| yeah I remember that people demonized flash so much for
| that and turned a blind eye once html and javascript was
| given that power.
|
| jokes on them now, I guess
|
| not to mention flash content could run on a potato, while
| javascript is soon to see your processor as fried as a
| potato chip instead
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without
| destroying the web site as well.
|
| That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious'
| sites, there are enough sites _now_ what treat you like a
| 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a
| landscape orientation.
|
| If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a
| narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years
| already, so I can't accept your 'blovk Flash' stance as
| anything having a substinence.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I'd like to reply, but I'm not sure how to read this
| comment.
|
| There were always user-unfriendly sites. It used to be
| possible to easily block the nasty content (Flash), now
| it's rather hard. It used to be possible to extract the
| interesting content (Flash) and save it without the junk
| website. Now it's not. Separation was an advantage.
|
| I agree that the Web is narrowing itself down. One of the
| symptoms is not having interactive content clearly
| delineated from the rest.
|
| You seem to come from the same premises but arrive at the
| opposite conclusion, and I don't understand your
| reasoning.
| xp84 wrote:
| Oh yeah! We used a plug-in called FlashBlock which would
| load by default and basically do nothing but show a
| button to load, and if you clicked the button it would
| load actual Flash for that single embed. Blocked so many
| ads but let you play games.
| j4ah4n wrote:
| They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm.
| Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together.
|
| I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director
| (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic
| storytelling than the business "intros" offered at the time (I
| built these too mind you).
|
| I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very
| proud of in my early career.
|
| Good times.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| and then adobe spit on all of it. what a waste, and its all on
| adobe.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| This is encouraging news. These sorts of efforts help save
| information from being buried in the trash heap of history.
|
| Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet
| archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have
| information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that
| are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS
| Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I'd
| have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my
| basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| I don't know of too many, but there are some out there like
| https://hiddenpalace.org/ (though that is more related to video
| games).
| xp84 wrote:
| Look for platform-specific sites. For instance, 80s Mac stuff
| has at least a couple, like Macintosh Garden.
| winstonprivacy wrote:
| Relevant:
|
| https://archive.org/details/flash-is-dead
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| huh, so the Ruffle technology is actually something to consider.
| Much better than the last 5+ years of flash 'alternatives' tried
| some games out, most look identical to FP somehow.
| anticensor wrote:
| I misread as "Internet Explorer expands Flash support" for a
| moment.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before
| any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an
| alternative yet. Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a
| bit of good technology there.
|
| Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| yeah. the closest to getting flash back is Ruffle, which works
| pretty well, and Newgrounds does flash game jams still, so it
| ain't all dead
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much
| higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics,
| and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video
| resolutions.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up
| past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around
| then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone
| leverage that
| xp84 wrote:
| This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many
| things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few
| embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a
| HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video
| when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| "watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a
| 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB."
|
| WOW
| justinclift wrote:
| I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can
| eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there.
|
| Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or
| something?
|
| aka Flash Done Right :)
| mikercampbell wrote:
| Pokemon Tower Defense??
| vsnf wrote:
| I couldn't find any easily available official notice, but they
| seem to be using Ruffle[0]
|
| [0] https://ruffle.rs/
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Well when you load an emulator on the archive there is a ruffle
| splash page before the animation starts, so a good bet!
| textfiles wrote:
| It's certainly a firm hint!
| lucgommans wrote:
| Announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-
| animations-live-fo...
|
| > _Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we
| have added Flash support to the Internet Archive's Emularity
| system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as
| if you had a Flash plugin installed_
|
| I had trouble when adding e.g.
| https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because
| there's literally zero documentation on this system that I
| could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata
| tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that
| have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like
| whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:
| emulator = ruffle-swf emulator_ext = swf
|
| You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all'
| at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml
| file.
| nosamu wrote:
| The Flashpoint project has some great documentation here:
|
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for.
| ..
| db48x wrote:
| If you prefer JSON you can also visit
| <https://archive.org/metadata/gravityrunner-nolimit>.
| cempaka wrote:
| Went looking for a good old article about fanimutation, this is
| quite the walk down bored-college-dorm-session memory lane:
| https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-01-25/84480/
| haunter wrote:
| Highly recommend "Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby". It's the
| Dark Souls of flash games
|
| https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en
|
| The japanese version is here (no difference)
| https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126
|
| They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)
| 112233 wrote:
| The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a
| piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else
| altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not
| even close.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head.
|
| That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never
| did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or
| whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30
| minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much
| worse than the "home run derby" game above.)
|
| And yet...
|
| And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-
| or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from?
| Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?
| ilayn wrote:
| It was mostly from https://www.newgrounds.com/
|
| Click the audio tab
| swilliamsio wrote:
| A shockingly large amount of music used in old flash games
| and in old YouTube videos is by Kevin MacLeod, whose released
| thousands of high quality tracks of all styles under CC-BY.
|
| https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Newgrounds had the Audio Portal, a repository of free-to-use
| music specifically intended for use by people creating movies
| and games for their Flash Portal.
|
| That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame
| probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music
| track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.
|
| There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded
| versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every
| mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had
| Flash games on it.
|
| [0] Audiojungle.
| pests wrote:
| Did you mean to footnote Audiojungle with Audiojungle? haha
| kmeisthax wrote:
| footnotes you can hear
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| a lot of people tended to get CC0 music, free, and didn't
| need to make their own though most of the actually good flash
| games had an artist make music specifically for the game
| samketchup wrote:
| I just struck out 5 times in a row, finally made solid contact
| and the game crashed.
|
| Thank you, lol
| haunter wrote:
| Try not to play fullscreen. Started crashing some months ago.
| Or download the sfw file and play with the standalone
| Ruffle.rs client
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| did you report that to the bug tracker?
| haunter wrote:
| Looks like someone already did!
| jdjdjdhhd wrote:
| Indeed, it crashed Firefox mobile for me in full screen
|
| But either way, I played twice and that's enough for me
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| What a mystery for how that ever got approved...
|
| (For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat
| it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the
| "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-
| the-frame timing.)
| haunter wrote:
| Yeah that's Ludwig. One of the better streams ever. The final
| boss is crazy because every pitch is random so you have to
| guess instantly + perfect hit it too
|
| There is some lore behind the game. It was a Yahoo Japan
| title https://www.siliconera.com/winnie-the-poohs-home-run-
| derby-s...
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Last time I checked BlueMaxima makes two flash emulators
| Flashpoint Ultimate and Flashpoint Infinity.
| nineplay wrote:
| The orisinal games were one of my favorite things on the
| internet. I'm so happy to see them back.
|
| https://archive.org/details/chicken-wings
| jonplackett wrote:
| The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool.
|
| It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between
| artists and creators and coding in a way that totally
| democratised creating interactive websites.
|
| I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok
| effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but
| Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren't.
|
| I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted
| the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?
|
| Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and
| I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists
| - has plummeted since flash died.
| LadyMartel wrote:
| I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto
| action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your
| own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to
| make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or
| admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that
| ever since.
| ftmch wrote:
| Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at
| one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a
| mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn
| by someone way more skilled than myself.
| [deleted]
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The creation tool still exists (it's been renamed to Adobe
| Animate) and even still lets you make interactive content with,
| I can only assume, a similar workflow. But what I really can't
| understand or forgive is that Adobe killed ActionScript,
| replacing it with a JavaScript library (CreateJS) that's
| similar but not quite the same AIUI. That meant you can't just
| re-export existing Flash content for HTML5, and Flash creators'
| existing skillsets aren't directly applicable to the new
| system...
|
| There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could
| have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they
| could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a
| set of support routines. They could have gotten even very
| complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have
| charged money for this feature, and many people would have
| forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their
| platform die. It makes no sense.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| nah, HTML5 was and still isn't good enough for a straight
| conversion, as years of flash ""alternatives"" have shown us.
| xp84 wrote:
| I feel like WebAssembly was the thing Flash was waiting for.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's not just flash, all of web development has become very
| complex. In the early days, people would learn to make websites
| because they wanted to be web developers. They could make
| something in 5 minutes that was reasonably similar to what they
| would make if they achieved their goal of getting a job doing
| it. Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is
| still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a
| job doing. People either do this and give up, or they get lost
| in a maze of studying (bootstrap vs MUI??? Tailwind vs
| SASS??????) and emerge a fully-formed web designer (having made
| no cool personal site along the way).
| kkarakk wrote:
| >Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is
| still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a
| job doing.
|
| there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets
| them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that
| context the squarespace page is all they need.
|
| most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do
| it.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build
| simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even
| with my limited artistic skills.
| codethief wrote:
| So does that mean I get to play Winterbells and Yeti Sports
| again? :)
| lhball wrote:
| I had en elementary school teacher that made a website dedicated
| to flags games appropriate for students. It was amazing, FULL of
| games from my childhood:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050407011006/www.gamewing.com
|
| If they can get that working I'd be ecstatic!
| wiredbutburned wrote:
| sweet!
| willhackett wrote:
| This is pure nostalgia
| Propelloni wrote:
| Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible
| proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to
| crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it
| required a plugin.
|
| Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for
| it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| I was wondering about this because my only memory of it is
| just how much people hated it. That and security problems.
| cantik88 wrote:
| https://www.pelangi88a.com/account/withdrawal
| [deleted]
| tagyro wrote:
| I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but
| it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I
| don't see today.
|
| Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy
| where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists
| from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many
| more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard
| time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA
| (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still
| remember GotMilk).
|
| And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet
| applications" fun.
|
| I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now,
| after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any
| better.
|
| Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance
| of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware
| disguised as Flash Player).
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Compare with ooooooooo.ooo, recently discussed on Metafilter in
| great detail: https://www.metafilter.com/199981/Friday-Flash-Fun-
| Forever
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner
| yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE
|
| I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about
| it.
|
| In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star
| Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but
| not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be
| watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements
| like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure
| stories.
|
| He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your
| own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility
| as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a
| story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't
| possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate
| that visual difference throughout the story.
|
| But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience
| choose a character's hair color and have that effect the
| animation for the rest of the story.
|
| The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience
| those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are
| making that possible.
| goosedragons wrote:
| You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to
| ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to
| work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an
| extension.
| TillE wrote:
| Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked
| because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and
| Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just
| fine on YouTube.
|
| It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for
| amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have
| much else in the way of video on the internet.
| derefr wrote:
| Yeah, but there was a _reason_ that we "didn't have much
| else in the way of video on the internet" at the time --
| bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most
| people to download _in realtime_. (You could still download
| them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1
| /RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-
| hour to fetching, either using a download manager or
| Limewire. It was _not_ a "click to play" experience.)
|
| This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started
| until 2005 -- that was about when at least some people were
| starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video
| over their Internet connections, without needing to make a
| big production of it.
|
| Flash _as a distribution format for video_ was distinctive
| and successful because it was essentially a standardized
| abstract machine for demoscene demos -- a Flash animation
| wasn 't a video, it was an ActionScript program that
| _rendered_ a video when executed. So a Flash animation could
| be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire -- as long as the
| author was clever about composing things out of vector bits
| and small reusable textures.
|
| Flash _as a distribution format for video_ was obsolete
| basically as soon as people 's Internet connections improved
| enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of
| someone else rendering out the Flash animation program
| instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also
| meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of
| vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously
| ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of
| conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do
| that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
|
| Flash as a distribution format _for games_ stuck around a few
| more years, because HTML5 wasn 't fully there to replace it
| yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to
| this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating
| vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped
| video.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from
| logistical considerations.
|
| Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it
| provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can
| have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single
| body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw
| literally everything.
| kibwen wrote:
| Related: drawing mouths on the side of the face to save
| on the animation budget:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I don't think this is right. RTMP was the protocol for
| sending videos over the wire and was developed by
| Macromedia. We didn't have any good replacements for some
| time.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| I think you nailed it on the head with the demoscene
| mention. not only was this one of the only ways to get this
| kind of content in those days, but any ol hobbyist could
| and did pick it up. netflix is the farthest you can get
| from ever seeing anything like homestar runner's
| characters, plot, etc
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete
| basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved
| enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output
| of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program
| instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also
| meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of
| vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously
| ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of
| conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to
| do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG
| anyway.
|
| You still needed Flash as a _player_ platform for many
| years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push
| people to use native HTML elements for that.
| derefr wrote:
| Yes, sorry, I should have said "Flash as a distribution
| format for Flash animations" there.
| xp84 wrote:
| I was remembering the same thing. What an awkward few
| years. I feel like Flash spent its retirement in the most
| ridiculous way, mainly in rendering players that streamed
| those crappy FLVs, because people were still insisting on
| using MSIE in enough numbers that we couldn't afford to
| use HTML5 video without at minimum falling back to Flash.
| Oh, that, and that little SWF everybody needed to use in
| order to implement a click-to-copy button, back when
| there wasn't an API in browsers for that function.
| j45 wrote:
| As much as people might not like to hear it, I believe
| Flash Videos were how Youtube initially started.
|
| Very little could handle buffering videos that well, or at
| scale.
|
| Since people kept computers longer, and I was involved in
| online education/training delivery online in those years,
| flash video provided more backwards compatibility in a
| decade where IE4 wouldn't die, then IE6 wouldn't die.
|
| Flash Media Server too, did some pretty interesting things.
| There were open source options like Red5 that were worth
| trying out.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive
| and successful because it was essentially a standardized
| abstract machine for demoscene demos
|
| While it WAS true, it's not COMPLETELY true. The first
| versions of Flash had very little scripting support, it was
| basically limited to switching between scenes. The first
| Flash that could do something non-trivial was Flash 5,
| released some time in 2000 and by that time Flash
| domination had already been established.
|
| The secret was in its authoring tools and the concept of
| timelines. Basically, you inserted "key frames" and Flash
| interpolated between them automatically. So if you need to
| draw a triangle moving from point A to point B, you just
| add it to the timeline at the starting position, then move
| down the timeline, insert a key frame and drag the triangle
| to point B.
|
| And these timelines can be composed, looped, triggered by
| scripts, etc.
|
| Here's an example video that shows that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOPCPZO5YOA
|
| And that's it. No need to write any fancy code. Flash would
| do everything for you, and it's baked right into the file
| format, that was specifically designed to be compact and
| concise.
| derefr wrote:
| To be clear, I didn't (exactly) mean that the _author_ of
| a Flash animation has to think in terms of creating a
| "demoscene demo." I rather meant that the Flash abstract
| machine is designed to primarily _do_ the types of thing
| that demoscene demos do -- i.e. to use vectors and
| gradient fills and clipping masks to achieve procedural
| visual effects. You could say that the SWF abstract
| machine has a "demoscene-alike Instruction Set
| Architecture." Most of the work of figuring out how to
| _achieve_ particular visual effects on that abstract
| machine, though, is domain-knowledge built into the
| "Flash compiler" of the authoring tool.
|
| In my previous post, I emphasized _Flash as a
| distribution format_ for a reason. While the authoring
| tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean
| abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and
| objects with their own swappable animations that have
| their own sub-timelines), the .SWF _export format_ bakes
| all that down into an imperative _program_ for an
| abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining
| and moving around (potentially texture-filled) vector
| objects on a canvas. Writing SWF bytecode directly, would
| be similar to programming against a retained-mode fixed-
| function graphics API like OpenGL -- just without any 3D
| support. In other words, it would be like writing a
| demoscene demo.
|
| Or, to put that another way: the core of the .SWF export
| format -- before all the user programmability stuff was
| added -- is basically a cousin of PostScript, but with a
| finishRenderAndWaitForNextFrame command, and the ability
| to set spline points' velocities. Which is very much
| unlike _declarative_ vector formats like SVG. The closest
| comparison, I think, might be to the object-oriented
| vector display-lists used in vector-based arcade machines
| (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs.)
|
| But, in both the arcade games I mentioned, and in Flash,
| if you've achieved the effect you want and are now
| optimizing the final work for size and performance, doing
| so will mostly be a matter of modularity and reuse of
| small repeatable design elements. Having "mechanical
| sympathy" for what the Flash export format looks like,
| will push you toward certain authoring decisions, e.g.
| building complex scenes using many smaller primitive
| objects that each independently animate (or in later
| versions of Flash, are independent state-machines);
| creating objects that can be uniform and so constructed
| by cloning rather than redefinition (leading to a
| surprising number of 2D flash animations and later games
| that were built out of colored, untextured voxel boxes);
| etc. And -- despite there being no actual programming
| involved in the Flash animation authoring case -- this
| _is_ still very much akin to the process of optimizing a
| demoscene demo.
| cyberax wrote:
| > While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format)
| do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with
| keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own
| swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines),
| the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an
| imperative program for an abstract machine whose
| primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around
|
| I mean, you can describe SWF like that, but it's not
| really what people think now when you say that it's an
| abstract machine. The SWF file is indeed a series of
| commands like: "put this object in this layer, and assign
| this matrix to it".
|
| However, SWF still preserves the notion of persistent
| vector objects (called "characters") down to the display
| level. You're not just preparing a command list and then
| submitting it to a GPU for rendering (like with OpenGL),
| and then re-doing it again for the next frame.
|
| Characters in SWF are persistent. Flash does all the
| composing, clipping, and it even does automatic
| interpolation for you for morphing.
|
| SWF format is now open: https://open-
| flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf - the page 35
| contains the description of the most important
| instruction "PlaceObject" that was used to actually do
| the animations.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm surprised I haven't seen a similar SVG editor for
| kids. All the kids I know who are into animating are
| using pirate Adobe software.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The best I know of is
|
| https://www.wickeditor.com/
|
| It is free, open source and surprisingly good(for simple
| things), but developement is on hold or abandoned. (I
| looked at the source and it is not great, but not
| horrible either, but with the original creators not
| around anymore and lack of documentation, would be a pain
| to overtake)
| j45 wrote:
| Tweening and animation programs are hard to find for
| young people.
|
| I remember one I saw running in a video on an Atari ST
| that pretty much outdid anything I've ever seen since,
| indie developer too. Wish I could remember the name,
| maybe he made another version.
| echelon wrote:
| Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing
| things.
|
| Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate
| Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...
|
| It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com
| parodied) that made Flash suck.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| "It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that
| Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck."
|
| Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't
| mean you should.
| irrational wrote:
| Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of
| training content in it (all of which was completely replaced
| with static text and images after all of our customers adopted
| iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is
| today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters,
| with their own backstories and personalities, that each had
| their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia
| especially loved them. Another project was for people who
| repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were
| 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access
| and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose
| something to repair and it would show them step by step how to
| do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they
| wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor
| static text/images are a good replacement.
|
| The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file
| sizes were minuscule.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Personally I'd rather read text and/or watch a human present
| slides/demo than watch an animated thing for training.
| j45 wrote:
| It's good to offer both, not one over the other.
|
| I think the point that gets missed with the power of
| today's devices is how much could be delivered on device,
| and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when
| flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or
| engaging way.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > We created all kinds of training content in it
|
| How accessible was that training content for disabled people,
| particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it
| about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better
| in some ways.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| now that is the real flaw of flash, and the most overlooked
| bit. all the while people (and adobe) were making login
| pages and security within flash (which is insane, you don't
| use an animation tool for those!) they should have focused
| on accessibility. Adobe promised the world when they bought
| macromedia and instead did nothing.
| genewitch wrote:
| were blind people with screen readers repairing printers?
| derefr wrote:
| > He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose
| your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same
| flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they
| wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair
| blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes
| required to propagate that visual difference throughout the
| story.
|
| I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a
| distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly
| do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
| Cerium wrote:
| It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is
| around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the
| content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that
| impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this
| example, or which character has something happen to them,
| etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible
| versions.
| derefr wrote:
| My point is that animation _can_ be procedurally generated
| "at runtime", while film [motion-photography of actors]
| cannot.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose
| your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same
| flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they
| wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair
| blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes
| required to propagate that visual difference throughout the
| story.
|
| Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they
| needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences
| in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With
| the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even
| have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of
| video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management
| nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical
| releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where
| small details in a scene would be changed like the
| adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme
| of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They
| didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in
| post.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative. plenty of
| developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to
| make console or steam games. flash had plenty of shovelware,
| but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
| klenwell wrote:
| Good example here:
| https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash
|
| It works! It had been effectively defunct for years:
|
| https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| good pick.
| themagician wrote:
| Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish
| Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have
| paid dividends _somehow._
|
| Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS
| that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone
| came out and they did have dev versions where it was running,
| but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real
| thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed
| this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down,
| and I can't blame him.
|
| Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash
| and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and
| Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't
| even imagine the things people might create if it was still
| around today.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen
| another software environment come close. We lost a really
| great onramp to UI development when Flash died.
|
| I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash
| codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for
| them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of
| that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-
| sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
| themagician wrote:
| I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also,
| it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens
| of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
| fenomas wrote:
| I worked at Adobe in those days, adjacent to the Flash
| team, and AFAIK everyone involved would have _loved_ to
| open-source the flash player. (And they did open-source
| significant parts of it, like the script VM - that didn
| 't just randomly happen, people fought hard for it.)
|
| But the overall player was a massive codebase - buildable
| for literally hundreds of platforms - that was developed
| over a decade with tons of external tech and external
| partners involved. Open-sourcing something like that
| (legally) isn't something you can just pay money to do.
| noduerme wrote:
| Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions
| of Illustrator that remove critical features at each
| iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to
| web, save locally by default, both being removed from
| Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity
| was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files,
| no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
| j45 wrote:
| > If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing
| existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe
| products anymore.
|
| Is there a friendlier format that I can export from
| illustrator that imports better into Affinity?
|
| I haven't had enough time to play with it and my days of
| working with the Adobe pdf spec are a little in the rear
| view.
| noduerme wrote:
| Unfortunately, PDF seems to be as good as it gets, which
| destroys any grouping done in Illustrator. (When reading
| .ai files, I'm pretty sure Affinity just reads the PDF
| data). The best workaround I've found is to "sequence"
| all groups into layers first in Illustrator and then deal
| with them as separate layers in Affinity. Tedious and
| time consuming.
|
| Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-
| functional, which makes working inside groups
| unreasonably difficult.
| wiredbutburned wrote:
| honestly, a line needs to be crossed. if everyone keeps
| waiting on compatability, everyone will just keep using
| adobe.
|
| it will hurt to go cold turkey, but the industry will
| thank you.
| bbarnett wrote:
| No, they mostly spend their time in the security sphere,
| with endless banks, and others, using them to detect
| "suspicious behavior" in browsers.
|
| It sounds like a joke, it isn't.
| bazzargh wrote:
| about ten years back I got my parents photoshop elements
| 11 as a present; it was the best thing since sliced
| bread. They'd seen the stuff I did (with Gimp)
| manipulating the family photos, they thought it looked
| like fun and they had hundreds of old slides/photos they
| wanted to scan and fix. Elements 11 was a joy to use,
| made it easy to in-paint and erase glitches in the scans;
| all was well. I liked it too-it did smart stuff like seam
| carving.
|
| A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12.
| IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I
| thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the
| fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the
| money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the
| advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an
| intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer
| to the ground rather than use that again.
|
| That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that
| I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the
| next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for
| 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| Since you use programs like that, what's your
| alternative?
| eropple wrote:
| _> If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing
| existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe
| products anymore._
|
| Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have
| a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is
| excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the
| price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription
| lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it
| pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.
| noduerme wrote:
| If you're doing motion design, I'd agree, I guess you're
| stuck with Adobe. In the realm of print, we are _so
| close_ to never needing them again. Affinity is great.
| The only problem is that vector groups are lost when you
| need to import or export to Illustrator /PDF. Adobe is
| fully aware of this and makes their bespoke file format
| as difficult as possible to parse. When you're working
| with a dozen designers and 6 separate print houses for
| different things, you have no choice. It's the most
| monopolistic system I can think of, worse than anything
| Microsoft did with Windows and IE in the 90s. It's pure
| extortion as they take away features. And they know it.
| Adobe is doomed. Their entire attitude as a company is
| one of stripping as much as they can out of their current
| market dominance without adding any value. Adobe will not
| last another few years as far as cornering the print
| market. But right now, no one in the industry wants to be
| the first to bail on them. Everyone would love to.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The parallels to QuarkXPress are striking
| [deleted]
| nolok wrote:
| > I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I
| suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.
|
| Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring
| tools and they had the best ones around.
|
| But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the
| death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.
| xp84 wrote:
| Suddenly everything makes so much sense!
| weard_beard wrote:
| _cough cough_ Magento _cough cough_
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| Magento? The...eCommerce platform that did a small
| fraction of what Fishbowl did?
| weard_beard wrote:
| I wouldn't know, haven't worked too much w/ Fishbowl. I
| was mentioning Magento as another product Adobe bought
| and is slowly screwing up so badly they're killing it.
|
| They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless
| Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a
| storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of
| it competing w/ AEM.
|
| They're missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have
| gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack
| and almost dead.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on
| iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe...
|
| I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to
| send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler
| bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of
| Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory
| is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be
| fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on
| the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong
| decisions and never got as popular.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly
| internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player
| was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?
| pan69 wrote:
| AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is
| today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an
| HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop
| apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies
| was Flash.
|
| According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its
| latest stable release on May 22, 2023.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like they pivoted to something that would perhaps
| be ok in less sensitive environments.
| simion314 wrote:
| >AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is
| today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an
| HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop
| apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies
| was Flash.
|
| When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI
| component library that you could use to create advanced
| and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in
| JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting
| divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced
| Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).
|
| When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with
| 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get
| pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite
| scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you
| can't do instant searches and filtering on.
|
| ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like
| language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were
| actually used to improve performance.
| fenomas wrote:
| ~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing
| flash (only) content into standalone executables for
| desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc.
|
| As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for
| interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler
| that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the
| android and ios app stores (IIRC).
|
| edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only _rendered_ flash
| content, but it could display web content by invoking an
| OS browser component. So you could have a browser
| component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could
| make the wrapper for you so from the author 's
| perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My
| bad!
| justinclift wrote:
| But still a security nightmare yeah, though with less
| "remote compromise" possibility?
| rf15 wrote:
| Your parent comment is correct. I did develop small AIR
| desktop apps some years ago with html+js, not flash, and
| I did switch to electron/nwjs later.
| pocketarc wrote:
| No, it's definitely correct, they definitely supported
| HTML/CSS/JS at some point, not flash-only content - I
| myself published a normal SPA back in ~2010, and looking
| back it's actually kind of insane how similar Adobe AIR
| is to Electron.
| fenomas wrote:
| Ohhh, I think one of the OS-integration features was that
| you could invoke an instance of the OS's web component,
| is that what you mean? AIR itself didn't do anything with
| html/js but you could render web content at runtime via
| the OS component.
|
| Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you
| forget in ten years..
| pocketarc wrote:
| Yeah, same! I didn't remember that it had been a wrapper
| (to be honest I have very little memory of -how- we did
| it), but I suppose it makes sense. TweetDeck was Adobe
| AIR too at the time, no?
| fenomas wrote:
| Yeah, I'm almost sure there was no html renderer or JS
| engine in AIR, but you could have pure html apps with no
| flash in the source now that I think back. TweetDeck was
| I'm sure, and one other high-profile AIR desktop app was
| the launcher/lobby app for League of Legends.
| pan69 wrote:
| As the Wikipedia page I linked points out:
|
| "HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included
| in AIR."
| dharmab wrote:
| I was inside Adobe during the final death of Flash. Adobe
| as an organization is fully capable of maintaining a
| frighteningly complex product; Document Cloud is a
| testament to that. Steve Jobs and Apple's decision that iOS
| should be focused on mobile web (and later, the App Store)
| without Flash is what directly led to the end of the
| project.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I think that's a bit backwards. Flash provided a solidly
| mediocre experience. Non-native widgets (and consequently
| input issues and accessibility issues), high cpu usage
| and generally poor performance for things like video
| playback, poor security track record... on desktops.
| Avoid that on a more constrained platform was a no
| brainer.
|
| Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a
| competitive product killed Flash. Jobs' unwillingness to
| hitch his wagon to Flash was a symptom not a cause.
| bbarnett wrote:
| And the relentlessly CVEs! It was banned on every
| corporate network at the time.
|
| Once flash was used for ads, that didn't help either. It
| wasn't just "flash was slow", it was "webpages with a
| dozen yelling, flashing, dancing, cpu sucking flash ads"
| slow.
|
| I wouldn't want that crap on my new shiny phone either.
| j45 wrote:
| I'm wondering if some of this might be referring to Flex,
| which then also touched with AIR.
|
| Careful when looking up Flex, it might trigger the past,
| and then seeing echoes of it present in today's techs :)
| experimenting wrote:
| I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat
| into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down
| several times, because Flash would have allowed games and
| apps outside the direct control of Apple.
|
| Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6.
| If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on
| iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
|
| It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure
| HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to
| localstorage.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| No, because web apps had the same abilities and those were
| allowed. The reason Flash was blocked was because it was
| always going to be a poor experience and Apple sells great
| experiences.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer
| 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version
| on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
|
| The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They
| released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly
| unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version
| on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage._
|
| Flash sucked ass on every single platform aside from
| Windows. Android, MacOS, Linux. Adobe sucked at porting.
| fenomas wrote:
| > because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app
| store profits
|
| Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when
| (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish
| iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of
| flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted
| them into the app store, fun times.
|
| Then _riiight_ as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS
| terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are
| "originally written" in - the source language had to be one
| Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages
| were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps
| from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and
| a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction.
|
| (Working from memory here, details are approximate.)
| versteegen wrote:
| To fill in some details (but IANAiOSdev): Apple first
| disallowed interpreted code [1]. (Wow, I had forgotten
| how much I loathed Apple for that.) Later in 2010 Apple
| loosened it to allow interpreted languages as long as you
| didn't download new code from the internet [1]. The
| exception was that you could use WebKit to run JS in a
| webpage in your app. I guess their excuse was security,
| so they could ensure the app they approved was the one
| you ran. In 2017 [2] they loosened it further to allowing
| downloading or importing code in some circumstances. The
| most important limitation now is that you can't generate
| executable code on iOS, which disallows JITs and makes
| everything other than WebKit a second-class citizen.
|
| [1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-
| license...
|
| The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in
| writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in
| an Application except for code that is interpreted and
| run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in
| interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with
| Apple's prior written consent, an Application may use
| embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is
| solely for providing minor features or functionality that
| are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose
| of the Application.
|
| [2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_
| develop...
| fenomas wrote:
| That's a separate unrelated issue. The terms I'm taking
| about dictated what language the app could be "originally
| written" in, _regardless_ of what happened at runtime.
| Technically, if you prototyped an app in some other tech
| and then manually ported it to objective-C it wasn 't
| even clear if that would satisfy the terms as written.
|
| (In practice of course it didn't matter what the terms
| precisely meant, because Apple never enforced them apart
| from removing flash-based apps.)
| weard_beard wrote:
| I think Steve Jobs realized he could blame Adobe
| endlessly and people would believe it because ... Adobe
| ... and he could kill an App Store competitor.
| stuaxo wrote:
| They did this just after I had started learning C# with
| Xamarin for iOS dev, it's why I got out of mobile
| development and am now a python/Django developer.
|
| Edit: I forgot, at the time I was between jobs (2008) and
| had used a chunk of my money to buy an iPhone to learn
| iOS Dev on, they wasted a load of my time, and money.
| j45 wrote:
| The app store didn't exist when the iPhone launched.
|
| Neither did third party developed apps, only what apple put
| on the smart phone like a featurephone.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Yeah the original plan for iPhone apps was they were all
| supposed to be web-apps saved to the home screen. No App
| Store. IIRC they even had a basic web SDK to make some
| standard-looking iOS views? Developers jailbroke the
| iPhone and reversed the APIs and made some really
| compelling demo apps and Apple had to rush to make an
| official SDK.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so
| tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I
| deleted it because I don't think my point about past security
| issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open
| sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my
| comment and found that it was deleted by the time they
| submitted - that was not my intent.
| noduerme wrote:
| I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and
| was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The
| touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving
| around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-
| based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about
| performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that
| was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines
| at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the
| same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate
| more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs
| decided to nix it.
|
| It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so
| great for working with animators and artists as you were
| refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and
| Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely
| performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch,
| and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform
| deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they
| aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work
| with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of
| bytecode that runs anywhere).
|
| [0] https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0
| andrepd wrote:
| Reading this thread has been unexpectedly depressing.
| j45 wrote:
| It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices
| didn't have the abilty to upscale either.
|
| At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a
| desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or
| indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web
| apps.
|
| At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no
| suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set
| of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the
| wheel.
|
| Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is
| also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's
| replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in
| HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or
| in any meaningful capacity.
|
| If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html
| could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.
|
| Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on
| many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon
| in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-
| curve techs like Flutter.
| pyeri wrote:
| They also had a competitor in the form of Microsoft's
| Silverlight, right? What happened to that?
| Aleklart wrote:
| As usual, some vp ate another vp in executive jungle floor
| over chunk of budget and silverlight was promptly forgotten
| and corpo push "you need silverlight to run this" reversed
| after a while. Not if it was valuable software, but it can
| happen with everything eventually as it happening with
| windows server, exchange, sharepoint and other "essential
| business productivity" offers.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle
| on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor
| and gave up early, leaving it to rot.
|
| I don't think they could even open source it, with all the
| other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like
| dolby
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The problem was that Flash Player needed significant
| rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at
| least, not without finding a way to get more money out of
| game developers for the privilege.
|
| The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4,
| along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also
| mention new _revshare_ rules mandated on anyone cross-
| compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is
| specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This,
| predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers -
| even those who don 't care about cross-compilation. So they
| kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash
| Player's problems.
|
| This all happened a year _after_ Steve Jobs posted
| "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and
| all other third-party development tools in the process[0].
| We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had
| begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would
| actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were...
| anemic[1].
|
| [0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration
| threatened an antitrust lawsuit.
|
| [1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been
| publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on
| Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed.
| Actually they probably were the same codebase given that
| jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
| cubefox wrote:
| I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on
| mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than
| other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole
| browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while
| Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native
| "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually
| _slower_ than Flash.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also
| had quality options that let you scale the software
| renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy
| CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a
| fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING.
| Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still
| have dedicated JPEG decoders in them.
|
| And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more
| so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official
| solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling
| Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap
| textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API
| that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood.
|
| In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU.
| This preserves vector scalability but it has other
| issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to
| waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain
| contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look
| polygonal.
|
| [0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We
| don't even support progressive download yet! But the
| alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for
| minutes on end.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| I always remember Flash being really fast at the vector
| calculation but and absolute hog on output rendering. So
| higher screen resolution hammered the CPU even though
| everything was setup.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I want you to know that I laughed very hard at finding a
| comment complaining about Homestuck in Ruffle
| unexpectedly here, thank you.
|
| To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to
| be on, for new things being posted, that would be
| historically accurate...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| [S] Cascade and [S] ACT 4 were my test cases for the
| "large movies hang the browser" bug[0]. Homestuck loves
| stressing out Ruffle's tessellator.
|
| Oh and yes, the opening bars of "Doctor" are permanently
| burned into my head now.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/7858
| cyberax wrote:
| Flash plugin was extremely well-optimized, it was one of
| the very few users of the original Pentium MMX
| extensions, and later SSE. That's also why they had such
| a difficult time porting it to 64 bits.
|
| The Flash renderer was also state-of-the-art for the
| moment, with really awesome anti-aliasing and blending.
| All while using just fixed-point integer arithmetic.
| wiredbutburned wrote:
| [flagged]
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| >adobe didn't want to pay for rewrites or bugfixes yeah,
| its a wonder they ever bought it to start with, then
|
| you don't just buy someone's entire workflow and then not
| fix any of it. not at least, if you intend for people to
| believe you when you say you're the future.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I was a software developer of the Flash Player team at
| Macromedia and Adobe, specifically on the team porting it
| to Windows CE/PocketPC and then Android. What you
| describe is correct as far as I can remember, though I
| hadn't heard the Apple "begged" Adobe to support iPhone.
|
| I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code
| with Apple, but heard Apple assigned an intern to try
| porting it to iPhone. The Adobe developer working with
| Apple told me the ported code Apple sent back to Adobe
| didn't even compile, so we don't know if they even tested
| it on a real iPhone. We jokingly called the iPhone port
| "Project Boomerang" because the code that came back was
| basically the same that we sent them. :)
|
| The Flash Player's source code was ugly, but you have to
| remember that its roots trace back before Macromedia to
| SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for the
| PenPoint OS in the early 1990s. The core rendering and
| scripting code has since been ported and squeezed into
| new platforms and applications. And then the dot com boom
| happened. The development team grew to about a hundred
| developers and no one person understood the entire code
| base. Code was copy/pasted freely for fear of introducing
| regressions that would break existing Flash content.
|
| Multiple rewrites and grand new engines that would live
| alongside the legacy engine were attempted but failed due
| to backwards compatibility, the second system effect, and
| product management's pressure for new features.
|
| To make matters more challenging, Adobe was losing
| interest in funding Flash development because revenue
| didn't scale with Flash Player usage, only with sales of
| the Flash authoring tool to a small audience of Flash
| content creators. That's when rev share schemes for 3D
| APIs, DRM, and asm.js-like C++ cross compilation (Alchemy
| and CrossBridge) were hatched.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly how to properly cite Apple's side of
| the story anymore, since it was from a Twitter thread
| that I don't know how to search for[0]. I know there was
| something on InternalTechEmails as well but I'm too
| afraid to touch Elon's Musk anymore.
|
| Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it"
| to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early
| iPhone development where basically half the company was
| being press-ganged into giving Steve Jobs an iPhone demo
| that wouldn't crash on stage.
|
| Everything you said about Adobe management also tracks.
| I'm reminded about Jobs' quote about Xerox being filled
| with copier-heads[1].
|
| Also...
|
| >second system effect
|
| Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player
| equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some
| point?
|
| [0] Said thread also revealed that Jobs felt snubbed from
| not being able to have Adobe's CEO on speed dial
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
| [deleted]
| chongli wrote:
| Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things.
| They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and
| exist only to collect rent. When something requires
| finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to
| this day.. wtf
| chongli wrote:
| Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think
| CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally
| inexcusable!
| dylan604 wrote:
| If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been
| the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was
| buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring
| how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things
| at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare
| as people were trying to do much more complicated things
| that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece
| of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment
| I'd say.
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people
| entrusting _logins_ and _security_ to flash player to
| start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if
| it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid
| such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia
| designed flash to be a _web based animation system_ , not
| a full web stack. The very fact that these things were
| attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people
| who were surprised when it came crashing down.
|
| all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it,
| and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for
| blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't
| for _secure logins_ anyone who did use it for those was a
| money maker or a madman.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have
| been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash
| was buggy as hell.
|
| No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare
| _throughout its existence_ , just as ActiveX and Java
| applets were.
|
| The key thing is, these things were created in a time
| when there were _far_ less bad actors on the Internet -
| not just because finding an actually working version of
| IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the
| financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e.
| botnets, crypto malware) just wasn 't existing or at
| least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin
| vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter
| bullshit back in the early '00s.
| anthk wrote:
| Blaster. Sasser. Malware everywhere. IE with Active X was
| hell.
| j45 wrote:
| Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back
| then in some way?
|
| Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to
| think of some positive rich media app technologies.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back
| then in some way?
|
| Collecting data from a form sent via POST to be processed
| server side?
| babypuncher wrote:
| > Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on
| iOS that wasn't garbage.
|
| Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which
| is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the
| Internet is a better place today because half of it is no
| longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.
|
| At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while
| to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet
| could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was
| so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I
| don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South
| Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and
| me needing to reload my browser at least once.
| vGPU wrote:
| > because half of it is no longer built on a poorly
| implemented proprietary technology.
|
| And then Google amp came along.
| romusha wrote:
| No reason to still use shitty technology
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I agree, we should ditch JavaScript.
| epa wrote:
| Im excited for this! So much is archived on flash that had
| thought to be lost
| lucgommans wrote:
| They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How
| do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago
| and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to
| activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer
| to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up1
| in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation
| on this?
|
| Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a
| filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash".
| Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm
| supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is
| there a list of all software categories?
|
| 1 https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav...
| whereas it is on the site-wide search:
| https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| not that I've seen. one thing you can try to do is add the
| Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably
| pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time
| they do a sweep. I guess you can also email them, hey are
| pretty prompt by email, usually.
| ehPReth wrote:
| Try @textfiles on Twitter
| dayvid wrote:
| Xiao Xiao was a nostalgia kick:
| https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=xiao...
| Bakingpotato wrote:
| amen.
| diggernet wrote:
| Sadly, flOw still doesn't work.
|
| https://archive.org/details/flash_flow
|
| In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much
| less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.
| justinclift wrote:
| Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be
| running ok.
|
| At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling
| towards wherever the mouse is.
|
| There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other
| hiccups.
| diggernet wrote:
| Thanks for checking. Same setup here. Feels a little jittery
| to me. I dunno, maybe it's in my head.
|
| Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never
| gets any food to eat. So, no game.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah. I used to play Flow on the PS3, and thought it was
| awesome. :)
| WillAdams wrote:
| I hope this means that they will fix the site for the wonderful
| book _Bembo's Zoo_:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| Regarding a modern alternative to Flash, I just want to mention
| the Scrimba webdev learning platform [1], which leverages a
| custom built programming language [2] for making interactive
| courses and save the videos in an optimized vector format with a
| very small footprint.
|
| It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I
| have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to
| my wife, and it was a great experience.
|
| [1] https://scrimba.com/ [2] https://scrimba.com/learn/imba [3]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699
| codedokode wrote:
| In case anyone is wondering how much CPU Flash emulator uses:
| "Isolated Web Co" - 12%, Firefox - 16%, gnome-shell - 25%.
| nathants wrote:
| working on a game right now. the second to last attempt was in
| godot 4. it reminded me a lot of flash, especially in 2d mode.
|
| to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!
| hoten wrote:
| PIXI.js also gives a similar framework.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Possibly an unpopular opinion:
|
| Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting
| intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by
| the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its
| various implementations, has always amounted "building a house
| upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an
| ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the
| sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the
| RCE's came raining down).
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