[HN Gopher] Thoughts on Flash (2010)
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Thoughts on Flash (2010)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 8 points
Date : 2023-08-22 22:09 UTC (51 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Another interesting open letter from Jobs was "Thoughts on music"
|
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/15878/open-letter-07
|
| I seem to recall a third open letter on another subject but
| search fails me at the moment
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I'll be the one to lament that with Flash, a very accessible
| authoring system died that hasn't been replaced yet. Lots of
| creative laypeople built fantastic stuff because Flash was so
| easy to use, yet powerful.
|
| This comment is mandatory for every post mentioning Flash, and
| although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog and an
| absolute security nightmare, it's still true.
| camillomiller wrote:
| I remember this spat clearly. At the time Kevin Lynch was Adobe's
| CTO and came out with a pretty strong (and IMHO totally
| insufficient) rebuttal of this memo. Fast forward 3 years and he
| jumped ship to join Apple's on the Watch project, where he still
| holds a VP of Technology position. I don't know who, inside
| Adobe, was working as a fifth column for Apple, but they
| definitely made the Flash people realize they had to leave the
| ship to sink and move on.
| shove wrote:
| Kevin was in an impossible position, he could have ripped Steve
| a new one and it wouldn't have made a lick of difference.
| jonplackett wrote:
| > Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools
| for the future
|
| I wish they had taken this advice instead of just giving up.
|
| A massive part of the value of flash was the authoring tool. It
| let non-coders make interactive things easily by just adding code
| straight to their designs.
|
| Having non-coders able to express their ideas like this is good
| and I miss it. The next closest thing would probably be Unity, or
| maybe Effects House / Spark AR for making insta and tiktok
| effects. But these are obviously totally limited to their own
| platform.
|
| Nothing has truly replaced flash for this purpose.
| shove wrote:
| A business decision pretending to be a technology decision. In
| the end, there were just as many shitty Flash sites as there were
| shitty iOS apps.
|
| The legacy of this choice turns out to be the beginning-of-the-
| end for the broad market in high(er)-end, custom website
| development and the move towards the walled gardens of app stores
| and social media giants.
| camillomiller wrote:
| So you're saying that refusing to support a subpar competing
| format on your own devices was just business? Of course it was
| ALSO business, but are you telling me, for real, that Adobe
| Flash and Flash Reader, 100% proprietary non-easily-portable
| technologies, where the tentpoles of the free internet?!
| shove wrote:
| Subpar is really stretching it. With some care, Flash content
| could behave quite well on the iPhone. It was _not_ 100%
| proprietary. Of course it wasn't 100% open either, but then I
| direct your attention to the Apple App Store.
|
| Edit: Flash Paper was hot garbage. Definitely not going to
| defend that one lol
| pavlov wrote:
| The final reason stated is the only real reason why Apple blocked
| Flash: they didn't want any cross-platform runtime when it became
| clear they were winning. They only grudgingly accepted HTML
| because it was unavoidable, but embarked on a deliberate program
| to limit Safari's capabilities to hamper the web as a platform
| (just like Microsoft did with IE ten years earlier).
|
| In the late 1990s Steve Jobs was a big fan of Cocoa-Java because
| he thought a cross-platform language and runtime could help
| adoption of his company's middleware product. In 2010 he was very
| much against middleware and cross-platform runtimes. That's how
| it goes. The thing you're selling at that moment is always the
| right answer.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Funny that IE is the only remaining browser to still support
| Java, even if it's disabled by default.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Well, that was the "Flash" that Steve was bashing here. Of
| course the tech for animation in itself was not a problem, but
| the proprietary reader was a massive s*itshow of security
| vulnerabilities. On top of that, it was so poorly optimized
| that it would have burnt through iPhone batteries in no time.
| The fact that not allowing Flash games would favor the then
| still nascent App Store certainly played a big role as well,
| but technologically Flash was inferior to what Apple was
| developing.
| grishka wrote:
| Apple's problem was not with Flash itself as a technology but
| with the half-assed player implementation form Macromedia/Adobe
| -- the only one that existed at the time. There's nothing
| inherently terrible about ActionScript or the SWF format itself.
| On the contrary, it's a very nice container for scriptable vector
| and bitmap animations, still unmatched by any purported modern
| replacements.
|
| I sure hope that Flash eventually makes a comeback.
| camillomiller wrote:
| It's basically still here inside Adobe Animate, which is now a
| decent, albeit half forgotten, heir to Flash (the software to
| build animations). It basically works in the same way, and the
| exported animations are compatible with all modern browsers and
| run quite smoothly thanks to createJS and easel integration.
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