https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-004-199612/page/n77/mo...
.spl, there you go. For "SPLash", I guess, or "Splash PLayer".
You could call it Lightweight Scaleform. This same codebase was used in RAGE.
[1]: https://github.com/DragonMinded/bemaniutils/blob/trunk/beman...
Here’s a screencast of one of my favorites in 2009:
I don't think the issue is lack of features, because audio context and canvas2d are pretty good for making things shiny and nice. The issue is pretty much the rest of the DOM that has quirks everywhere if you want to use it that way. CSS3D as a scene graph is also kind of half baked, and not really integrated well with animations, and well, also too painful when it comes to scheduling and timing and chaining any transition.
SVG animations are also only half-ass implemented among browsers, so that's not really a reliable alternative.
What I liked about the Macromedia suite was the integration cross-IDE, where dreamweaver worked really great together with Flash and vice versa, and where flash was able to load HTML content, just in a more animated manner.
I mean, this was when XHR and AJAX was the "modern" thing in web browsers. Adobe could have dominated the mobile market if they would have decided to make it an open standard. Flash was really a decade ahead of its time.
People were more creative, and Flash had great UI/UX.
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More 2009 flash websites:
you could get so much done with flash which is just so cumbersome with javascript/html5. Simple things, like click on an object and play a sound, I tried to do this yesterday and it was pretty complex (break your animation into a sprite sheet, find something to work with sprites, find something to play an mp3 on click, make sure it all syncs up...)
Not to mention just having a default timeline/tweening system to work with.
None of this really matters, because if flash was still around, I still wouldn't be willing to pay Adobe $50 a month to use it.
There were various details in here that I forgot (or never knew).
A few notes:
The iPhone was what put the final nail in Flash’s coffin.
Prior to that, and despite its many flaws, the Flash Player was the only true, write-once, run anywhere platform.
Quokka sports was a big deal at some point.
No mention of South Park?!
The Flash Forward conference and Lynda.com were also big.
Things did begin to fall apart under Adobe, but the article might be a little too harsh about it.
I knew the player team before and after the acquisition and it wasn’t abandoned.
The work they did was extremely difficult and no one else has ever managed to produce such a capable and tiny executable that runs on all the things before or since.
I have ever since found most animation packages that I've tried lacking. Having such dead simple tweening and easing was really incredible for a beginner. Now i know how to do all that in AE but it's way more complicated
The_President•1mo ago
To think it all really started from the gerbil in a microwave and the frog in a blender (both with attitudes) spreading like wildfire through email forwards (Joe Cartoon.)