It's definitely outdated at this point by HTML5 and WebGL, but I will always fondly remember all those little flash games and experimenting with ActionScript, learning programming fundamentals.
I would highly recommend tinkering with the HTML5 Canvas element and WebGL if you were a fan of Flash. The web browser has evolved into an OS of sorts as personal computers have evolved along with the introduction of mobile devices.
Web browsers now handle email clients, word processors, photo editors, even video and code editors. Check out this neat fluid simulator experiment in WebGL, you can build even more advanced applications of this nature with this technology.
My feedback was that was kind of cumbersome compared to our other tools, and didn't see the potential appeal to our user base and recommended against it, and we declined the offer.
Ultimately I'm glad Macromedia did acquire it because adding scripting and animation appealed to the already diminishing Director/Shockwave platform.
I do wonder how things might have been different had we decided otherwise and acquired Futuresplash-- there'd have been no Flash as we know it!
It's amazing how little decisions we make in the past can project out over time and have larger repercussions.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/software/futuresplash-animat...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070509070443/http://www.adobe....
^Search 177,508 games and 32,156 animations, all playable online without a plugin
btw Adobe Flex anyone?
It would be cool if there was a browser that had a full set of components that would allow fast construction of internal dashboards, CRUD apps, etc. via new html tags. if not that then maybe a custom browser with flex enabled for internal use only. The security and performance would have to be improved but seems like a really fast way to prototype and build internal only sites.
I worked in the industry before flash, during flash, after flash, and in my little corner of the world, the iphone not supporting flash was the biggest factor in the decline of flash. Every executive and bigwig could not drop their blackberries fast enough, and grab the newest status symbol iphone. Once management all had iphones, then flash just would not do, and the directive came down to make the website "good" for iphones, which usually entailed adding excessive white space, large lettering, and big buttons.
Today, the web is creatively barren relative to the wild innovation of the time. Actual creatives have been cut out of the process, requiring the intervention of people like you and I. HTML5 was supposed to replace Flash, and a generation later, we still don’t have anything close to its expressive power. React takes twice the effort for a quarter of the experience.
I’m still bitter at Steve Jobs and his flying monkeys at Wired. Apple could have worked with Adobe to fix Flash. Adobe was willing. But let’s be honest: the App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow, and Flash was a direct, free competitor. Apple had no interest in letting it survive. So now we’re left with a dismal, sanitized web.
Are you referring to the tooling around HTML5 + Canvas elements or the technical possibilities?
> "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)."
> "HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on a third party browser plug-in (like Flash)."
> "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content."
> "If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"
> "HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."
I view these as cynical. HTML5 has yet to match the experience that Flash delivered, and I believe Jobs knew that it could not even at the time he said it.
The designer experience with Flash tooling, the end user experience sans plugins or the technical capabilities of HTML5 + Canvas?
> App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow
Okay, how many apps have some super mind-blowing animations on their home screen? Maybe nobody really wanted that? (And, certainly Jobs did not want companies writing CRUD apps in Flash/AS3.)
There was also more of the run of the mill 'hero animation', jquery was good enough for that. I think they still use Adobe Animate for banner ads.
And then there was the junior guy who was good at flash and just wanted the entire web to be flash, and that was more of the debate because some assistant creative director thought it was slick.
(And lest I forget, there were also the ActionScript guys who spent all day in their IDE writing MVC code, and rarely using the Flash editor.)
But on HN, I commonly see the opposite "retro manchild" take that Flash was all just all web fun & games applets, totally unlike all this awful Node/React stuff. They have no idea how professional ActionScript programmers did things.
But the games space hung onto Flash far longer. Right up until Adobe thought it'd be a good idea to start charging revshare for certain Flash features... that were used by Unity's Flash cross-compiler... which just scared everyone over to Unity.
Both of these were downstream of Adobe not wanting to invest money in Flash Player. Apple had begged them to make Flash work but Adobe didn't wanna put money into something people could use for free. So they'd send over a build of Flash that didn't work with iOS's input handling[0], or they'd send over source code Apple couldn't figure out how to build, or whatever. If Adobe hadn't penny-pinched on Flash Player they probably could have gotten a few more years out of the platform, and also stuck around as an animation development platform for JS[1].
[0] More specifically, Flash Player didn't support the rollover menu detection Safari had for desktop sites. If you touch an element on a website, it sends both hover and click events, but the click events only happen if the hover event didn't reveal any new content.
[1] Yes, I know modern Adobe Animate can export to JS. It sucks. It doesn't support the Flash drawing model at all, so all your artwork gets rendered out at 1x onto a sprite-sheet. This was also a problem with the GPU rendering frameworks available for Flash, except HTML5 / JS apps also had access to efficient vector rendering.
I moved away from that industry, and while there are now tools to do interactive ads I’m not sure the talent is there to do it well. The move to JavaScript though was great, I built closer working relationships with the media buyers and ad platform reps who also wanted to do more interactive ads and wanted to be reactive and supportive rather than dismissive.
The reality was that since Flash wasn’t indexable, search engines couldn’t index it but also you could pre-screen the content either. There could be really bad stuff hiding into easy to release apps. Plus if people could make cross-platform games on flash, why would they make them for app stores.
It was also too energy intensive and would have made battery life much smaller on iDevices.
I've chatted with a colleague who used to work at Macromedia, and she has some great stories.
Also any history of Flash which doesn't mention shockwave.com (or Princess[1]) is incomplete.
Shockwave died pretty quickly after that.
(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649245)
Just wondering what's the today's equivalent of Flash like technology open or proprietary?
[1] Adobe Flash Player:
I was working on the MyFordTouch system and the UI was written in Flash by a contractor, then handed off to Microsoft to fix the bugs. It was a nightmare to work with and flash in a car worked about as well as you'd expect it to in 2012 (badly).
At the time I found ActionScript 3 to be a very good language that one could structure programs in very nicely, but ActionScript 2 was kind of nightmareish and any project in AS2 that had grown to a certain size was bound to be horrendous unless the person creating it was extremely meticulous with how they structured everything.
Chumby devices were stuck on the AVM1 (ActionScript 1 & 2) virtual machine for most of the company's lifespan though we did support AVM2 (AS3) very late in the game when the larger 8" devices were released.
For most of my time there I worked in the Haxe language because it allowed you to have an ActionScript 3 like language that could be compiled down to AVM1 bytecode (among other targets) and it had a pretty amazing compiler macro system that was great for doing all sorts of precompute optimizations which were very useful given how anemic the hardware we were running on was. Its been years since I've used Haxe but it appears to still be a thriving, if somewhat niche, language targeting a lot of different platforms.
We also had access to the underlying Flash Plugin C++ code as part of our deal with Adobe and I worked in that code directly for a while to extend a custom Chumby flash player to support braille devices as output for a joint project accessibility demo we did with NPR. Whatever suspicions people who have worked with the Flash Player as a blackbox might have about it being a horrible ball of spaghetti inside, I can vaguely confirm.
Being able to wake up to Pandora felt magical at the time.
Looks like the link I provided in that post is dead, but there's still a wayback machine snapshot of it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duk...
The device with the card "Captioned Radio" under it in the 2nd photo is an Insignia Infocast 8", which was basically the same thing as the Chumby 8", just a white-label version produced for Best Buy with a cheaper plastic outer casing and a customized dashboard app with their branding all over it.
Best Buy/Insignia was a retail partner of chumby for a time (they also sold a rebranded version of the Chumby One).
Flash wasn’t perfect. It had major security flaws, a proprietary runtime, and a clunky update system. But Flash emerged when browsers themselves were insecure, standards were immature, and the web could not deliver expressive, interactive content. Flash filled that gap, and did so brilliantly in a way not matched even today.
The real irony is how quaint worries about Adobe’s control seem today. Google and Apple now hold that same power, wielding it with more reach and less accountability. Chrome effectively defines the web, and Apple’s restrictions on Safari for iOS block entire categories of web apps. Where Flash was a creative toolkit, today's web prioritizes tracking, monetization, and App Store lock-in. Previously one company defined the runtime; now a handful dictate standards, browsers, ad models, and even UX paradigms.
Flash may have been proprietary, but it sparked a wildly decentralized creative culture, from Newgrounds to weird experimental microsites, that today's web hasn’t matched. Flash let creatives take risks and lead the conversation. By contrast, today’s web is sterile, cautious, and suffocated by performance metrics and SEO compliance.
Flash didn’t kill the open web. It kept it interesting while standards matured. Once those standards caught up, Flash was pushed aside. But let’s not pretend what replaced it is a victory for openness or creativity.
Multicomp•1d ago
It's amazing how much creativity that used to go to Newgrounds and Flash games is now funneled into TikTok shorts.
Kids these days! But Super Mario Bros 63 is still fun.
ElCapitanMarkla•1d ago
bdcravens•1d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge_Animate
janalsncm•1d ago
glimshe•17h ago