The thing about Flash was that it was pretty WYSIWYG and a lot of creative people flocked to it because it had strong multimedia capabilities. Personally I kind of missed the part where you could build really nice looking stuff without much technical expertise, nowadays you need to know all about CSS, Polyfills and JS quirks so there's always this limitation where you have to understand pretty technical stuff early on to get something done.
Flash was more like using Premiere where you just edited your timeline with a bit of interactivity sprinkled over it, no movie editor ever had to get his hands dirty with some kind of scripting language or low level file formats just to edit a movie.
I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash. It was like the web was warped into the future. Nowadays you can achieve the same but not as elegant. It kind of reminds me of how PC's had to catch up with the Amiga for years. Perhaps starting with Wing Commander things were really on par or better, almost 8 years later.
To me, flash was like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using flash.
Flash was like using poor quality native apps, which was a step backwards from a browser.
To me, JavaScript is like the past, or a warped vision of the distant future. The interfaces people created had visual appeal, but that’s all they had. It lacked all of the usability that I was used to finding on webpages, and therefore made for a very frustrating experience. No bookmarking, no back and forward, no right clicking to open a new tab, frequent superfluous sound, major security holes, long loading times. I would hardly call any of this elegant. As a user, I was thrilled when people stopped using JavaScript.
Link me to the most user-hostile ECMAScript-based web page you can find, and I'll open up devTools and delete my way out of whatever email-list/login/begware DOM-jail they try to keep me in.
Link me to the most user-hostile Flash-based web page you can find, and I'll watch a ten year old hour-long video presentation from a Gnash developer explaining their 100-year plan to ship a usable open Flash runtime alternative.
There are some bad JS websites, but most of them do have proper bookmarking since pretty much every web framework supports adding multiple pages including forward and back navigation. Browsers are also good enough to handle #links as well within a SPA app. Also, they tend to have faster than typical loading times for navigation within the site.
Flash didn't have any of that, and was much slower to load than modern JS websites.
Just no. I'm on latest chrome on android 6 and when I browse search results on YouTube, then click a video and hit back I expect that the scroll position within the results is restored. Instead when I hit back I only see the red top bar and a loading spinner and a moment later the results show up again and I'm at the top of them. Because we don't have nice paged results anymore, but this hip and ubercool dynamically extending page of results and everything.
And this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google. They can't get their shit working on their own browser. I have yet to see an SPA with a convincing UX that's more than just some wannabe webdev's "about" page.
> this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google
It's sad that Google is revered by the developer community as a role model for software engineering because their frontend web work has—at least for the last ~10+ years—always been terrible and a really great example of worst practice.
Gmail's early HTML version is possibly the last faded memory of a quality frontend product coming from Google. Everything they've created since the advent of GWT has been aggressively anti-user and anti-interop. Gmail took a long time to get full browser support and a longer time to play will with back buttons, etc.—meanwhile the Gmail interface has slowed and bloated with each iteration; the latest bordering on unusability on my very new midrange laptop. Wave never worked in anything but Chrome, the same is true of the early iterations of most of their large newly released products over the years. The Google homepage provides a totally inconsistent experience across browsers—on mobile I see three different results views in three different browsers, two are Blink-based! Why doesn't search by image work on mobile? We're thankfully no longer lumped with the distaster desktop experience the was Google Instant Search.
Similarly, Microsoft and Apple don't have great histories here. When looking for good development practices, you should always look at the example set by companies that need to compete. Monopolies don't need usability.
This is a great example of Google's spotty frontend work -- especially since you can simply tap the share button on iOS, and then scroll over to "Request Desktop Site". And voila, image search now works perfectly. You can even click the camera icon to upload an image directly from your phone. And yet, this functionality is completely hidden by default on mobile.
Ironically google landed its initial success with (and maybe partly because of) an ultra minimalist website focused to the task. They seem to have forgotten that and now they have bloat everywhere. Instead of reducing it they put a lot of resources into developing technologies to deliver that bloat more efficiently.
> Instead of reducing it they put a lot of resources into developing technologies to deliver that bloat more efficiently.
Efficiency has a lot of different definitions depending on whom the efficiency is "for". I would say Google put a lot of resources into increasing the bloat (adding abstractions) in order to automate the creation and maintenance of their services. They are the pioneers of removing humans from the equation: they're using ML to create their maps, instead of the previous focus on humans driving around with cameras, they have a notorious lack of human-intervention customer service for most of their paid services, even GWT which I mentioned above removed human JavaScript devs (admittedly in order to allow Java devs to write it, but unlike other transpilers—e.g. Typescript/Coffeescript—which produce a relatively readable direct JS equivalents, GWT is heavily abstracted and the output isn't in any way representative of what a human would create).
Call me a conspiracy-theorist, or crazy. But I say that that is by deliberate design. Just like the push for HTTPS, on some level. You can't proxy most of the web, you can't cache, you can't bookmark SPA and ajax-loaded results, you can't scrape any of the data easily, you can't intercept and modify it if you wish without doing fancy SSL certificate injection.
"Gee, I remember seeing this unique comment on a youtube video. Let me search for it, maybe some web-crawler has indexed it and made it available to the rest of the web. Nope."
"Oh I remember the video, it was XYZ. I'll just go there and find the comment. Oh, it's not at the top of the comments, and there are 5600 comments."
"It's okay, I'll just ctrl-F for that specific word I distinctly remember was used in that comment. Nope, ctrl-f only finds what's loaded in the Dom, you've got to scroll!"
"Hmm, maybe I can just keep scrolling for a while till I find it. Scroll, wait. Scroll, stop, loading icon, scroll some more, wait, scroll some more, wait."
Hey, at least I can share a specific time-stamp location within the video on Google+ and Facebook!
On top of that, opening an email in a new tab from inside of GMail hasn’t worked for at least 2 years now, and it doesn’t look that they’re going to bring back support for this basic functionality any time soon. At least the new GoogleMaps version has gotten pretty acceptable in the last year or so, it’s almost as responsive as the classic one used to be.
And then you have developers/companies/projects that end up treating JavaScript+HTML5 like "Flash but newer" or "Java but newer" or (for maximum pain) "Silverlight but newer". That sort of mentality - whether conscious or unconscious - underlies the vast majority of single-page apps in my observation/experience.
Javascript interfaces usually have much better usability than Flash ones used to have.
That is because following the standard semantics of the Web in Javascript is easier than breaking it, while for Flash it was the other way around. Of course that does not mean that every JS powered page is good, or that every Flash powered one was bad, and ironically it does mean that the more JS, the worse it tends to be, but the more Flash, the better it used to be.
You're absolutely right (and an excellently written post; very effectively communicated ), but I think the difference is in what's possible/easy/difficult.
Building a usable experience in Flash was possible, but sufficiently difficult that almost none did.
Building a usable experience in JS is significantly easier than it was in Flash, though sadly still seems to be sufficiently difficult that too few do. The ratio of usable JavaScript apps is a lot higher than it was for flash, but is still a minority. It is at least an improvement though, if an incremental one.
It's true that it is much easier now in JS, but that is because the browsers and the core web technologies have radically evolved in that 10+ years since Flash was the dominant way of creating interactive experiences. Looking back at the eco-system when Flash was still a viable technology, we have to recall where the browsers were at, where HTML was at and also JavaScript itself.
At the start of 2005, I was helping lead a team build a highly interactive experience for a major car company using Macromedia Flash and Flex 2. When we launched the site we had full cross-browser pixel accuracy, fully supported URL deep-linking, bookmarking, page history navigation, web crawling, keyboard navigation, screen reading support, interactive video, highly animated experiences and even had fully integrated web mapping using a beta version of Microsofts first interactive map tech (it eventually became branded as Bing maps).
What we built then was possible only because of Flash, there was no way we could have created the complete experience in JS/HTML/CSS. Granted, we could have done a lot of it in native web tech (and in some cases, we had to under the hood), but to make it fully pixel accurate cross-browser would be tripled the dev & testing time. On top of that, some of the features would have been impossible without Flash.
Let's recall where we were in 2005. Chrome was still 3 years away (it was released in 2008), Firefox was still version 1.0 (1.5 didn't release until Nov. of that year), Gmail was just released into beta (you had to have a friend to get access), Google Maps was still in an experimental beta and was truly pushing the boundaries of what JS/HTML could do. The browser history API didn't exist so we had to do crazy iFrame hacks to create deep-links and history (this was true of any app, no matter what tech). There was no video in browsers without a plugin (HTML5 spec wasn't finalized until Oct. 2015). There was no such thing as CSS animations, they got their first release in Firefox 5 (June 2011).
So, were Flash apps trash? Absolutely, but not all of them. That's like claiming that modern browsers solve it all. We still have massive load times (look at how much time and effort is put into optimizing content delivery), the cross-browser and backward compatibility is a nightmare, and way more of a challenge then it ever has been. In some ways, modern web development is much better than Flash development was, but to be perfectly frank, we have a LONG way to go. Honestly, we haven't caught up to where Flash was 14 years ago.
But, we are getting there for sure. I can see why Steve Klabnik is so excited about WASM. I can envision where it is going and it reminds me of where Flash was trying to go before it was slaughtered by Adobe. It's an exciting time for sure, but we should also look back at where we came from and instead of just stating Flash is trash and it caused the web to be terrible, we should also look at what it did right and what it allowed us to create before we throw it out with the bathwater.
Nice attempt at memeing a response, but that comment doesn't work. Most SPAs that I've seen allow bookmarking, back and forward, right clicking to open a new tab... and they certainly don't introduce major security holes to attack your local machine (they're just websites, not a poorly coded third-party plugin like Flash), and they do not typically have superfluous sound or long loading times. In fact, browsers are blocking superfluous sound more and more, which wouldn't be possible to affect with flash since the browsers didn't control flash.
So... nice one there, green user. You really got'em!
But Flash games were a boon. Everyone with an idea was able to make it into a game. I spent a lot of time playing games in Kongregate and similar sites. Many were really interesting, well worth the effort of sifting through the rip-offs and trash.
I used to love Flash games, and I was also watching the projects that tried to get .swf files to run in a Flash virtual machine emulated via something like Emscripten, but I feel like all those projects have died out :/
The internet speeds were much slower then, the difference mattered a lot. Also note, from the description:
"Sadly, it's not possible to replicate the pop-up mouse-overs from the "Special Edition" - though I was able to append the "deleted scene" presented in that version. If you want to see that version - or the "Fire BAD!" flash video game where you attempt to extinguish flames on James Hetfield (tragedy + time = humor), you'll have to find the original .SWF files and have a way to play them."
It is and it isn't. Unity is great but it's got like a min 5MB download for just a spinning cube. Flash (because the plugin was built in) started instantly and had built in support for streaming. Unity can stream, after the 5MB engine download, but for whatever reason it's not common.
I meant more as in people with no technical knowledge whatsoever creating interactive stuff. Just look at the cambrian explosion of indie games from (most) people who probably can't do long division by hand.
Very likely! But some years ago, back when I still played Flash browser games, Unity games didn't work in a browser for Linux, the only platform I use. Maybe that situation has changed? :)
Electron (or embedded Chromium, etc.) is lazy development: save time on cross-platform work at the expense of your users' CPU overhead/battery time/SSD life.
Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.
I think calling it "lazy" is uncharitable, unless you're also going to chastise developers who target only one platform -- they're likewise not doing the cross-platform work.
Manually targeting multiple platforms is really hard. How could one person possibly keep track of all the battery-saving API changes in OSX, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android?
Yeah, it's annoying that Electron apps are so bloated. But the alternative would be > 50% of people can't use those apps at all because you only targeted one platform.
"unless you're also going to chastise developers who target only one platform"
Which I tend to do, particularly since that "one platform" is almost always either Windows or macOS, neither of which I use on a daily basis (and neither of which I have any desire to use on a daily basis).
Meanwhile, there's such a thing as cross-platform GUI applications that don't try to fit an entire web browser into them. Especially if your programming language of choice doesn't require precompilation, frameworks/toolkits like Qt and GTK and Tk are perfectly viable for cross-platform development, at least on the desktop (which is usually where folks are using the likes of Electron or CEF anyway). They also tend to perform significantly better and stay much closer to the look-and-feel of the rest of the operating system (no, I don't care if you think you know better than me about my sense of style; if your app doesn't respect the look-and-feel of the rest of my system, then it sticks out like mold on a slice of Wonder Bread).
Do you know of any of those cross plaform GUI tools that work in the web browser? Targeting Windows/Mac/Linux is easy but outside of JS I have seen no way that you can write one application that works on Web, Windows/Mac/Linux, Android and iOS
You're making the mistake of thinking that everything is just a technical challenge that you can throw money at, and that technical superiority is the only trade-off.
Just because an enterprise has funding doesn't mean it's wealthy in other, more scarce things like organizational capital. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the client developers at Slack would love to split off into dedicated platform teams and do a rewrite. We as developers love that shit.
But you should try to understand why these enterprises make these trade-offs and why they are still in these positions in spite of how much disposable money you think they have.
Sorry but I shouldn't have to use 2GB of RAM to browse the web. Compare Airbnb to Craigslist. One is visually pretty, the other isn't. One uses every framework under the sun, the other is HTML.
“Nice for you” and “nice for your computer” are being treated as separate things here, I think. Assuming a supercomputer (like the kinds most Electron app devs must surely have), Electron [native] apps have a good user experience.
Electron wrappers for originally web apps, on the other hand, are usually horrible user experiences—often they don’t even support right-clicking elements, or clicking on links to open them in a browser.
For some cases, nice for the makers is nice for the users.
I don't think more than a handful of the games and little videos that I enjoyed as a kid on newgrounds and addicting games would have been made had they not had such a low barrier to creation.
I do kernel/firmware development now, so I'll be the first to admit that this value proposition isn't valid for all domains.
But sometimes, for some use cases, just having a simple to use scripting environment is totally the way to go. Particularly if it's sandboxed well and can't really harm the end user.
Legions of bored teenagers would fight you over that. :) At one time there was no force so powerful as a bunch of friends sharing albinoblacksheep games/videos. Users loved it.
I only got into CS because of Flash. First I spent a ridiculous amount of hours on games, then I learnt to reverse engineer and tweak them, and then a ridiculous amount of hours creating and debugging games/apps with Flash.
Flash for the win! Till the day I die.
AS3 was amazing. When Typescript came out, it was a lot like
AS3. I was convinced and became a believer in TS and never looked back.
Not just games; anything other than hypertexts and forms.
In those days there was no notion of SPA or other contemporary well-established patterns for online interaction.
I authored several commercial sites using Shockwave and the like and it enabled us to give clients the ability to author media-rich and design-heavy presentations in a fashion they were familiar with from card decks applications. At the time doing so in a 'sexy' way made them stand out.
It was a cul de sac, but it was a worthwhile direction to test in terms of UX.
That it was proprietary was weighted differently in those days. The world was dominated by closed standards and open source was still vestigial especially in commercial applications.
Flash websites could have a back button. Maybe it wasn't quite as easy as putting in a hyperlink, but it was still pretty easy to configure.
Not arguing with you about the rest. As a web developer I still haven't made a website in the last 5 years that was as visually impressive as my Flash projects from before, and sometimes I miss the visuals....
But people forget that the AWESOME intro that you wait two minutes of loading to see... is only cool the first couple times. Many many people where losing 5 minutes of loading time, just to visit websites that they used EVERY day.
I agree but it's about using the right tool at the right time. How else would could they have started YouTube back then for example? Early YouTube definitely was a glimpse into the future.
Not sure what you mean by 'proper' - but flash video was a step-up from the previous era where websites gave you a choice of either RealVideo or Windows Media formats - the more quirky sites had Quicktime, and you had to have plugins for each [I'm dating myself here].
By virtue of being installed on 98% of all computers, Flash video was a de facto standard video target. One that could be played on Linux without getting into legal grey areas too!
Without Flash looming over them, IE would never have supported cross-platform video - this would have been Microsoft undermining the WMP format.
It was also a useful proof of concept of what could be done. Without Flash, would there have been the critical mass of users who wanted video in their browsers at all? Or the content?
I think that we would have gotten there eventually, but probably not as fast. The close - but not quite good enough - implementation of video in Flash was as much of a catalyst as it was a crutch to lean upon.
Bullshit. Without Flash or some other plugin there'd at best have been a different standard for each browser, with the only one worth caring about being whatever IE implemented.
I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.
> I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.
I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments.
(1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here.
To be fair, there were reasons those things fell out of favor; there was a real tendency for crazy, uneditable code that was way larger than it needed to be. Perhaps some of these things would be less of an issue now (honestly, a bunch of wasteful code is less of an issue now than when most of us were on 56k modems), but they weren't made-up.
The only good content in Flash was games and animations (like Homestar Runner). If you were using Flash as a Web/application design tool, you weren't making good content. You were making a pain in my ass.
The looping radar views use flash [1] [2]. The composite regional radar loops don't though [3]. That is unfortunate because the former has more information and detail. There's no reason why it can't be reimplemented with canvas or SVG to manage the overlays.
I suspect a lot of early internet amateur animators got started on pirated/shared versions of Flash. Probably helped the proliferation of that scene a whole lot. Cloud based service models make that much harder.
Things may have changed for today’s teens, but having been a teen through the 00’s that would’ve been too expensive for me. It was hard to even justify a WoW subscription at $15/month even with the near endless entertainment value that provided. Also, with the CC subscription setup, if you stop paying you lose access to your creations. That’s not too big of a deal for working adults, but for a teen with tumultuous cash flow, it’s a huge dealbreaker.
I spent hundreds of hours in Photoshop as a teen, but I likely would’ve have bothered with it at all if it weren’t easily piratable.
Depends on where you live in this World. For young people here (south america) that could be a lot.
That's a problem generally with cloud services. Pricing is mostly done considering some countries and contexts, but totally ignoring other. With physical equivalents some years ago, local distributors made deals with their home offices to adjust for this, but that's not something usually done anymore.
In 2007 flash could run 3d games, do shaders, have multiplayer, run physics manipulation, have 3d sound, do bitmap manipulation, socket programming, and had documentation built into the editor.
Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back.
General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT.
In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities.
Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar
I think the key thing to keep in mind is that Flash gave you all of that from one vendor in a coherent, easy to make use of experience. We can certainly do the same things with JS and the technologies we have outside Flash, but it takes a lot of mental work to stitch it all together. You have to know so many frameworks. You have to know the type of frameworks you're looking for to do `x`. And then there's a lot of performance tuning because something done through canvas isn't as fast as something done with the DOM, etc. Flash was gross but useful.
I agree. In the early 2000s, I learned about animation through Flash. I remember working on a 9th grade project that I illustrated through Flash. I remember learning what frames were, what keyframes were, what vectors were, etc. It was just the right amount of non-technical for me to make sense of it.
Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.
Flash was much more than animation. ActionScript was a fantastic language for developing dynamic client guis in. Flex's component based model was way better than what we have now -- basically typed webcomponents with a consistent runtime, and mxmlc and mxml was open source. Actionscript 3 was a fine language, with types and a nice compiler to work with.
Steve Jobs and browser security holes killed Flash, and no current open web platform covers all the use cases mxml and AS3 covered for cross-browser development. I could analyze audio channels, run lightweight process concurrency via green-threading, store user files, do i81n translation, streaming websockets and work with actual binary data types in the browser in 2006. I could trigger actions based on events in video and audio streams. I had consistently applied css with animations across components in 2006. I had reusable web components in 206. It's now 2018 and we still don't have cross-browser support for all of that. Oh, and I could run my app on the desktop in offline mode and in the browser.
Security was an issue. Looking back now, I think an Android-like permissions scheme is what it, and the browser, needs to fulfill the promise of write once run anywhere that the browser and the web tends to make.
It was heavily based off ES5, which really helped launch my Javascript abilities forward at the time. I was sad to see it go and ended up working with other technology that never felt as fun.
I remembered recently that Haxe was initially based off of MTASC (something I used in the later AS3 days), and checked it out. It's quite a stable ecosystem that feels very familiar in syntax. Add in HaxeFlixel, and it's almost like Flash never left.
Your timing is off, ActionScript 3 was based off the doomed ES4 which had classes etc. Adobe was even a main participent in the standardization process iirc.
Yup, AS3 was based completely on the ECMA draft at the time and was a spec implementation. Macromedia then later Adobe had representatives on the W3C board and due to politics, worry about compilation, the lack of "learning to code from reading source" and from what I recall concern for backward compatibility the draft was killed. Harmony was the next draft and it eventually evolved into ES5.
Completely agree with you... Going to browsers only from flash was like going 20 years backward. Even features available don't perform at same speed as flash.
Sad disaster
i once (~15 years ago) worked at a web design shop where the founders were both architects. they did everything in flash as it somewhat resembled the tools they knew - cad software. one of them was the designer and he was really good and they made amazing websites without even knowing a shred of html or even programming languages (they didn't even use actionscript). in case the customer wanted a guestbook they used a free ad-supported one (until i joined as a programmer).
flash was a good tool for the websites they used to create, usually graphics and animation heavy websites low on interactivity. they used the export function to generate the swf including the html index page to embed it.
over the years focus shifted more and more to dynamic websites with content generated from databases and they were mostly lost there. dynamic content (loaded by http requests from databases) in flash usually turned into a huge pain in the ass after a while. for those projects we switched to a traditional website model where dynamic content mostly wasn't loaded into flash, instead it was a html-by-php website where flash animations replaced header jpegs (i.e. animated passive content).
so, in our case, flash was a good replacement for animated and slightly interactive but not dynamically generated content.
I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash.
A lot of users did, too. But it was usually along the lines of "Oh, wow. This page has flash. Well, I guess I'll go get a Coke while the Flash plugin loads into the browser and my computer can't go anything else. If I'm lucky, the whole thing won't crash and take all my work with it by the time I get back."
Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone.
> Macromedia Flash keyframe animation was great even for technical users who didn't know animation. However, as soon as you wanted any kind of interactivity you had to start learning a new scripting language and that was painful for everyone.
Not really. Action Script has always been close to Javascript/JScript.Net and now Typescript, it is the same syntax. In fact ActionScript 3 was supposed to be the template for ECMASCRIPT 4, before it was abandoned.
Totally agree with this! I miss the simple days of build once run anywhere and just being able to bash out a fun idea in an afternoon and release it and know everyone would have the same experience. Yeah security was crap with flash but surely that could have been solved. I think the battery use and apple’s desire to make sure everything had to go through their paid AppStore was what killed it really though.
When Steve Jobs and company effectively killed "RIAs" I remember Adobe pivoting and promising a software to do what they previously had but output HTML5/CSS/JSS instead of Flash. It looks like it is still alive in the form of Adobe Animate?
> The product was originally called Adobe Edge, and it was rolled into Adobe Animate.
Not Adobe Edge was killed dead, it was not rolled into Adobe Animate. Edge did export animation with jQuery and DOM element, while Adobe Animate exports animations in pure canvas.
Kind of makes me wonder if there's a market for a React.js editor that works a lot like the Web Inspector does right now, where you can build your hierarchy as a nested list, set properties of each layer through a table, "wire" properties through several layers of hierarchy to reach further down components, and reference functions easily in the table. As long as it has support for lifecycle methods, it feels like it could become a natural UI for writing React apps!
Flash was indeed a tool for cultural creatives. You can tell because it only ever worked properly under Internet Explorer for Mac OS Classic. On every other browser/platform combo, there were framerate issues and the audio would gradually desync from the video. Forget about seeing these issues resolved in the afterthought of a Linux port.
is supposed to be an implementation of the Flash VM in typescript, But it can't even run in latest Firefox browser anymore apparently and no commits from 2 years.
Adobe has Animate CC, which is basically Flash Pro with a new name that also outputs to JS, canvas, and webgl. I think it's very probable it will implement WASM in the future.
Flash was more like using Premiere where you just edited your timeline with a bit of interactivity sprinkled over it, no movie editor ever had to get his hands dirty with some kind of scripting language or low level file formats just to edit a movie.
I had a lot of "oh wow" moments at the end of the 90's and beginning of the 00's with Flash. It was like the web was warped into the future. Nowadays you can achieve the same but not as elegant. It kind of reminds me of how PC's had to catch up with the Amiga for years. Perhaps starting with Wing Commander things were really on par or better, almost 8 years later.