Macromedia Flash – A New Hope for Web Applications (2002) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Macromedia Flash – A New Hope for Web Applications (2002) [pdf]

uie.com

42 pointsMrBra29 comments

I still remember playing with one of the first versions of Macromedia Flash as an intern at an IT company during high school. The "hot thing" back then that people mostly used Flash for was to realize cool "intro" sequences for their website. As an example, here's the intro that I made for my company (courtesy of the Wayback machine):

https://web.archive.org/web/20030605160730/http://kimweb.de/...

Everything in Flash was pretty limited back then, for example Actionscript didn't even have sine and cosine functions! I remember that for another project of mine I ended up re-implementing these functions using a Taylor series approximation, which was pretty wild but worked.

Today it seems that Flash gets a lot of hate and ridicule by the IT community, but honestly back in 2001 it was a huge deal and allowed you to do thing on the Web that were completely impossible using HTML/CSS (Java applets were an alternative but much clunkier and harder to create). One example of this was a small thing that I built which would allow you to specify some text as a parameter and then would let this text "fly in" using user-defined animation sequences. For example, you could have the letters "fly in" from above or perform some wave-like dance. Creating these animations could be done by defining a sub-tween (I might misremember the name for this) for each letter, which would take the letter value and position and perform the rendering, which was quite flexible and allowed for object-oriented use of animation sequences. So, even back then Flash was a pretty decent and versatile tool and probably had a large influence on later technologies like HTML5.

I was making bank in high school (for a hs student) making those flash intros for people. Then I made a flash video of my teacher with her hair on fire and almost got expelled. Versatile technology indeed.

To be fair those things you couldn't do in the web, like intros and text fly-ins, were really obnoxious. That's what got Flash a lot of hate (and rightly so).

What made Flash great were games, video, real-time communication (e.g. web chats) and cartoons. Flash was great as its own medium, even if embedded in the web (not replacing it).

Shoehorning Flash into the web medium was a mistake, just as obnoxious as now is hijacking the scroll or adding thousands of fade-ins in HTML5 (which fortunately as a fad seems to be dying).

People forget though, web designers didn't start using Flash to replace the web for kicks - HTML sucked pretty hard as a visual medium in those days. Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity.

Obviously HTML has always been the best medium for marked-up text, but for pages whose value came from interactivity or design, Flash was simply a better medium for a long time - its entire heyday plus 1-2 years beyond, IMO.

> Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of interactivity.

Hardly the fault of HTML, a layout markup language. Put the blame where it's due, on a non-cooperative, or rather openly combative, market place.

> Put the blame..

I was just trying to deflect the blame from Flash. ;)

But yeah, HTML's woes were due to browsers not cooperating, but then until their lunch was getting eaten I don't suppose they had any incentive to. To me, the Story of the Open Web is one that validates both standardization and proprietary innovation, in that sense.

Flash was great for a lot of things 10 years ago that you couldn't to with HTML.

Custom fonts? -> Flash

Sound? -> Flash

Text Shadow? -> Flash

Dynamically blur images? -> Flash

3D? -> Flash (well, more like Director/Lingo back then)

it took some time to reinvent the wheel with HTML. Once in a while I come across an HTML page with a "loading" screen... oh wait most, lot's of SPA do this… :)

(edit: formatting)

Lets not forget the indy gaming scene. Before there was mobile gaming we had flash games.

I was in the middle of this way back when. Software I created (well, I prototyped and hired somebody else to create), won the very first Macromedia Rich Internet Application. It created name badges from a Flash app.

For those who don't remember -- and judging by the comments I think that'd be many -- there was no AJAX back then, and when I first saw AJAX I remember thinking that's the end of Flash.

It wasn't a love of Flash technology but a love of stateless UI that inspired our line of thinking. Stateless UI was possible with Java, and I first wrote the program that went on to win the award in Java, but Java looked even clunkier than Flash and ran worse. Flash looked nice, ran well, and was easy to install and maintain (back then it was already installed and enabled in all browsers).

Now I have lots of grey in my beard and have been working mainly on mobile tech lately. But those days -- not long before this PDF came out -- were great fun. We knew the web had to evolve and saw this type of user experience, if not this specific implementation, as the future. Today, that's AJAX and mobile apps. But Flash was a necessary stepping stone.

A lot of people hate anything Flash but Adobe Flex was a really great tool to create web apps at one time (before the spark components). It introduced a lot of cool things for making web apps like two way data-bindings, asynchronous requests, event listeners at core of everything, MXML components with repeaters, etc - many of these things that AngularJS does now with Javascript.

If their browser plugin wasn't so buggy and non-standard it could have been a really good alternative.

If Flash had been open source early on it might have succeeded and become a core web technology. Microsoft, Apple and Google would have been in charge making the runtime secure and high performing.

Macromedia/Adobe would have continued to be in the position of providing the leading development tools.

The web would be very different. I actually think that we are lucky this did not happen. I find our current web technologies to be a much better solution over all.

> I find our current web technologies to be a much better solution over all.

Really? It what sense? I just now see TypeScript coming close to parity with what ActionScript provided several years ago--and the tooling is nowhere near there (though I have not used Visual Studio). I feel like our current web technologies are more the VHS to Flash's Betamax.

The SWF format has been open source for more than a decade.

I think the article completely missed the trend towards mobile devices. Also it fails to take into account the propietary nature of Flash and the fact it's look and feel doesn't fit the 'web experience' (users like to copy and paste text, etc. and don't want the UX to be different on each site). Oh dear. Looks like UIE are still in business though - you can't predict every trend.

I remember an investment bank in London building their whole trading platform in Adobe Flex. They really thought this was the future and spent literally millions on it. I am not sure what's happening now, but good luck resourcing and maintaining that project. I imagine someone has just asked for a whole lot of cash to rewrite in HTML5, because you know standards, multi-device compatibility, etc. are important!

What are you on about, HTML5? This was written in 2002, when a Nokia 3210 was bleeding edge, AJAX wasn't a thing and everything was written in PHP and JAVA Applets.

The second paragraph wasn't dated - that was about 2009 when my friend was trying to encourage me to apply to join this fledgling Flex team - so even after 2002 people were still following the Flash / Flex mantra.

still, Flex is better than the crowds embraced Silverlight™.

Possibly the most mistimed technology introduction in the history of computing. Any other candidates out there?

I'd say that in 2008-2009, Flex, for that sort of application, wasn't necessarily a bad bet. Most people date Flash's demise to the start of the mainstream smartphone movement, but the first iPhone was only released in mid-2007 - obviously it had no Flash support, but it notably didn't have a lot of other things too (like copy and paste!), so it wasn't immediately obvious that it would never get Flash; and the Android devices that followed the iPhone did support Flash (it was even touted as a differentiator from iOS devices), albeit poorly.

Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" piece was published in 2010 and that probably did hammer a few nails in the Flash coffin, at least in terms of public awareness. I think if you were betting big - millions of pounds big - in mid-2010 on Flash, you could be accused of making a silly mistake. Before that, I think it's more forgivable.

Flex was always bunk, if you ask me, but it did some of the same things that people like about Angular, with the addition of a bunch of (fairly poor) UI components. In theory you could build business-oriented / data-driven applications with it quite easily, so finance was very much its intended audience.

There is a tendency to group all flash content together, if you break it out into say: Websites (typically micro sights) Banner adverts Creative websites Games Video players Audio players Applications Desktop AIR applications Mobile AIR applications Web site components

Each use case has a date when they became a bad bet, some never were. Even today web components (shims/polly fills) are written in flash and are acceptable.

Flex is now Apache Flex, and still running on Mac OS, iOS, Windows and Android (Using Flash or AIR). And Flex is now open source (been for a while, like in a couple of years).

I currently work for an investment bank in London on a trading platform written in Adobe Flex. Resourcing and recruiting isn't actually much of an issue as while the pool of developers is small they are also highly skilled and specific to the target platform and business.

We have JavaScript migration plans, but for something with so many developers and hundreds of thousands of lines of code the tools are only really reaching the required maturity.

In terms of "because you know standards, multi-device compatibility, etc. are important!" this is actually not very important, we have native mobile applications and there is zero chance you would run a desktop app on a mobile device without the majority of the code being different.

The main driver is security concerns with the Flash player.

When I first started tinkering with algorithmic art, Java applets and Director was fast and spiffy but not many people installed the runtime and Shockwave. DHTML was a headache due to browser compatibility. C/C++ with OpenGL were blazing fast but had no web presence (and was really really hard to learn at the time). Flash had the least amount of barriers to get me going and publishing.

I rode the flash train for a while and have since moved on. The awesome thing about flash was knowing that the stuff I learned is completely applicable to any programming language I chose to focus on.

Sigh. Look how sideways technology moves.

I got a little distracted and transported back to early 2000's and felt a strong urge to switch to this magic technology. So glad it happened, so glad it's gone.

I totally like the fact that this is published as Pdf :)

UIE website dates back to 2002 too

Hope is like a bread for the poor.

off-topic, There is a word-by-word translation of this phrase in Turkish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com