Hacker News Reader

Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

AS3/Flash was an amazing language + ide. It included a simple syntax, layers, a great system of events and callbacks, animations built in, timelines, vector graphics, etc. I and other AS3 devs (2011) could write code x10 faster than anyone in obj-c. The concept of AS3/swfs running on an iOS store could mean the end of control of the apple app store and the break down of the obj-c community.

Apple completely fucked over AS3/Flash. Adobe launched multiple attempts to work with apple to build out a system to launch swf files on a iOS device. Apple could have helped. Adobe should have played hardball and yanked photoshop [+studios] from the osX.

View on HN

As an end user, I can't say I'm particularly sorry about how this turned out. Flash was a security nightmare, and devs that continued to use it in light of that helped an ecosystem that put their customers at risk. Ease of development should not be the only constraint.

Flash the platform was awful.

Flash the development environment was pretty great, and nothing comes close to it today. The closest I can think of in terms of ease of picking it up for artists/designers/etc is Unity, but it really is built for 3D first.

Except it ran like shit everywhere besides Windows, never mind a 2007 iPhone.

I'm sure it could be made to work great, but it never did.

Right. Apple would never be able to figure out how to get a swf file to run quickly.

When iOS was released it was illegal for Apple to implement a mechanism to execute SWF files:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Licensing

I'm sure they could have worked w/ Adobe to create a version of Flash Player for iOS; just like Adobe did for Android and Blackberry.

And how did those perform?

Blackberry designed their whole OS and app development ecosystem around Flash / AIR. It performed surprisingly well, but obviously their devices was not successful in the marketplace.

Android was hit or miss depending upon the specs of the device.

To play devils advocate, we are in 2017 and JS adverts on normal websites can slow the latest phones down to a crawling stuttering mess.

These are probability the same developers that were writing sloppy Flash banners a decade earlier.

Sure, but JavaScript is an open standard and you can tune your implementation at will.

Compare that to being at the mercy of a company like Adobe that bundles at least 3 different JavaScript interpreters, a full blown WebKit and who knows what else to Photoshop. All while having a custom made cross platform UI layer across all of their apps.

True, although sadly you can't also tune JavaScript developers at will.

That's simply bad app or library code. Any website can take up 100% of a cpu thread. If all threads are used then even the greatest workstation will slow down.

This is quite true. I had nothing but disdain for Flash back in the early noughties because, almost universally, everything I encountered that was built with it was terrible, especially those CPU core swallowing ads.

Nowadays of course we have CPU core swallowing and battery draining JavaScript ads, along with massive JavaScript bloat in general. For the heck of it I just went and had a look at one of my own pages, which runs an HTML5/JS/CSS game, and includes Adsense. It downloaded 633KB of JavaScript. By today's woeful standards that's not even particularly bad. To break it down a bit though, 52KB of it is scripts I use directly, of which 47KB is required for the game. The other ~5KB is FontAwesome, which I use for icons on the menu buttons. The other 581K? Well, Adsense itself is also fairly small (about 35K for two scripts), which leaves the rest - the vast majority - which is loaded by the ads themselves.

Like you, I've come to realise that it wasn't the tool/platform, but the people building for it. Clearly the best developers are not building ads. It feels like there should be some scope for disruption here.

I think browsers could throttle scripts loaded from cross origins. That may allow the main website to load faster, but then I guess from the content owners point of view the most important thing is getting the ad code loaded and registering hits :(

That's true, I remember when Adobe Air first came out for mobile devices and I was completely heartbroken at my game which ran 30 fps on desktop choking at 4fps on the iPhone.

At the time, it was such a great idea (in theory)

I seem to recall flash being power-hungry, slow, and a security nightmare. All of those things would be bad for iOS.

Remember how in the early days it was a "big deal" that android phones supported flash but iOS didn't? Tech people used to think that was important, and it netted android some sales, but in the end everyone had to admit that it was kind of a bad idea.

I was on Android back then. Flash was important since I could use certain web sites I could not use on iPhone.

Today things are different since most site use html5 instead but back then iPhones were seriously crippled on the web.

So was I. While you could use a few of those sites, the device was clearly not happy about it, getting really warm, or just crashing sometimes.

Shortly after, most of those sites released normal mobile versions anyway.

Flash was a complete security nightmare.

However, as a platform the player was lean and optimized. A lot of people wrote horribly inefficient things with it, which gave it a reputation for being power hungry and slow.

There were additional performance issues on Mac desktops where certain APIs for video playback were blocked.

AS3 was definitely a great language to use. Good mix of OOP and functional, typed as much as you wanted it to, good tools. I wasn't really an AS3 developer (only did 2 projects with it) but I remember it very fondly.

That said, I'll never miss Flash. The web became a much better place the day it died. Maybe it could have worked better on mobile devices? I have no idea, but I'm definitely not sad that Apple said no (because that kept it out from my Android phone too)

The death of Flash was definitely bitter sweet for me. Working at an agency that mostly made Flash games/experiences from 2004-2011, there were a few years there after the final nail was put in Flash's coffin where we had to completely reset our expectations of what was possible in web based games (that run on the majority of browsers/devices). In most cases it was more time consuming and costly to build lower quality stuff.

Granted, mobile devices were never a target for Flash games, so the biggest problem was that all the sudden our clients needed content to run on a new lower power device in addition to desktop browsers. Previously our biggest problem was clients that needed things to run in old versions of IE (IE6 anyone?!). Our last couple of Flash games that we built 5+ years ago are still far more impressive (on desktops) than any HTML5 game we've since developed (and we've developed A LOT of them!). GPU access was made available for the Flash player shortly before it died. A lot can be done now with WebGL, but wide device/OS/browser support is still a problem.

We've since branched a lot more into native app development where we can continue pushing the envelope visually. Our JS games continue to feel like they have handcuffs on them and still can't compete with Flash 5-7 years ago.

So why didn't it become popular for Android dev?

Because the whole point was to use it on multiple platforms. Without iOS support it was just not worth it.

A few really big indie hits were however written in flash and related languages.

Android + Web + Desktop is not multiple platforms?

I don't know if this is still the case (haven't cared much about the mobile market for a few years), but what the Android and Web markets were missing that made iOS a necessary target was: users willing to pay money for apps. I don't recall the exact percentages, but many mobile app companies were reporting that iOS users made up 20% of their users and 80% of their revenue. Something like that.

It was one of the attack vectors for the PlayBook (Blackberry/QNS) but by that point they were too far behind.

Flash was awful. It was buggy as hell, resource intensive as all hell, and a huge security risk. I am glad Apple did not allow it, otherwise every iOS device would have a glaring backdoor to where the government wouldn't have to ask to decrypt iPhones.

> The concept of AS3/swfs running on an iOS store could mean the end of control of the apple app store and the break down of the obj-c community.

Why would Apple want that?

You're aware of Adobe AIR, right? It supports cross platform AS3 development to both iOS and Android.

I think it could have been a contender for winning the 'cross-platform-mobile-dev-tool" war; but Adobe abandoned it along for the most part.

> Apple completely fucked over AS3/Flash.

This is complete nonsense.

Adobe screwed over Flash and the number of major vulnerabilities discovered in the decade since iOS 1.0 has proven this to be absolutely the right decision. Apple has the responsibility and the right to put their user's security above and beyond the needs of a minority of developers.

Also your point about AS3 versus Objective-C is hilariously stupid. Anyone experienced in a platform is going to find development quicker than someone who isn't. I would be 10000x faster building an app with Objective-C because guess what I don't even know AS3.

Oh no. We all knew obj-c. It is just a shit language from the 1970s. Do your homework.

EDIT: 33 years ago, not 1970s.

1984 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

Sad

33 years ago???? WTF? I was off by 6+ years. I think you missed the point.

> Also your point about AS3 versus Objective-C is hilariously stupid. Anyone experienced in a platform is going to find development quicker than someone who isn't. I would be 10000x faster building an app with Objective-C because guess what I don't even know AS3.

Programmer productivity is measurable.

And in this case the OP has provided no evidence or facts.

But my point still remains that people are more productive in the technology they know the best.

> Apple completely fucked over AS3/Flash. Adobe launched multiple attempts to work with apple to build out a system to launch swf files on a iOS device. Apple could have helped.

The problem rather is in the Apple users that accepted this behaviour from "their" company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com