Comment by excessive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by excessive | Hacker News Reader

I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s.

It's easy to imagine the various security vulnerabilities could have been fixed by a more responsible/responsive company, and the abuse by advertisement companies should've been solvable with an ad blocker.

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML have come a long way in capability, but the mashup is much more distasteful to me. Flash was elegant despite its frequent misuse.

Something that's not easy to appreciate about Flash if you weren't there is that it is the first tool that really put multimedia interactivity within reach of non-devs -- and, almost gratuitously, made it dirt simple to distribute your creation at the same time.

A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly build and send something around the world in a week. No wonder it uncovered so many creative projects waiting to happen!!

And it was very easy to distribute too! All you needed to share was the swf.

Disclaimer: old timer

As someone who wrote a complete 3d modeller for a game, including animation, even before 3dsmax was a thing, I was surprised when a few years later (10+) I saw how easy the Flash UI was to understand, especially the way keyfames were added. The UX was rather extraordinary. Unfortunately even at that time (early iPhone) because Flash was so synonymous with security flaws, I would regularly uninstall it. Since then, I've yet to see a solution that's as easy to use and doesn't have some kind of vendor lock in (like Flash did). Maybe I haven't looked hard enough tho.

As much as I personally disliked the artistic Flash- only sites at the time, hindsight shows that they were rather invaluable. We lost a lot of diversity when Apple killed it off.

> It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s.

People often forget about those.

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