Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page.

This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.

> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite

Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway

> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS

Flash?? Seriously?

View on HN

We're talking about CS4 here: Flash was basically THE way to build UI back then. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivating factors for Adobe buying out Macromedia (aside from just quashing potential competition from Macromedia Studio).

Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.

The wonderful pseudo-3D HUD on tye Crysis franchise is made with Scaleform. It's deprecated, and AFAIK, CryEngine doesn't use it anymore, but it made the best GUIs back then.

THE way to build a UI that worked and looked consistently across platforms at the time as well. It was a great time! Even now it still takes some work to achieve the same!

Flash?? Seriously?

I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

Flash is still used in animation and other bits, despite its web presence disappearing

Is there a reliable way to view flash files without a browser then? I'm concerned about loosing the ability to occasionally view some flash (games etc) after Chrome removes Flash support this december. And people (I have quite a number of friends who do) already have to use old Windows systems with Internet Explorer to use the Flash app to apply to the US DV lottery (Chrome just offers to save it instead of running it).

Flash Player works as a standalone app iirc.

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Specifically, you need to get the "projector" from this page: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

Flash is cool and very good at certain things. I just prefer a more native-feeling UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com