Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

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It was definitely Apple from my perspective. We had this amazing training site built in flash. I’m taking full on animated storylines, professional voice talent, everything. Our animation teams were releasing new content every three months with new product seasonal launches. We won lots of awards. Then… Apple launched the iPad. All of our retail partners announced they were going to adopt the iPad to train sales associates. And the iPad doesn’t run flash. Well… crap. We laid off the animation teams and told the voice talent there would be no more work. All of the content switched to plain plain html - text and static images. So boring. We saw massive drop in usage, especially in Asia where they lived the animated stories (the flash animations were translated into 40 languages). It has been 10+ years now and the site is around, but it is still boring plain text and static images. Flash had problems, but it was also something really special that has not been replicated since Apple killed it.

So it was deemed too expensive or risky to just turn it into an app? Sounds like you had your business model already figured out, building the app sounds like the easy part.

Flash file sizes were very small (they were basically just vector graphics). We tried making them into videos, but the file sizes, even greatly compressed, were too big for our Asian retailers. This was in the days before video streaming really came into its own. If we were making the decision in 2022, we probably would have gone with videos.

There was never any simple way of turning it into an app with these sort of products. Flash had a very unique set of functional/creative affordances that have never since been replicated in an authoring tool. I worked on many bespoke solutions to migrate Flash animations to apps and the lack of proper integration and ecosystem supporting the workflows made it far too impractical to try and reproduce much of Flash’s functionality. It many instances the business objectives were tied directly to the capabilities of Flash. Flash also had an extremely robust means of loading isolated application modules that helped businesses isolate their workloads and scale their applications. Solving that problem once Flash was gone was beyond the capabilities of many businesses that relied heavily on Flash.

Browsers have all the APIs you need to 'replace Flash' now, just needs the ecosystem IMHO.

The issue described wasn't that the underlying system couldn't support it: they were taking about native apps, which certainly had "all the APIs you need to replace Flash". The issue isn't about the runtime, it is that the Flash authoring experience itself--the app/IDE which people used to develop for Flash--was so glorious and rich in its design, and offered such wonderful affordances for making these animations, and no one has ever replicated such.

This: "Flash had a very unique set of functional/creative affordances that have never since been replicated in an authoring tool".

It was extremely to do a UI application with Flexbuilder, very similar to using VisualBasic 6.0. Just drag some widget and connect the event to some functions. Also drawing and animating vector graphic with the Flash authoring tool was extremely easy.

Today there is still no software that is this easy to use. You dont see 7 years old kid coding vector gfx animation with javascript and css :)

But back in the day it was not uncommon to see complex flash animation designed by 7 years old kid.

Also very curious which motivation not to wrap and app it!

Because Apple silently refused to approve all app using flash internally. This was war between apple and adobe.

I once spoke with an ex-Macromedia employee who told me that a full Flash-to-App tool had been developed for the launch of custom apps on iPhone ... and that Apple had internally committed to blocking any app developed in Flash, so the tool was never released.

A modern version of Flash is precisely the type of software you would think Apple would have created. They acquired Hypercard after all.

Sad that the best they can do is Swift Playgrounds for iPad; creating what is essentially a JSFiddle/Codepen for apps that can't be deployed without first paying their $99 dev fee toll.

Adobe Animate is Adobe Flash and it exports to HTML5 and so on. you can even export to .swf files if you want.

Adobe Flash died before becoming a forever-subscription product.

In that spirit, I use Tumult Hype, which truly is Flash, and can be acquired without a pesky subscription.

why do so many comments on this website sound like commercials?

Wait til you notice some 1% of the posts on the first few pages are keyword-targeted for you based on things you’ve discussed elsewhere.

In some ways it is too little, too late. There was a plethora of vector animators that probably could have moved over to animate, if it had existed back then. But it didn’t. So they moved into video as the YouTube era took hold.

I think all the security vulnerabilities that came out also contributed to its decline.

Why didn't you make them videos?

We tested it. File size was too big. Internet speeds were too slow in much of Asia back then (I don’t know how it is now). Flash file sizes were extremely small (it was basically all vector graphics).

You could do animation and audio without Flash 10+ years ago. :shrug:

LOL. Please. What tools, other than flash, were animators using to make videos for the web back then? Remember that they can’t be saved as videos since video streaming hadn’t come into its own and video file sizes were too large for our Asian retailers. The nice thing about flash animations is they were vector graphics. Super small file sizes.

This is outside my expertise but i remember doing svg animations, web gl animations and unity animations roughly ~10 years ago. But maybe that was a few years to late or not applicable to your case?

But an app with vector animations should have been doable (not to hard in theory) if you could have found the investment for it, right?

Professional animators are artists. They need professional animation tools, like flash, to work with, not svg/webgl/unity that a programmer would be more comfortable with. They need things like a timeline, character library, animation pallet, built in tweening tools, etc.

Ah, I understand. thanks for the clarification :)

(Unity do have animations tools for artists (it is partly made for artists) but not so good for vector graphics and not close to flash, and definitely not back then.)

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