Hacker News Reader

Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com