Internet Archive expands Flash support
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I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.
In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.
He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.
The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.
It works! It had been effectively defunct for years:
It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.
This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.
Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.
Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.
You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.
While it WAS true, it's not COMPLETELY true. The first versions of Flash had very little scripting support, it was basically limited to switching between scenes. The first Flash that could do something non-trivial was Flash 5, released some time in 2000 and by that time Flash domination had already been established.
The secret was in its authoring tools and the concept of timelines. Basically, you inserted "key frames" and Flash interpolated between them automatically. So if you need to draw a triangle moving from point A to point B, you just add it to the timeline at the starting position, then move down the timeline, insert a key frame and drag the triangle to point B.
And these timelines can be composed, looped, triggered by scripts, etc.
Here's an example video that shows that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOPCPZO5YOA
And that's it. No need to write any fancy code. Flash would do everything for you, and it's baked right into the file format, that was specifically designed to be compact and concise.
It is free, open source and surprisingly good(for simple things), but developement is on hold or abandoned. (I looked at the source and it is not great, but not horrible either, but with the original creators not around anymore and lack of documentation, would be a pain to overtake)
I remember one I saw running in a video on an Atari ST that pretty much outdid anything I've ever seen since, indie developer too. Wish I could remember the name, maybe he made another version.
In my previous post, I emphasized Flash as a distribution format for a reason. While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines), the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an imperative program for an abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around (potentially texture-filled) vector objects on a canvas. Writing SWF bytecode directly, would be similar to programming against a retained-mode fixed-function graphics API like OpenGL — just without any 3D support. In other words, it would be like writing a demoscene demo.
Or, to put that another way: the core of the .SWF export format — before all the user programmability stuff was added — is basically a cousin of PostScript, but with a finishRenderAndWaitForNextFrame command, and the ability to set spline points' velocities. Which is very much unlike declarative vector formats like SVG. The closest comparison, I think, might be to the object-oriented vector display-lists used in vector-based arcade machines (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs.)
But, in both the arcade games I mentioned, and in Flash, if you've achieved the effect you want and are now optimizing the final work for size and performance, doing so will mostly be a matter of modularity and reuse of small repeatable design elements. Having "mechanical sympathy" for what the Flash export format looks like, will push you toward certain authoring decisions, e.g. building complex scenes using many smaller primitive objects that each independently animate (or in later versions of Flash, are independent state-machines); creating objects that can be uniform and so constructed by cloning rather than redefinition (leading to a surprising number of 2D flash animations and later games that were built out of colored, untextured voxel boxes); etc. And — despite there being no actual programming involved in the Flash animation authoring case — this is still very much akin to the process of optimizing a demoscene demo.
I mean, you can describe SWF like that, but it's not really what people think now when you say that it's an abstract machine. The SWF file is indeed a series of commands like: "put this object in this layer, and assign this matrix to it".
However, SWF still preserves the notion of persistent vector objects (called "characters") down to the display level. You're not just preparing a command list and then submitting it to a GPU for rendering (like with OpenGL), and then re-doing it again for the next frame.
Characters in SWF are persistent. Flash does all the composing, clipping, and it even does automatic interpolation for you for morphing.
SWF format is now open: https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf - the page 35 contains the description of the most important instruction "PlaceObject" that was used to actually do the animations.
Very little could handle buffering videos that well, or at scale.
Since people kept computers longer, and I was involved in online education/training delivery online in those years, flash video provided more backwards compatibility in a decade where IE4 wouldn't die, then IE6 wouldn't die.
Flash Media Server too, did some pretty interesting things. There were open source options like Red5 that were worth trying out.
Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...
It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.
Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't mean you should.
I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him.
Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.
I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems.
This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1].
[0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit.
[1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood.
In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal.
[0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...
Oh and yes, the opening bars of "Doctor" are permanently burned into my head now.
The Flash renderer was also state-of-the-art for the moment, with really awesome anti-aliasing and blending. All while using just fixed-point integer arithmetic.
you don't just buy someone's entire workflow and then not fix any of it. not at least, if you intend for people to believe you when you say you're the future.
I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code with Apple, but heard Apple assigned an intern to try porting it to iPhone. The Adobe developer working with Apple told me the ported code Apple sent back to Adobe didn’t even compile, so we don’t know if they even tested it on a real iPhone. We jokingly called the iPhone port “Project Boomerang” because the code that came back was basically the same that we sent them. :)
The Flash Player’s source code was ugly, but you have to remember that its roots trace back before Macromedia to SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for the PenPoint OS in the early 1990s. The core rendering and scripting code has since been ported and squeezed into new platforms and applications. And then the dot com boom happened. The development team grew to about a hundred developers and no one person understood the entire code base. Code was copy/pasted freely for fear of introducing regressions that would break existing Flash content.
Multiple rewrites and grand new engines that would live alongside the legacy engine were attempted but failed due to backwards compatibility, the second system effect, and product management’s pressure for new features.
To make matters more challenging, Adobe was losing interest in funding Flash development because revenue didn’t scale with Flash Player usage, only with sales of the Flash authoring tool to a small audience of Flash content creators. That’s when rev share schemes for 3D APIs, DRM, and asm.js-like C++ cross compilation (Alchemy and CrossBridge) were hatched.
Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company was being press-ganged into giving Steve Jobs an iPhone demo that wouldn't crash on stage.
Everything you said about Adobe management also tracks. I'm reminded about Jobs' quote about Xerox being filled with copier-heads[1].
Also...
>second system effect
Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?
[0] Said thread also revealed that Jobs felt snubbed from not being able to have Adobe's CEO on speed dial
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer.
A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). A few years before that, a team had evaluated whether the .NET JIT (or a cleanroom implementation developed in-house) was technically and legally an option.
Much later, long after I had left, I heard from friends still at Adobe that somehow JVM developers from Oracle had joined the Flash team in the mid-2010s and were eager to attempt yet another VM, based on their JVM experience. But by this time, Adobe no longer wanted to invest in modernizing the Flash platform when it could simply milk the cash cow.
I know Adobe will never open source the final Flash Player code (because of third-party code licenses and there’s nothing for Adobe to gain), but I wish they had at least open sourced their internal test suite so open source players could improve their Flash compatibility.
all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were.
The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.
Collecting data from a form sent via POST to be processed server side?
I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
Is there a friendlier format that I can export from illustrator that imports better into Affinity?
I haven’t had enough time to play with it and my days of working with the Adobe pdf spec are a little in the rear view.
Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.
it will hurt to go cold turkey, but the industry will thank you.
A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12. IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer to the ground rather than use that again.
That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?
Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.
It sounds like a joke, it isn't.
But the overall player was a massive codebase - buildable for literally hundreds of platforms - that was developed over a decade with tons of external tech and external partners involved. Open-sourcing something like that (legally) isn't something you can just pay money to do.
Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around.
But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.
They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of it competing w/ AEM.
They’re missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack and almost dead.
I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.
According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023.
As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC).
edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!
Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you forget in ten years..
"HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included in AIR."
When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI component library that you could use to create advanced and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).
When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you can't do instant searches and filtering on.
ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were actually used to improve performance.
Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a competitive product killed Flash. Jobs' unwillingness to hitch his wagon to Flash was a symptom not a cause.
Once flash was used for ads, that didn't help either. It wasn't just "flash was slow", it was "webpages with a dozen yelling, flashing, dancing, cpu sucking flash ads" slow.
I wouldn't want that crap on my new shiny phone either.
Careful when looking up Flex, it might trigger the past, and then seeing echoes of it present in today's techs :)
It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.
Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times.
Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction.
(Working from memory here, details are approximate.)
[1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license...
The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application.
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_develop...
(In practice of course it didn't matter what the terms precisely meant, because Apple never enforced them apart from removing flash-based apps.)
Edit: I forgot, at the time I was between jobs (2008) and had used a chunk of my money to buy an iPhone to learn iOS Dev on, they wasted a load of my time, and money.
Neither did third party developed apps, only what apple put on the smart phone like a featurephone.
Flash sucked ass on every single platform aside from Windows. Android, MacOS, Linux. Adobe sucked at porting.
Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.
At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.
And then Google amp came along.
At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.
At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.
Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.
If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.
Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.
The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.
I think the point that gets missed with the power of today's devices is how much could be delivered on device, and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or engaging way.
How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.
It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.
I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.
I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?
Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.
there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that context the squarespace page is all they need.
most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do it.
There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a set of support routines. They could have gotten even very complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have charged money for this feature, and many people would have forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their platform die. It makes no sense.
> Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed
I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:
emulator = ruffle-swf
emulator_ext = swf
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en
The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126
They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)
Thank you, lol
We took a look at `Home Run Derby` specifically and found some bugs and inefficiencies - the most recent builds should run faster and hopefully crash less :)
(For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-the-frame timing.)
There is some lore behind the game. It was a Yahoo Japan title https://www.siliconera.com/winnie-the-poohs-home-run-derby-s...
That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)
And yet...
And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?
Click the audio tab
That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.
There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.
[0] Audiojungle.
But either way, I played twice and that's enough for me
Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
WOW
Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something?
aka Flash Done Right :)
Interestingly enough, the Ruffle player itself is looking like it'll achieve that wide spread adoption. If a "Flash Done Right" type of thing was included in that by default, then it'd just leave the authoring tools piece missing.
Others have pointed out that Godot has timeline functionality similar to the old Flash (authoring) interface. So maybe the authoring tools piece would mean existing authoring tools (like Godot) would be able to add a "Flash Done Right" output target and call it a day.
Seems like an approach that would work.
Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).
Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).
And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.
I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.
Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).
I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).
I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.
Good times.
Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories?
¹ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash?query=grav... whereas it is on the site-wide search: https://archive.org/search?query=gravityrunner
though, nothing is stopping anyone from creating new flash games, videos, etc. the software is out there, and NG already does flash game jams.
CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.
jokes on them now, I guess
not to mention flash content could run on a potato, while javascript is soon to see your processor as fried as a potato chip instead
That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious' sites, there are enough sites now what treat you like a 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a landscape orientation.
If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years already, so I can't accept your 'blovk Flash' stance as anything having a substinence.
There were always user-unfriendly sites. It used to be possible to easily block the nasty content (Flash), now it's rather hard. It used to be possible to extract the interesting content (Flash) and save it without the junk website. Now it's not. Separation was an advantage.
I agree that the Web is narrowing itself down. One of the symptoms is not having interactive content clearly delineated from the rest.
You seem to come from the same premises but arrive at the opposite conclusion, and I don't understand your reasoning.
the problems that html5, css and javascript could in theory 'solve' are a moot point when the switch to those technologies killed any enthusiasm for it.
Today? Just forget about saving some web based game someone makes because it's probably streaming its assets from some dynamically computed URLs
https://archive.org/details/flash_flow
In fact, the motion of the little bit that it does feels much less smooth than I remember from last time I checked.
At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is.
There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.
Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never gets any food to eat. So, no game.
(Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2290936)
I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a living, so that's not infrequent)
[0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/
I suppose it's worth uploading the swf to archive.org and seeing if it will work there as well. Edit: https://archive.org/details/newyorktimes-2010-interactive-ro... says "failed to download game data" but I'm not seeing a failed request in the developer console. Not sure if that's a problem with my upload or if IA hasn't finished processing it or something. /edit
It's not fully functional by the way: the computer is not being animated at all, the text areas are too small, the score counter doesn't update... but it runs! Thank you :)
https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/12071 https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/12073
As I noted on those issues, this game uses multiple assets, so downloading and playing just the main SWF file won't work. You can play the game by loading the URL of its main SWF file in the Adobe Flash projector, which can still be downloaded from here: http://web.archive.org/web/20220401020702/https://www.adobe....
https://web.archive.org/web/20161126122429/http://www.johnny...
There was a time when I used to play that game every day.
Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I’d have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .
https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...
It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to my wife, and it was a great experience.
[1] https://scrimba.com/ [2] https://scrimba.com/learn/imba [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579699
If they can get that working I’d be ecstatic!
https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...
to anyone missing flash go checkout godot!
Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.