This comment is mandatory for every post mentioning Flash, and although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog and an absolute security nightmare, it's still true.
And yet, it was really lightweight compared to what we have now. If you have a webpage or game on the level of what Flash typically did, expect tens of MB of downloads, more than 100MB of RAM usage, and choppy animation on anything but a high-end PC. Flash was a resource hog in the early 2000s, when people still had dial-up modems, single core sub-GHz CPUs, mechanical hard drives, RAM in the 100s of MB,...
Performance of the "modern web" is abysmal for the computing power of modern devices.
Also, with the loss of Flash, we lost most of the vector graphics that was typical of that era. It was, in a sense more, modern than what came after since vector graphics work really well on the high-resolution displays we have now. Vector graphics on the web are timidly making a comeback, on websites with many times the resource requirements of what was typical for Flash.
We wasted a good decade rebuilding things from ground up with what became the web stack, including many of the bad things we blamed Flash for, like intrusive ads and DRM. And along the way, we lost some of best parts, like the authoring tools, and we dragged a lot of bloat too.
Whilst I once dismissed Flash for being being "proprietary", I can now appreciate it as a great democratising force.
Today- if you want to make some cute animations from scratch, you basically have to first work out how to rig up the js development environment de jour, and then delve into some fairly complicated mathematics to make it work. In other words, the type of thing that no spontaneous creative type is going to waste their life on.
Flash used to help normal people to make websites. Normal people have stopped making websites. We should bring back Flash, or something like it if we want to maintain a truly decentralised web.
Unity seems like it's a similar model, but I don't see the same abundance of "high schoolers and low-tech artists building cool shit for fun."
Being able to draw until it got tedious and you learned to program was a huge fucking deal.
Shit I even made GUIs for all my command-line tools so normal people could use them.
Using the Unix philosophy to combine text based tools does not translated to GUIs. How about test automation?
Back in the day when I was still forced to develop software on Windows or Mac OS I wasted so much time maintaining brittle click & even snoop-based integration using kludgy tools like selenium and add-hoc click-the-freaking-button.exe just because the app originally happened to be developed natively in Java, Flash, HTML5+ajax by some rockstar, 10x coder without seatbelts.
Or try running a simple Java tool on headless Windows using Jenkins agent or cygwin SSH and you'll discover how horribly bad relying on a GUI can be. Or: how about automatically launching a MacOS VM on VMWare and setting up a VPN tunnel after a restart power outage without a mouse, keyboard and display. Should work in theory, but in practice never gets beyond most of the time.
There’s no reason why an app can’t work as well either via command line or via GUI. The whole point of architecturing your software is so you don’t write something kludgy.
FWIW, the Flash IDE (now called Animate) and ActionScript 3 never went away, they just became irrelevant.
I thought that's fine...
Then the day after, the CEO of Adobe went on CNN and said "we agree, flash is shit, standards are the future." I could not believe my eyes. RIP Flash, and 12 years of pain.
I remember years of fighting. If you visited the page for downloading Flash with an iPhone user agent, you'd see a passive-aggressive message explaining how Apple sucks and everything is their fault.
Another thing Adobe did was actually make a Flash player for Android. https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/flash-player-mobile/
I used it, it worked pretty well!
I reckon you are not talking about accessibility the way we use it for product design right? Because to me Flash was the opposite of accessibility compared to the regular web of the time that could mostly be browsed with a text based web browser using a braille display.
What's kinda interesting to me is that Macromedia also had a Java-applet-based SWF player, which got me wondering why a Java-based version of Flash, instead of the native-code Flash, never took-off as a more secure alternative.
Can't remember exactly though but this is the experience I vaguely recall.
Honestly by the time Thoughts on Flash was written Adobe hadn't cared about that aspect for many years. They seemed to be only interested in it as a video delivery system and then a hardcore multiplatform tool not the entry level space it filled for many of the earlier years.
Adobe also for many years claimed Mac was the problem for the poor performance of the player yet after Apple denied them the iPhone the Mac player reached Windows performance parity in weeks.
Eventually becoming MacroMind Director and eventually Adobe Director. Creative people could have moved to Director from flash.
Flash was truly awesome, but I'm glad we only need a text editor these days.
I’m a paying user, but it is possible, it’s just harder and requires more frequent patches. Along with macOS making it harder and harder to run unsigned binaries, it truly demands a lot of effort from the user
I think Richard Hipp would be offended by the comparison :)
Those same people are now writing the same bad code in HTML5/Javascript.