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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

WHich was... only windows computers since Flash barely worked on Macs or Linux, and never properly made it to mobile, where it was also a complete battery drain when it did in fact do things... sometimes.

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I have different memories from before 2012. Flex apps I built were used on all 3 and worked flawlessly in AIR. Looked and behaved exactly the same everywhere. Indeed, though, barely made to mobile. But Nokia N95 was pretty cool.

What was the process of installing AIR like on Linux?

I really don’t know. Back in 2009 I was contracting for this company in Worthing. They have a US location in Florida, and are selling aircraft spare parts. I have built an application in Flex for them which was used for taking all sales orders, place purchase orders, manage clients, suppliers, stock, and invoice by people on a call floor. It was great, it worked in every browser where Flash Player could be installed. When AIR came out, in became a standalone application with a wrapper loading the swf file generated for the web app. It worked on Windows and Mac, Snow Leopard back then. It was great, app could be updated by making the new swf available for download on the local network, and waiting for users to restart the app. They did that twice a day: when going to lunch, and when going home. The app remembered everything they were working on. It was great.

It took us good three years, it was eventually feature complete and used by 120 people on two local installations synchronised back then with Dropbox (hey, I didn’t know any better and it actually worked great over a hurricane m). We have replaced a home-grown COBOL app.

Eh.. lots of projects targeted mobile app stores by authoring in Flash and using the GPU accelerated stuff. Starling was a semi-blessed framework. Worked perfectly well, no battery drain. Lots of "native" apps were authored that way (and still are, you see the same approach with Unity etc.)

Browser plugins could have been fixed to catch up, the VM itself wasn't the problem in terms of drain

Not my recollection at all. Adobe invested almost 0 effort in getting their runtime working on non-x86 platforms. It was pathetic, honestly, how many years passed before they had any kind of passable implementation there.

Adobe Flex was interesting and not awful. The problem was the runtime.

And the company behind it. Who remains awful.

Do you remember Angry Birds? https://villekoskela.org/2012/02/15/angry-birds-facebook-rel...

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