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I still have not found a development platform that's more fun to develop in than Flash.

When I was a teenager, it was almost magic; I could draw a little cartoon, convert it to a movie clip, and export it to code; the fact that Flash was an animation-first program meant that it was really fun to draw with, and its integration with code made it so much more fun.

Now, part of the reason I have such rose-tinted glasses is because I was a teenager while using it, but still, I just don't think anything has had the fun "prosumer" feeling that Flash did. It didn't feel like it was just a "toy", but it also did kind of feel like a toy.

There are some more modern things that are cool, don't get me wrong: Pico-8 is pretty fun, and even more professional things like GDevelop or GameMaker can be fun as well. It just doesn't quite reach to the level that Flash did.

I do understood why the platform died, but I am also kind of sad that it did.

People have pointed out to me that the Flash platform basically still exists with Adobe Animate, AS 3 and everything (including web publishing).

So you can theoretically use the same flow as in your memory. I wish the price was not what it was, and I do not pirate software anymore. And Adobe's tricks when it comes to subscriptions are so nasty. This is a huge barrier to me trying to use Animate for anything, even though I'd probably enjoy it so much.

Timeline-based programming is such a good system for one-offs.

Wait how do you publish stuff written with AS3 and Adobe Animate in 2025? Ruffle?

You can just compile to HTML5 output! It “just works” for some version of “works”.

Interesting, I tried that feature shortly after the first version was released, but it was terrible, even relatively simple animations wouldn't work.

Why do you think the children of Flash were not inspired to create the next generation of that tool?

I’ll throw out one theory:

It attracted the most creative developers and not necessarily the most technical. There is a difference and both belong on a team.

Almost certainly that's a component.

Still, I wish someone would make a clone of the Adobe Animate program that directly exports to WASM, with all the artsy bells and whistles that I loved about it. Specifically, I would like something that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for forever. It was my first "real" experience with writing code, and I know I'm far from alone with that.

Pico8 and Game Maker and GDevelop and Scirra Construct are still fun, so it's not like there's a shortage of game making toolkits for younger people to get into this stuff. I just miss Flash in particular.

Hmm. You ever just stumble upon your reason for living?

Ha, if you were to make a decent Flash clone I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for it as long as it’s not a subscription thing. I don’t have enough interest in that level of programming to make it myself.

My theory is that it's hard to create a usable tool in general and even harder if the domain is complex. Interactive animations are pretty complex.

Yeah, there’s some truth to that.

It also doesn’t help that it’s two pronged: Flash is an animation tool and a software development environment.

There are some great animation software packages out there like Toonboom or even something like Moho or Opentoonz, but as far as I am aware they do not have the same kind of direct integration with a programming language like Flash did.

On the other end of the end of the spectrum, you have tools like Game Maker which do have programming as a core feature, but you’re expected to do animations elsewhere and import them in.

So Flash is a competent tool across two complicated domains.

It is a lot of work and does not have much potential to earn money. Simple as that

People, including developers, consistently underestimate work that needs to go into developing good user facing tools. And a lot of that work is not fun, not exciting, just work you have to do.

> Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.

> Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.

I've got no love for Jobs, but he wasn't wrong. Flash games were a lot of fun, but flash restaurant menus were terrible, and I'm sure the Adobe CEO was tired of pushing security fixes every other week. Also, I thought Jobs contributed to the death of Flash in the browser should be enough times, before third party apps on iPhone OS were a thing at all?

I also don't miss trying to get flash to work consistently on Linux.

Ah yes, famously restaurant websites got so much better after flash died

Wait... I'm hearing that actually restaurant websites still suck but in HTML 5 now

HTML5 is if you’re lucky. Usually it’s a PDF or even worse, a PDF inside some embedded javascript viewer with page turn animations.

Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.

I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true.

A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_fl... [1] https://vole.wtf/styscraper/

It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension.

But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime.

Adobe killed Flash when they bought Macromedia.

> It didn't suck.

We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications.

As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.

I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.

Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that

A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash

I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!

Cross compilation to native code from flash runtime was absolutely possible, and absolutely never considered by Apple ;)

Fun fact nobody remembers: back in the day Adobe built a feature where you could build flash source to an iphone app - you hit "publish" and an .ipa came out. It worked fine, people made apps, they got accepted to the app store, users used them, etc.

Then a day or so before that feature left beta, apple added a vague new clause to their app store agreement, which made no sense on paper but whose obvious purpose was to disallow flash apps. They then unpublished all the existing flash apps for violating that clause. Adobe quietly cancelled the app publish feature, and a few months later apple quietly removed the clause.

What was the clause?

It was something like that the app must have been "originally written" in certain approved programming languages. It basically targeted cross-compilation, but it was written so vaguely that on paper it appeared to even disallow native iOS apps if they started out as a port from some other language.

There was briefly a kerfuffle about it, as people using other cross-compilation tools (xamarin? etc) worried their apps would get removed as well. But IIRC apple never actually enforced the clause, other than to remove existing flash-based apps and reject new ones.

But it did cause vendors of cross-compilers to lay of dozens of staff as the clause killed their business (Source: I work with someone who was laid off because of the clause)

I don’t recall Apple unpublishing my AIR apps. One of mine was among the first secretly submitted before Adobe revealed the feature publicly. However, I definitely remember after Apple added the new clause, when I needed to submit updates, those were stuck in approval limbo for many, many months. Then, suddenly, they all got approved in a flurry and there was never an issue again.

Adobe AIR is actually still available today (now maintained by Harman through an agreement with Adobe), and it can still compile native iOS apps that can be submitted to the App Store. This feature was never removed, and is still maintained to be compatible with new iPhones.

And if you tried any sites that used flash on an Android (early days when you could for a while) you'd understand why.

No keyboard: which broke most games.

No mouse: touch is not the same and hard to fake mouse controls with touch while supporting pan or zoom.

Small screen: flash was designed for bigger screens and everything was too small or needed zoom.

Flash wanted to control its event/animation loop: battery life was drained quickly even for basic content.

Mobile didn't kill Flash.

You see the same UI issues when controlling a Remote Desktop from a phone screen. Just difficult.

Not only it was possible, it has available during the last years from Flash.

Many Flash haters have no clue that before Unity and friends many of the first generation games on iOS were actually AOT compiled Flash games, despite Apple.

While it is hard to predict an alternative future, the Flash runtime had suffered numerous security issues after all and I agree that a fresh new runtime with any successor to Flash would have been technically much better. Flash really had an excellent authoring tool and a mediocre runtime.

Sounds like a good candidate for transpilation. Next big thing could be Flash.

> Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.

This is still true today - there are very few fun games you can run on a phone. The primary problem is that phones only offer a single control, touching the screen.

I constantly have problems with the crossword puzzle app I have installed on my phone, because I can't reliably touch the right letters on the on-screen keyboard. Flash isn't the problem with putting games on a phone. Flash was a tool that people used to make fun games, but making fun games is pointless if you want people to try to play them on a phone.

A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games. For real games you can try out a Backbone:

https://www.amazon.com/BACKBONE-Mobile-Gaming-Controller-And...

Modern phones are very capable of playing some pretty serious games. It’s fine to get a few accessories as I do agree fingers aren’t ideal.

> A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games.

A stylus can solve the problem of not being able to target a point on the screen. It can't do anything about the problem that your game has to run off of a single control. Games need to be able to let the player do more than one thing.

It was perfectly fine on Symbian phones, and even after the whole iPhone drama, many games for iOS were initially done in Flash, as Adobe added AOT compilation capabilities.

However Adobe decided it wasn't worth it, given how plugins were going on browsers as well.

Naturally the Flash hating mob never got this.

Everything sucks on mobile. Mobile UX is the most unimaginative garbage ever.

After a brief period of creativity, every mobile app regressed to 'search bar on top, list in middile, tabs on bottom' UX. Even this best case UX is mediocre at best.

The fundamental flaw is that touch is imprecise and your finger covers the screen, which is unsolvable without buttons.

The lack of buttons killed all creativity and possibility of having a good UX for games on smartphones.

For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway.

They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.

Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.

Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either.

I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck.

After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH.

Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery.

Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.

> But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.

This oddly reminds me of another exchange on HN, in which someone said that the state of software tooling for learning Japanese was very good - in that there are a lot of software developers interested in the problem, and therefore there are a lot of tools around that those developers have built - and the counterpoint came up that while Mandarin Chinese really has just one tool available, Pleco is significantly better than every tool that exists for Japanese. The more vibrant competition in Japanese tooling doesn't seem to have produced any benefits.

I can't pretend to have a good diagnosis of why this occurs in modern web game frameworks or in language tooling, but in the language tooling there does seem to be an issue of crowding out - a high-end Chinese-English dictionary is $20,¹² whereas LogoVista's Android edition of the Kenkyusha Green Goddess is $65³ (and if you want English-Japanese in addition to Japanese-English, that's another $65).

LogoVista's app has the UI entirely in Japanese, making it a challenge for Japanese learners. But with the dictionary costing that much, anyone thinking "I can make an English interface for this!" might well decide that licensing the dictionary will prevent them from ever being able to turn a profit.

¹ And every Chinese learner I've ever met, other than myself, won't even pay for that - they stick to Pleco's vastly inferior free dictionary. But even that is infinitely better than what you get in Japanese tools, which use the equivalent of CC-CEDICT.

² https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/

³ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovist... ; I'm not sure what the iOS pricing is currently like, but if someone's interested it's available as paid content through https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?plat...

To be fair, Flash and Java were having an aggressive competition for enabling the most RCE exploits on end-user systems.

If we'd had the kind of support for sandboxing then that we do now, they probably would've survived a lot longer.

Flash was kind of terrible, though. It was proprietary and the creation tools were largely inaccessible. Some of the plugins only worked on windows boxes. It had a lot of the same issues java applets had with accessibility. Today's ecosystem should be able to support basically the same creations in a much more portable, accessible, performant format. My understanding is that even the flash runtime itself has largely been ported to html/js/webgl/canvas. So why we don't see this is very curious indeed! It must be the lack of accessible animation studios.

I don't mean to diminish anything you say, of course, it's all true and these flash games are a cherished point of my childhood. But the true loss hasn't been flash itself but the creative tooling that enabled a generation of artists to express themselves and create fun things and the communities that arose around it.

This. I can’t believe so many people fell for the scam claim that flash needed to die for security. No, Apple and Google needed it to die so they could control their respective platforms and rent seek.

It's a fun theory, but the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac OS crashes. Jobs obviously took that — and Adobe's refusal to take that seriously — extremely personally.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...