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Comment by rezmason | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worth noting that 2004-2006 was a time period where a Flash applet could have done this on the client. This was also a time when Flash content was supported by Apple QuickTime, so it's interesting that they didn't make use of it here.

I wonder if a SWF was ever hosted on the apple.com domain.

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> This was also a time when Flash content was supported by Apple QuickTime

While QuickTime supported some Flash content, my recollection is that it only supported simple animations which could be mapped onto QuickTime's own interactive video features. I don't think it supported ActionScript, so this kind of interactivity would have been beyond it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

Apple had Adobe by the balls, and made the entire web a little sadder to protect their bottom line.

It's rare to find people complaining about moving from a proprietary Adobe technology to an open standard.

Flash => HTML5 was a travesty for creative little games on the web. It never recovered. Even today the authoring tools are crap for the average person with an idea, if you ignore AI vibe coding for a minute, which overcomes the tooling deficiency by being experts at the difficult tooling. (But I guess Flash => HTML5 was only a part of it, the rise of IAP everything, which was also pioneered/popularized by Apple, may have played an equal or larger role in the demise of that game genre.)

I agree the authoring tools were excellent. I think it goes beyond Flash though.

I have this book from 2008 on Flash web designs and they're so cool, there's so much detail and love put into them. Then they all became flat and soulless.

Same with skeumorphism. I bought yesterday two iPhone 4's, one with the original iOS and one that had been "upgraded" to the flat laggy version with all the detail, all the love, all the joy sucked out of it.

The exact same thing happened across the entire digital landscape, more or less simultaneously.

It's taken Javascript ten years or more to get to the point Flash was at, and the tooling is still nowhere near as good. Open standard is not the only thing that makes the web happier, and it's not even the main thing. Playing Flash games on Newgrounds in 2005 was amazing, and arguably 2025 has it worse.

I've used GIMP every day for 20 years and I'll still gladly say it's a piece of crap compared to Photoshop. I don't think that's exactly a niche position on my part ;)

apple used some flash, for example:

store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/vday07/img/PersonalizationHome.swf

(Reported a security problem to them back in the good old days 2013)

Not sure about swf files on www.apple.com directly, would have to dig into my older collections on a dusty server.

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