Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

To offer a business perspective on this, as opposed to widely spread tech-centric comments...

Flash market is still there, and it's growing. Hard-on-3D browser based games are extremely sparse with business opportunities, as are HTML5 (WebGL, Canvas, plain old school js) games.

Unity player is seeing huge growth, but that's peanuts in comparison to Flash plugin availability. HTML5 games need monetization strategy that ain't just "slap a multiplayer and process most of it on backend".

Thing is, Adobe is a corporation. They think business first, technology second. Market is there. Plugin availability is there. Tools are there. Developers are there. Wtf?

And that's why Adobe doesn't make sense to me with all they're doing with Flash. At all.

On a more personal note, another wtf! Flash enabled huge infusion of creativity on web, way of expressing in much less contrived ways than available. Made you experience web you remember fondly from not so far long ago. Still does. Remember that. Only then move on.

I was going to use flash as a frontend for my startup's technology. The thing is, I could already see the handwriting on the wall even a couple years ago. Adobe was running around with their heads cut off trying to figure out how to develop flash. They just had no idea what they were doing. The compiler wasn't very good and simple performance problems with the VM and flash timeline weren't fixed at all. Instead, we got immediately abandoned projects that just sapped resources from more worthwhile endeavors. You basically had to use haxe to get good performance for certain applications.

With all of these issues known to Adobe you might suspect that they would move aggresively to increase the performance of Flash in general and Flex in particular. More integrated tools would have also gone a long way in improving the developer experience for flash/flex. Instead, Adobe went ahead with the strange creation otherwise known as Flex 4. Adobe decided that the main issue with Flex applications was their poor 'skinability.' Flash catalyst made no sense, and was totally unusable for serious application development. It was another tool (bringing the count to 3) for flash/flex authoring that did nothing to solve the problems with the platform.

To sum up, if Adobe had: -aggressively targeted 3D gaming from the start -built powerful authoring capabilities in the flash ide rather than supporting multiple development environments -addressed performance, security and cpu issues with the plugin -developed the as3 language -not wasted time on mobile browser plugins -trust the flash ecosystem to fill in gaps as they worked on the platform

the story might have turned out differently. Of course, they didn't do any of those things when they had the chance

>You basically had to use haxe to get good performance for certain applications.

Haxe did nothing you couldn't do with AS3 and Alchemy.

>With all of these issues known to Adobe you might suspect that they would move aggressively to increase the performance of Flash in general and Flex in particular

They did, by quite a bit. They also had parallel project for increasing performance with Stage3D and Alchemy.

I get your point about Flex 4. It is a better UI framework than Flex 3, but not significantly better, so the engineering effort that went toward it could have been better spent doing something else.

I also mirror your thoughts about "what could have been". My pet theory is that Stage3D should have been a FP10 feature (which would put it around the beginning of 2009 timeframe) and Adobe should have had some sort of (optional) browser-based app store to push Flash as a gaming platform. And since we're in hypothetical scenarios, AS3 should have been better designed, and cross-compilation to HTML/JS should have been there from the beginning. This may have given Flash some legs. But the reality is that sooner or later it would have been superseded by HTML anyway. Oh well, hindsight.

Furthermore, looking at the performance gains that Google, Microsoft and Mozilla managed to squeeze out of a language like JS, one can't help but think how much faster ABC and Flash Runtime could been.

Haxe did nothing you couldn't do with AS3 and Alchemy.

So, have they fixed this bug in Alchemy: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/487570

It's kind of hard to use C++ when you're not allowed to make a copy of std::string. Last I looked into this in May 2012 this was still not fixed (reported in 2009.) There is a page on stackoverflow where someone explains how to work around this problem by rebuilding a patched version of libstdc++. But after applying that fix you hit other similar problems.

Also, the sztrace() function exists and is documented, but they forgot to add it to the .h file, so if you want to log anything, you have to write:

  extern "C" {
  void sztrace(char*);
  }

> Flash market is still there, and it's growing.

Do you have a reference for this? Not that I have a reference to the contrary, but I'm not getting this impression at all based on the increasing number of sites that I see supporting HTML5 (more and more sites work on iOS devices).

At one point, most multimedia sites wouldn't work on iOS devices. Now, I only run into these occasionally, and it seems to be less and less frequently that I do.

EDIT: Actually, according to this[1], the Flash market is indeed shrinking. Assuming this is accurate, of course.

[1]http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all

Aside of asking for details of few high profile developers and sponsors, no. They have extremely widely distributed and viewed network of games, so I'm fairly confident in the accuracy of those trends reported.

Another interesting point they've raised is fairly low overlap of mobile and flash gamer demographics (which impacted their cross-promotion attempts).

EDIT IN RESPONSE TO EDIT:

Market and distribution are not neccesarily correlated, prime example being iOS vs Android. In Flash game market, this is reflected in ever increasing quality of games published.

> Thing is, Adobe is a corporation. They think business first, technology second. Market is there. Plugin availability is there. Tools are there. Developers are there. Wtf?

The momentum is behind HTML5, and Adobe sees that. They can make the same amount of money selling HTML5 devtools as they can Flash tools, while not swimming against the current and not having to deal with building their own technology stack and maintaining it on multiple platforms.

With IE apparently going to support WebGL, HTML5 has become a complete solution for things like games. Flash's advantages in the games space are much reduced, and Adobe rationally can't ignore that.

Maybe developers are more interested in eco-systems than designers?

"It's completely build on open source software!" makes many devs proud to say.

whereas

"It looks and behaves just awesome, just like I imagined it!" makes many designers proud to say.

But it seems to me the OSS movement swept over to the designers in the last years, just look at the creative commons. Probably because many of them started to code for themselfs and found the potential of OSS.

Developers are obsessed with tools and, for major part, not in a healthy way, is my observation.

Maybe they escape drudgery that is most of development that way. :)

Development is only drudgery if you have bad tools

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