Mozilla Shumway: A Flash VM and runtime written in JavaScript
github.com
github.com
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2ikd21/prezi_is...
I run Shumway from git and it works less reliably than flash so far. I love the idea, but every thing I care about is black/doesn't work unless I right-click and hit 'Fallback to Flash', which works as reliably as I stated in the opening.
The case I'm trying to make is 1) it is desperately needed 2) it is far from usable in general, based on mu personal experience
I keep it, follow git and try it more or less every day. I hope to remove the crazy Adobe plugin one day.
If the former: I was aware of that, but a ~random~ plugin is no reason for me to jump to a different (and ultimately not interesting, from my personal view) browser.
I still like Flash. It helped a lot of kids (myself included) get into computers, its authorship tools allowed non-programmers to create a lot of really cool animations and interactive things over the years, and technically it's still ahead of HTML5 in a lot of ways (the gap is slowly shrinking due to Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform, but I still find that most websites with even the slightest hint of superfluous animation lurch and stutter embarrassingly today on my fairly decked-out PC compared to full-blown Flash animations on my Pentium). If Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia, and if their management had had the good sense to release the source to the Flash player client, I think the web would be in a much better place right now.
Somewhat OT, but if you've ever watched medical office secretaries, airline desk people, bank tellers, or some hotel clerks work, you'd never think of switching them to a newer computer and web-apps; their proprietary terminal stuff works nearly instantly for most things they need to do. It's sad that the best web experiences today can still be an order of magnitude slower than that.
It's all about graphics perf, not AS3 vs JS anymore.
> I still like Flash.
Me too.Though I moved to js,processing and openframework for multimedia projects.Flash IDE is still one of the best tool to learn programming.I would have hated learning programming through javascript frankly.
> Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform
Yeah,that's insane.They had a huge community and they just blew it. Again,as I said earlier the whole emscripten toolchain + WebGL could still make Flash IDE relevant in the future,but I doubt Adobe wants to throw more money at it.They fired most of the flash team and outsourced the rest to India.
Start from scratch.Use WebGL and emscriptem.Write a flash like IDE that uses C++ or a safe language that compiles with the LLVM toolchain.Make flash without flash,backed by webtechs instead writing an emulator or that's just cargo culting.
Flash got a lot of things right, both the SWF file format and the authoring tools are pretty good. There's not much sense in re-inventing it (we could do without ActionScript though).
However, I find projects like this relevant as a way to enable sites that do utilize Flash, fallback gracefully to devices that do not have Flash support, even if it's at the cost of performance.
That's not the angle I was going for actually. If Flash isn't as relevant now, why start a new implementation at all? Is someone wants to do it for fun, then sure. But it isn't even an interesting research project. Lightspark came the closest with actual GPU acceleration. Porting to JS is just a blind port.
It makes me not trust this as a viable future implementation, if none of the previous ports came even close to relevant.
Netflix and Hulu don't know where most European countries are, including mine.
I don't intend to ever install iTunes on my computers or own an iOS device.
iTunes just feels bloated on Windows and doesn't exist for GNU/Linux.
iOS devices cost insane prices outside contract for a smartphone. As I am not willing to pay more than 300€, even if that isn't a problem to me. As many fellow Europeans I don't do contracts.
As a developer, iOS is a more closed system than Android and Windows Phone are. Specially how information gets in and out of the device without gatekeeper software like iTunes.
I don't intend to pay for an Apple system just to develop for iOS, given that I work with UNIX/Windows systems so I already have enough hardware at home.
Finally, on my home country, iOS devices are third place given their cost vs the average income.
I haven't worked with AS3 for the past few years so my memory of the APIs is fading, but overall, they were for the most part well-structured and programmer-friendly. A complete Shumway would be really neat.
The hardest part about Flash is understanding how timeline animations interact with AS code: events, object construction order, for all versions of Flash. Shumway supports all SWF versions and the the three programming languages that are supported by the Flash player: AS1, AS2 and AS3.
And I'm saying this as a fairly staunch flash hater.
A lot of these things we're supposed to be using to replace flash with HTML5 are simply not there reliably or sometimes even at all. SVG is a particularly glaring example of something which is woefully under-implemented.