I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.
In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.
He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.
The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.
Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.
Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him.
Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe...
I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.
I was inside Adobe during the final death of Flash. Adobe as an organization is fully capable of maintaining a frighteningly complex product; Document Cloud is a testament to that. Steve Jobs and Apple's decision that iOS should be focused on mobile web (and later, the App Store) without Flash is what directly led to the end of the project.
I think that's a bit backwards. Flash provided a solidly mediocre experience. Non-native widgets (and consequently input issues and accessibility issues), high cpu usage and generally poor performance for things like video playback, poor security track record… on desktops. Avoid that on a more constrained platform was a no brainer.
Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a competitive product killed Flash. Jobs' unwillingness to hitch his wagon to Flash was a symptom not a cause.
And the relentlessly CVEs! It was banned on every corporate network at the time.
Once flash was used for ads, that didn't help either. It wasn't just "flash was slow", it was "webpages with a dozen yelling, flashing, dancing, cpu sucking flash ads" slow.
I wouldn't want that crap on my new shiny phone either.
Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?
AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash.
According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023.
~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc.
As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC).
edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!
No, it's definitely correct, they definitely supported HTML/CSS/JS at some point, not flash-only content - I myself published a normal SPA back in ~2010, and looking back it's actually kind of insane how similar Adobe AIR is to Electron.
Ohhh, I think one of the OS-integration features was that you could invoke an instance of the OS's web component, is that what you mean? AIR itself didn't do anything with html/js but you could render web content at runtime via the OS component.
Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you forget in ten years..
Yeah, same! I didn't remember that it had been a wrapper (to be honest I have very little memory of -how- we did it), but I suppose it makes sense. TweetDeck was Adobe AIR too at the time, no?
Yeah, I'm almost sure there was no html renderer or JS engine in AIR, but you could have pure html apps with no flash in the source now that I think back. TweetDeck was I'm sure, and one other high-profile AIR desktop app was the launcher/lobby app for League of Legends.
>AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash.
When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI component library that you could use to create advanced and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).
When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you can't do instant searches and filtering on.
ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were actually used to improve performance.
Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died.
I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
I worked at Adobe in those days, adjacent to the Flash team, and AFAIK everyone involved would have loved to open-source the flash player. (And they did open-source significant parts of it, like the script VM - that didn't just randomly happen, people fought hard for it.)
But the overall player was a massive codebase - buildable for literally hundreds of platforms - that was developed over a decade with tons of external tech and external partners involved. Open-sourcing something like that (legally) isn't something you can just pay money to do.
Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
about ten years back I got my parents photoshop elements 11 as a present; it was the best thing since sliced bread. They'd seen the stuff I did (with Gimp) manipulating the family photos, they thought it looked like fun and they had hundreds of old slides/photos they wanted to scan and fix.
Elements 11 was a joy to use, made it easy to in-paint and erase glitches in the scans; all was well. I liked it too-it did smart stuff like seam carving.
A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12. IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer to the ground rather than use that again.
That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?
> If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.
If you're doing motion design, I'd agree, I guess you're stuck with Adobe. In the realm of print, we are so close to never needing them again. Affinity is great. The only problem is that vector groups are lost when you need to import or export to Illustrator/PDF. Adobe is fully aware of this and makes their bespoke file format as difficult as possible to parse. When you're working with a dozen designers and 6 separate print houses for different things, you have no choice. It's the most monopolistic system I can think of, worse than anything Microsoft did with Windows and IE in the 90s. It's pure extortion as they take away features. And they know it. Adobe is doomed. Their entire attitude as a company is one of stripping as much as they can out of their current market dominance without adding any value. Adobe will not last another few years as far as cornering the print market. But right now, no one in the industry wants to be the first to bail on them. Everyone would love to.
Unfortunately, PDF seems to be as good as it gets, which destroys any grouping done in Illustrator. (When reading .ai files, I'm pretty sure Affinity just reads the PDF data). The best workaround I've found is to "sequence" all groups into layers first in Illustrator and then deal with them as separate layers in Affinity. Tedious and time consuming.
Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.
I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it.
It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).
I wouldn’t know, haven’t worked too much w/ Fishbowl. I was mentioning Magento as another product Adobe bought and is slowly screwing up so badly they’re killing it.
They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of it competing w/ AEM.
They’re missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack and almost dead.
adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot.
I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege.
The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems.
This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1].
[0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit.
[1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
I was a software developer of the Flash Player team at Macromedia and Adobe, specifically on the team porting it to Windows CE/PocketPC and then Android. What you describe is correct as far as I can remember, though I hadn’t heard the Apple “begged” Adobe to support iPhone.
I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code with Apple, but heard Apple assigned an intern to try porting it to iPhone. The Adobe developer working with Apple told me the ported code Apple sent back to Adobe didn’t even compile, so we don’t know if they even tested it on a real iPhone. We jokingly called the iPhone port “Project Boomerang” because the code that came back was basically the same that we sent them. :)
The Flash Player’s source code was ugly, but you have to remember that its roots trace back before Macromedia to SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for the PenPoint OS in the early 1990s. The core rendering and scripting code has since been ported and squeezed into new platforms and applications. And then the dot com boom happened. The development team grew to about a hundred developers and no one person understood the entire code base. Code was copy/pasted freely for fear of introducing regressions that would break existing Flash content.
Multiple rewrites and grand new engines that would live alongside the legacy engine were attempted but failed due to backwards compatibility, the second system effect, and product management’s pressure for new features.
To make matters more challenging, Adobe was losing interest in funding Flash development because revenue didn’t scale with Flash Player usage, only with sales of the Flash authoring tool to a small audience of Flash content creators. That’s when rev share schemes for 3D APIs, DRM, and asm.js-like C++ cross compilation (Alchemy and CrossBridge) were hatched.
I'm not sure exactly how to properly cite Apple's side of the story anymore, since it was from a Twitter thread that I don't know how to search for[0]. I know there was something on InternalTechEmails as well but I'm too afraid to touch Elon's Musk anymore.
Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company was being press-ganged into giving Steve Jobs an iPhone demo that wouldn't crash on stage.
Everything you said about Adobe management also tracks. I'm reminded about Jobs' quote about Xerox being filled with copier-heads[1].
Also...
>second system effect
Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?
[0] Said thread also revealed that Jobs felt snubbed from not being able to have Adobe's CEO on speed dial
> Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?
Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer.
A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). A few years before that, a team had evaluated whether the .NET JIT (or a cleanroom implementation developed in-house) was technically and legally an option.
Much later, long after I had left, I heard from friends still at Adobe that somehow JVM developers from Oracle had joined the Flash team in the mid-2010s and were eager to attempt yet another VM, based on their JVM experience. But by this time, Adobe no longer wanted to invest in modernizing the Flash platform when it could simply milk the cash cow.
btw, the source code for Flash Player 4 is available on the Internet Archive. That was before my time at Macromedia, but I heard that Macromedia either open sourced the code (and then changed their mind for Flash Player 5 when they started charging for source code access) or it has been shared with a partner company who leaked it. Supposedly a few Korean electronics companies included this Flash Player 4 code in their devices when Macromedia was trying to sell Flash Lite (also a fork of Flash Player 4) as an solution for mobile phone UIs.
I know Adobe will never open source the final Flash Player code (because of third-party code licenses and there’s nothing for Adobe to gain), but I wish they had at least open sourced their internal test suite so open source players could improve their Flash compatibility.
I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.
Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them.
And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood.
In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal.
[0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
I always remember Flash being really fast at the vector calculation but and absolute hog on output rendering. So higher screen resolution hammered the CPU even though everything was setup.
Flash plugin was extremely well-optimized, it was one of the very few users of the original Pentium MMX extensions, and later SSE. That's also why they had such a difficult time porting it to 64 bits.
The Flash renderer was also state-of-the-art for the moment, with really awesome anti-aliasing and blending. All while using just fixed-point integer arithmetic.
>adobe didn't want to pay for rewrites or bugfixes
yeah, its a wonder they ever bought it to start with, then
you don't just buy someone's entire workflow and then not fix any of it. not at least, if you intend for people to believe you when you say you're the future.
Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.
> If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell.
No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were.
The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down.
all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins
anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple.
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
> because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits
Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times.
Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction.
(Working from memory here, details are approximate.)
To fill in some details (but IANAiOSdev): Apple first disallowed interpreted code [1]. (Wow, I had forgotten how much I loathed Apple for that.) Later in 2010 Apple loosened it to allow interpreted languages as long as you didn't download new code from the internet [1]. The exception was that you could use WebKit to run JS in a webpage in your app. I guess their excuse was security, so they could ensure the app they approved was the one you ran. In 2017 [2] they loosened it further to allowing downloading or importing code in some circumstances. The most important limitation now is that you can't generate executable code on iOS, which disallows JITs and makes everything other than WebKit a second-class citizen.
The old terms:
> Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application.
That's a separate unrelated issue. The terms I'm taking about dictated what language the app could be "originally written" in, regardless of what happened at runtime. Technically, if you prototyped an app in some other tech and then manually ported it to objective-C it wasn't even clear if that would satisfy the terms as written.
(In practice of course it didn't matter what the terms precisely meant, because Apple never enforced them apart from removing flash-based apps.)
They did this just after I had started learning C# with Xamarin for iOS dev, it's why I got out of mobile development and am now a python/Django developer.
Edit: I forgot, at the time I was between jobs (2008) and had used a chunk of my money to buy an iPhone to learn iOS Dev on, they wasted a load of my time, and money.
> Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.
No, because web apps had the same abilities and those were allowed. The reason Flash was blocked was because it was always going to be a poor experience and Apple sells great experiences.
Yeah the original plan for iPhone apps was they were all supposed to be web-apps saved to the home screen. No App Store. IIRC they even had a basic web SDK to make some standard-looking iOS views? Developers jailbroke the iPhone and reversed the APIs and made some really compelling demo apps and Apple had to rush to make an official SDK.
I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I deleted it because I don't think my point about past security issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my comment and found that it was deleted by the time they submitted - that was not my intent.
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage.
Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.
At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.
It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either.
At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.
At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.
Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.
If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.
Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.
As usual, some vp ate another vp in executive jungle floor over chunk of budget and silverlight was promptly forgotten and corpo push “you need silverlight to run this” reversed after a while.
Not if it was valuable software, but it can happen with everything eventually as it happening with windows server, exchange, sharepoint and other “essential business productivity” offers.
Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube.
It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.
Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.)
This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.
Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.
Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
> Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos
While it WAS true, it's not COMPLETELY true. The first versions of Flash had very little scripting support, it was basically limited to switching between scenes. The first Flash that could do something non-trivial was Flash 5, released some time in 2000 and by that time Flash domination had already been established.
The secret was in its authoring tools and the concept of timelines. Basically, you inserted "key frames" and Flash interpolated between them automatically. So if you need to draw a triangle moving from point A to point B, you just add it to the timeline at the starting position, then move down the timeline, insert a key frame and drag the triangle to point B.
And these timelines can be composed, looped, triggered by scripts, etc.
And that's it. No need to write any fancy code. Flash would do everything for you, and it's baked right into the file format, that was specifically designed to be compact and concise.
It is free, open source and surprisingly good(for simple things), but developement is on hold or abandoned. (I looked at the source and it is not great, but not horrible either, but with the original creators not around anymore and lack of documentation, would be a pain to overtake)
Tweening and animation programs are hard to find for young people.
I remember one I saw running in a video on an Atari ST that pretty much outdid anything I've ever seen since, indie developer too. Wish I could remember the name, maybe he made another version.
To be clear, I didn't (exactly) mean that the author of a Flash animation has to think in terms of creating a "demoscene demo." I rather meant that the Flash abstract machine is designed to primarily do the types of thing that demoscene demos do — i.e. to use vectors and gradient fills and clipping masks to achieve procedural visual effects. You could say that the SWF abstract machine has a "demoscene-alike Instruction Set Architecture." Most of the work of figuring out how to achieve particular visual effects on that abstract machine, though, is domain-knowledge built into the "Flash compiler" of the authoring tool.
In my previous post, I emphasized Flash as a distribution format for a reason. While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines), the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an imperative program for an abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around (potentially texture-filled) vector objects on a canvas. Writing SWF bytecode directly, would be similar to programming against a retained-mode fixed-function graphics API like OpenGL — just without any 3D support. In other words, it would be like writing a demoscene demo.
Or, to put that another way: the core of the .SWF export format — before all the user programmability stuff was added — is basically a cousin of PostScript, but with a finishRenderAndWaitForNextFrame command, and the ability to set spline points' velocities. Which is very much unlike declarative vector formats like SVG. The closest comparison, I think, might be to the object-oriented vector display-lists used in vector-based arcade machines (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs.)
But, in both the arcade games I mentioned, and in Flash, if you've achieved the effect you want and are now optimizing the final work for size and performance, doing so will mostly be a matter of modularity and reuse of small repeatable design elements. Having "mechanical sympathy" for what the Flash export format looks like, will push you toward certain authoring decisions, e.g. building complex scenes using many smaller primitive objects that each independently animate (or in later versions of Flash, are independent state-machines); creating objects that can be uniform and so constructed by cloning rather than redefinition (leading to a surprising number of 2D flash animations and later games that were built out of colored, untextured voxel boxes); etc. And — despite there being no actual programming involved in the Flash animation authoring case — this is still very much akin to the process of optimizing a demoscene demo.
> While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines), the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an imperative program for an abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around
I mean, you can describe SWF like that, but it's not really what people think now when you say that it's an abstract machine. The SWF file is indeed a series of commands like: "put this object in this layer, and assign this matrix to it".
However, SWF still preserves the notion of persistent vector objects (called "characters") down to the display level. You're not just preparing a command list and then submitting it to a GPU for rendering (like with OpenGL), and then re-doing it again for the next frame.
Characters in SWF are persistent. Flash does all the composing, clipping, and it even does automatic interpolation for you for morphing.
SWF format is now open: https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf - the page 35 contains the description of the most important instruction "PlaceObject" that was used to actually do the animations.
Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from logistical considerations.
Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.
> Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.
I was remembering the same thing. What an awkward few years. I feel like Flash spent its retirement in the most ridiculous way, mainly in rendering players that streamed those crappy FLVs, because people were still insisting on using MSIE in enough numbers that we couldn’t afford to use HTML5 video without at minimum falling back to Flash. Oh, that, and that little SWF everybody needed to use in order to implement a click-to-copy button, back when there wasn’t an API in browsers for that function.
As much as people might not like to hear it, I believe Flash Videos were how Youtube initially started.
Very little could handle buffering videos that well, or at scale.
Since people kept computers longer, and I was involved in online education/training delivery online in those years, flash video provided more backwards compatibility in a decade where IE4 wouldn't die, then IE6 wouldn't die.
Flash Media Server too, did some pretty interesting things. There were open source options like Red5 that were worth trying out.
I think you nailed it on the head with the demoscene mention.
not only was this one of the only ways to get this kind of content in those days, but any ol hobbyist could and did pick it up. netflix is the farthest you can get from ever seeing anything like homestar runner's characters, plot, etc
I don't think this is right. RTMP was the protocol for sending videos over the wire and was developed by Macromedia. We didn't have any good replacements for some time.
yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative.
plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games.
flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
>He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.
Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training -
Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement.
The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.
I think the point that gets missed with the power of today's devices is how much could be delivered on device, and going to text was a step backwards in some ways, when flash might have delivered text in a more interactive or engaging way.
How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
now that is the real flaw of flash, and the most overlooked bit.
all the while people (and adobe) were making login pages and security within flash (which is insane, you don't use an animation tool for those!) they should have focused on accessibility. Adobe promised the world when they bought macromedia and instead did nothing.
> He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this example, or which character has something happen to them, etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible versions.
You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.
The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool.
It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.
I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.
I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?
Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.
It's not just flash, all of web development has become very complex. In the early days, people would learn to make websites because they wanted to be web developers. They could make something in 5 minutes that was reasonably similar to what they would make if they achieved their goal of getting a job doing it. Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing. People either do this and give up, or they get lost in a maze of studying (bootstrap vs MUI??? Tailwind vs SASS??????) and emerge a fully-formed web designer (having made no cool personal site along the way).
>Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing.
there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that context the squarespace page is all they need.
most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do it.
As a web dev who’s made good money, yes yes and yes. We often get too hung up on the technology when most of the websites in the whole world fall into a category well served by sites like squarespace.
I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.
Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.
The creation tool still exists (it's been renamed to Adobe Animate) and even still lets you make interactive content with, I can only assume, a similar workflow. But what I really can't understand or forgive is that Adobe killed ActionScript, replacing it with a JavaScript library (CreateJS) that's similar but not quite the same AIUI. That meant you can't just re-export existing Flash content for HTML5, and Flash creators' existing skillsets aren't directly applicable to the new system…
There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a set of support routines. They could have gotten even very complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have charged money for this feature, and many people would have forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their platform die. It makes no sense.
Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.
> Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed
I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:
emulator = ruffle-swf
emulator_ext = swf
You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.
Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head.
That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)
And yet...
And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?
a lot of people tended to get CC0 music, free, and didn't need to make their own
though most of the actually good flash games had an artist make music specifically for the game
Newgrounds had the Audio Portal, a repository of free-to-use music specifically intended for use by people creating movies and games for their Flash Portal.
That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.
There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.
A shockingly large amount of music used in old flash games and in old YouTube videos is by Kevin MacLeod, whose released thousands of high quality tracks of all styles under CC-BY.
(For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-the-frame timing.)
Yeah that’s Ludwig. One of the better streams ever. The final boss is crazy because every pitch is random so you have to guess instantly + perfect hit it too
We took a look at `Home Run Derby` specifically and found some bugs and inefficiencies - the most recent builds should run faster and hopefully crash less :)
The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not even close.
Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet.
Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there.
That's a good point. It'd need both widespread adoption of the player, and some kind of good authoring environment.
Interestingly enough, the Ruffle player itself is looking like it'll achieve that wide spread adoption. If a "Flash Done Right" type of thing was included in that by default, then it'd just leave the authoring tools piece missing.
Others have pointed out that Godot has timeline functionality similar to the old Flash (authoring) interface. So maybe the authoring tools piece would mean existing authoring tools (like Godot) would be able to add a "Flash Done Right" output target and call it a day.
Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.
This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.
yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that
Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).
I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today.
Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world.
Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days.
In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).
And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.
I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.
Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).
They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together.
I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).
I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.
They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this?
Edit: wait, I think I found it. Below the About text, there is a filter for "AND primary_collection:softwarelibrary_flash". Probably I need to add that tag to my item. Now I wonder how I'm supposed to know of the relevant collections to put things in? Is there a list of all software categories?
not that I've seen.
one thing you can try to do is add the Ruffle emulator flags to your metadata, and they'll probably pick it up and place it in that category whenever the next time they do a sweep.
I guess you can also email them, hey are pretty prompt by email, usually.
At some point Flash emulation would solve all the biggest troubles of the original Flash and.. became a new standard for a web-based inter/animation? Of course, having a VM with XP with Macrmedia director would be a problem for Apple M1/2/3 owners, but nothing a modern emulation couldn't solve...
Well, the modern CSS + animations + SVG solves like 90% of things Flash could do, with HTML5 and canvas it solves the remaining 9%. but the biggest problem is the authoring tools and I if there were anything worthwile enough the web would had exploded already.
Flash is to web dev as Excel is to desktop applications: it "sucks" but is also arguably the single best tool the entire field has produced. The technologies that might replace Flash are "better" but also so much worse that they aren't even close to actually replacing it, years on—and, yeah, that's mostly about the authoring tools, which were not just excellent, but also de facto free for hobbyists (thanks, piracy) when Flash was in its prime.
not only that, the shovelware scene proved that it was piss easy to use, and powerful (especially in the later years)
see as many html5 gaming webpages lately? yeah, no. the 'death' of flash killed the browser game and rapid prototyping that flash offered, and there is nothing on that level in this age.
the problems that html5, css and javascript could in theory 'solve' are a moot point when the switch to those technologies killed any enthusiasm for it.
I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites.
CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.
Oh yeah! We used a plug-in called FlashBlock which would load by default and basically do nothing but show a button to load, and if you clicked the button it would load actual Flash for that single embed. Blocked so many ads but let you play games.
> CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.
That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious' sites, there are enough sites now what treat you like a 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a landscape orientation.
If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years already, so I can't accept your 'blovk Flash' stance as anything having a substinence.
I'd like to reply, but I'm not sure how to read this comment.
There were always user-unfriendly sites. It used to be possible to easily block the nasty content (Flash), now it's rather hard. It used to be possible to extract the interesting content (Flash) and save it without the junk website. Now it's not. Separation was an advantage.
I agree that the Web is narrowing itself down. One of the symptoms is not having interactive content clearly delineated from the rest.
You seem to come from the same premises but arrive at the opposite conclusion, and I don't understand your reasoning.
That would be nice. I was recently trying to play https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/scie... via archive.org, but it doesn't work. Also the swf file itself does not load in an old virtual machine. I don't know where to view error output besides the JavaScript console; it simply does nothing.
I still occasionally think back to this engine when the topic of human randomness comes up (I do computer security for a living, so that's not infrequent)
Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0].
Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.
Omg, it works! Why does this work? It doesn't work on Firefox ~4 on Windows XP with a real Flash player installed, nor does it work on MSIE8 on that system. I tried on the original site as well as on a custom file that embeds just that flash file, but no dice.
I suppose it's worth uploading the swf to archive.org and seeing if it will work there as well. Edit: https://archive.org/details/newyorktimes-2010-interactive-ro... says "failed to download game data" but I'm not seeing a failed request in the developer console. Not sure if that's a problem with my upload or if IA hasn't finished processing it or something. /edit
It's not fully functional by the way: the computer is not being animated at all, the text areas are too small, the score counter doesn't update... but it runs! Thank you :)
As I noted on those issues, this game uses multiple assets, so downloading and playing just the main SWF file won't work. You can play the game by loading the URL of its main SWF file in the Adobe Flash projector, which can still be downloaded from here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20220401020702/https://www.adobe....
This is encouraging news. These sorts of efforts help save information from being buried in the trash heap of history.
Is anyone aware of coordinated efforts beyond the internet archive to save data in old formats and media? I actually have information on 5.25 floppies I never copied over (my bad) that are almost certainly lost at this point. Also, I have docs in PFS Write format that will be PITA to recover at this point too. I’d have to dig out that old 486 that has been gathering dust in my basement the last 25 years to know for sure :) .
I have a theory that Google killed flash so that they could index the web more effectively. There were many old websites that were entirely made in flash (or java applets), and the content that Google needed to scrape was buried inside a binary flash file. Flash had security vulnerabilities? News flash: So do javascript engines.
while that might be true, its probably more true that they want to own the internet (see: nonstandard changes within chrome, forcibly making chromium dominant, the AMP debacle)
and adobe SWF files aint google
Regarding a modern alternative to Flash, I just want to mention the Scrimba webdev learning platform [1], which leverages a custom built programming language [2] for making interactive courses and save the videos in an optimized vector format with a very small footprint.
It was released in a Launch HN 3 years ago [3]. Personally, I have used the platform to teach the basics of frontend web dev to my wife, and it was a great experience.
Does anyone how to do this? I could tie existing wasm runtimes to some binaries that supports it (mostly old abandon ware games there that aren't flash), but when I asked around in forums no one answered there - or I didn't understood how their communities worked.
huh, so the Ruffle technology is actually something to consider. Much better than the last 5+ years of flash 'alternatives'
tried some games out, most look identical to FP somehow.
Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin.
Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.
In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.
He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.
The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.