Flash feels like some technology from the future that was taken away from us from all those anal people that "need to do it the right way" (see yesterday's story about converting a monolith to micro-services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469845)
you could get so much done with flash which is just so cumbersome with javascript/html5. Simple things, like click on an object and play a sound, I tried to do this yesterday and it was pretty complex (break your animation into a sprite sheet, find something to work with sprites, find something to play an mp3 on click, make sure it all syncs up...)
Not to mention just having a default timeline/tweening system to work with.
None of this really matters, because if flash was still around, I still wouldn't be willing to pay Adobe $50 a month to use it.
As an internet user flash never caused me any problem. It didn't run without a click, so it was fast, needed exactly 0 data (it was metered) and blocked some ads for me that weren't images.
The flash runtime was a closed source binary riddled with security vulnerabilities with a huge attack surface running with way too much privileges. I don't think it was sandboxed at all. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
The Flash era was the most fun I ever had as a developer. Flash was so ahead of its time, and it still feels like we're slowly crawling back after 20 years. Tools like Rive are helping us get closer, but there was something special about the Flash timeline and drawing tools that made it very approachable and fun to work with.
This was an excellent tool for beginner 2D animators with fundamentals of keyframes and tweening built-in. More powerful animators could use Actionscript and audio tracks to create entire presentations. It was fast on slow connections and supported many browser features. Macromedia Flash no doubt built Newgrounds into a behemoth of animated content.
To think it all really started from the gerbil in a microwave and the frog in a blender (both with attitudes) spreading like wildfire through email forwards (Joe Cartoon.)
Custom Flash players were actually relatively common in game development during the mid to late 2000s, as Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation that artists were already familiar with. Autodesk's Scaleform was probably the most popular implementation but a number of AAA developers had their own in-house libraries similar to Doom 3's; some of them, such as Konami's "AFP" [1], are still in use to this day (the latest game to use it, Sound Voltex Nabla, was released last month).
For folks who are curious about what drawing in FutureWave SmartSketch was like (it was one of my favourite PenPoint apps, and I also bought copies for Mac OS and Windows), see the opensource Wick Editor:
I love Flash, it was awesome. But what pains me the most is that only recently I found out about Shockwave. I mean the Director application. I always though Shockwave was a part of Flash. But turns out it was a separate thing all along!
Director was such a fun app for creating CD-ROM content back in the day! I still have fond memories of learning the Lingo scripting language inside Director to make interactive "multimedia" apps, then uploading them to the web and playing them in the browser using the Shockwave Player. It felt like magic at the time.
There were various details in here that I forgot (or never knew).
A few notes:
The iPhone was what put the final nail in Flash’s coffin.
Prior to that, and despite its many flaws, the Flash Player was the only true, write-once, run anywhere platform.
Quokka sports was a big deal at some point.
No mention of South Park?!
The Flash Forward conference and Lynda.com were also big.
Things did begin to fall apart under Adobe, but the article might be a little too harsh about it.
I knew the player team before and after the acquisition and it wasn’t abandoned.
The work they did was extremely difficult and no one else has ever managed to produce such a capable and tiny executable that runs on all the things before or since.
I don't think the issue is lack of features, because audio context and canvas2d are pretty good for making things shiny and nice. The issue is pretty much the rest of the DOM that has quirks everywhere if you want to use it that way. CSS3D as a scene graph is also kind of half baked, and not really integrated well with animations, and well, also too painful when it comes to scheduling and timing and chaining any transition.
SVG animations are also only half-ass implemented among browsers, so that's not really a reliable alternative.
What I liked about the Macromedia suite was the integration cross-IDE, where dreamweaver worked really great together with Flash and vice versa, and where flash was able to load HTML content, just in a more animated manner.
I mean, this was when XHR and AJAX was the "modern" thing in web browsers. Adobe could have dominated the mobile market if they would have decided to make it an open standard. Flash was really a decade ahead of its time.
I got flash 5 as a hand me down from my uncle when i was ~11. There was nothing more fun to do on the computer than make cartoons and build imaginary UIs for games i didn't know how to make.
I have ever since found most animation packages that I've tried lacking. Having such dead simple tweening and easing was really incredible for a beginner. Now i know how to do all that in AE but it's way more complicated
Flash feels like some technology from the future that was taken away from us from all those anal people that "need to do it the right way" (see yesterday's story about converting a monolith to micro-services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469845)
you could get so much done with flash which is just so cumbersome with javascript/html5. Simple things, like click on an object and play a sound, I tried to do this yesterday and it was pretty complex (break your animation into a sprite sheet, find something to work with sprites, find something to play an mp3 on click, make sure it all syncs up...)
Not to mention just having a default timeline/tweening system to work with.
None of this really matters, because if flash was still around, I still wouldn't be willing to pay Adobe $50 a month to use it.
As an animator it's a shame flash is dead. As a (somewhat security conscious) internet user I'm very glad it's dead and buried.
As an internet user flash never caused me any problem. It didn't run without a click, so it was fast, needed exactly 0 data (it was metered) and blocked some ads for me that weren't images.
The flash runtime was a closed source binary riddled with security vulnerabilities with a huge attack surface running with way too much privileges. I don't think it was sandboxed at all. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
The Flash era was the most fun I ever had as a developer. Flash was so ahead of its time, and it still feels like we're slowly crawling back after 20 years. Tools like Rive are helping us get closer, but there was something special about the Flash timeline and drawing tools that made it very approachable and fun to work with.
This was an excellent tool for beginner 2D animators with fundamentals of keyframes and tweening built-in. More powerful animators could use Actionscript and audio tracks to create entire presentations. It was fast on slow connections and supported many browser features. Macromedia Flash no doubt built Newgrounds into a behemoth of animated content.
To think it all really started from the gerbil in a microwave and the frog in a blender (both with attitudes) spreading like wildfire through email forwards (Joe Cartoon.)
The file extension wouldn't have been .swf until after being bought out and renamed (to ShockWave Flash). It was originally ...
https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-004-199612/page/n77/mo...
.spl, there you go. For "SPLash", I guess, or "Splash PLayer".
Good old days when you would get Adobe software like PhotoShop with flatbed scanners.
Maybe this is worth something to people involved with using SWF files, but the Doom 3 BFG codebase has an entire SWF parser/player included, which they used for the game UI: https://github.com/klaussilveira/chocolate-doom3-bfg/tree/ma...
You could call it Lightweight Scaleform. This same codebase was used in RAGE.
Custom Flash players were actually relatively common in game development during the mid to late 2000s, as Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation that artists were already familiar with. Autodesk's Scaleform was probably the most popular implementation but a number of AAA developers had their own in-house libraries similar to Doom 3's; some of them, such as Konami's "AFP" [1], are still in use to this day (the latest game to use it, Sound Voltex Nabla, was released last month).
[1]: https://github.com/DragonMinded/bemaniutils/blob/trunk/beman...
Interesting - why did they chose to rebuild the menu system of Doom 3 OG?
For folks who are curious about what drawing in FutureWave SmartSketch was like (it was one of my favourite PenPoint apps, and I also bought copies for Mac OS and Windows), see the opensource Wick Editor:
https://www.wickeditor.com/editor/
I love Flash, it was awesome. But what pains me the most is that only recently I found out about Shockwave. I mean the Director application. I always though Shockwave was a part of Flash. But turns out it was a separate thing all along!
Director was such a fun app for creating CD-ROM content back in the day! I still have fond memories of learning the Lingo scripting language inside Director to make interactive "multimedia" apps, then uploading them to the web and playing them in the browser using the Shockwave Player. It felt like magic at the time.
Great to reminisce about the old days!
There were various details in here that I forgot (or never knew).
A few notes:
The iPhone was what put the final nail in Flash’s coffin.
Prior to that, and despite its many flaws, the Flash Player was the only true, write-once, run anywhere platform.
Quokka sports was a big deal at some point.
No mention of South Park?!
The Flash Forward conference and Lynda.com were also big.
Things did begin to fall apart under Adobe, but the article might be a little too harsh about it.
I knew the player team before and after the acquisition and it wasn’t abandoned.
The work they did was extremely difficult and no one else has ever managed to produce such a capable and tiny executable that runs on all the things before or since.
Flash/Flex/Actionscript was the most fun I've ever had programming in my entire engineering career.
I have hope, but websites after Flash became boring.
Here’s a screencast of one of my favorites in 2009:
https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471
Pfft! My website isn't boring :P
I don't think the issue is lack of features, because audio context and canvas2d are pretty good for making things shiny and nice. The issue is pretty much the rest of the DOM that has quirks everywhere if you want to use it that way. CSS3D as a scene graph is also kind of half baked, and not really integrated well with animations, and well, also too painful when it comes to scheduling and timing and chaining any transition.
SVG animations are also only half-ass implemented among browsers, so that's not really a reliable alternative.
What I liked about the Macromedia suite was the integration cross-IDE, where dreamweaver worked really great together with Flash and vice versa, and where flash was able to load HTML content, just in a more animated manner.
I mean, this was when XHR and AJAX was the "modern" thing in web browsers. Adobe could have dominated the mobile market if they would have decided to make it an open standard. Flash was really a decade ahead of its time.
I agree, the problem isn't tech capabilities.
People were more creative, and Flash had great UI/UX.
---
More 2009 flash websites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85UL3HhNq6Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoUnzmaAV08
I got flash 5 as a hand me down from my uncle when i was ~11. There was nothing more fun to do on the computer than make cartoons and build imaginary UIs for games i didn't know how to make.
I have ever since found most animation packages that I've tried lacking. Having such dead simple tweening and easing was really incredible for a beginner. Now i know how to do all that in AE but it's way more complicated
I still get an annual “happy birthday” email from Flashkit Message Boards where I helped answer a handful of Actionscript questions
It's also worth mentioning that Apple contributed hugely to Flash's eventual defeat by not supporting it on the iPhone.
small correction the art/animation for Friday Night Funkin’ is created in Flash CS4, and Animate is only used to generate the spritesheets