
The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code - doppp
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DougPearson/20171212/311570/Post_Mortem_The_Death_of_Flash_and_Rewriting_14_Million_Lines_of_Code.php
======
kyle-rb
I feel like the author and/or the team is confused about what HTML5 actually
is. They're probably right to conclude that JavaScript/HTML5 won't perform as
well on lower end devices, but a few things struck me as odd.

They mention Facebook switching away from HTML5, but I think Facebook is using
the actual DOM, whereas their game would be using the canvas part of the HTML5
spec.

Later they mention WebAssembly replacing HTML5, but what it's really replacing
is JavaScript, and the actual canvas that you're rendering to will stay the
same afaik. The impact on performance would probably be as they predict, but
overall, their issues seem to be with JavaScript, not HTML5.

~~~
austincheney
> but what it's really replacing is JavaScript

That is a common misconception, but there no evidence of this. WASM replaces
Flash and Flash never replaced JavaScript.

~~~
tomovo
WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. If you
already use Javascript, WASM won't be much help. But WASM lets you compile
C/C++ and with a bit more effort other languages into a bytecode instead of
weird looking Javascript, or its more streamlined and still weird form,
asm.js.

~~~
gech
This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?

~~~
kpcyrd
Minified javascript isn't really open source either.

~~~
irrational
No, but there are tons of prettifiers that can get minified/obfuscated JS back
into a state that it can be read and reasoned about fairly easily. It's not
like minifiying/obfuscating JS compiles it into byte code. It's still plain
text.

~~~
bogomipz
Do you or anyone else have any recommendations for a good tool to recover
minified java script?

~~~
chr1
[http://jsnice.org](http://jsnice.org) works well, though misses many
oportunities of restoring variable names based on property names which cannot
be minified.

------
kennu
I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5
as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5.

The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution
that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite
interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this.

I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar platform,
although it would probably not be very optimized for games.

~~~
jchw
Haxe is pretty interesting. I really wish strongly that it was more polished
and had a larger ecosystem, because it feels like a nice development
environment and is quite nice to code in.

~~~
blueprint
As a native mobile dev, I found myself unable to adopt it because I need
and/or want direct access to the native platform capabilities, most especially
when it comes to building GUIs. Write-once tends not to work so well when
users are able to tell behavior, framerate, appearance, … differences in a
split second and when optimal UX was my purpose in writing mobile apps in the
first place. In the same way, learn-once is more of a marketing term than a
reality, since platforms implicitly differ.

~~~
jchw
Have you seen Flutter.io? I haven't tried it but it sounds like the framework
for you.

~~~
blueprint
Well, it's kind of an issue, because it's a similar argument for platforms
like Xamarin. A third party still has to keep up with mainline. That means
another layer of support, maintenance, dependency… which is not always an
issue… but practically speaking is one of the things you eliminate at scale
and / or in the rigors of production.

~~~
jchw
Fair enough; it still seems pretty promising, especially because my experience
developing native Android apps did not make me feel confident in doing very
advanced UIs with native Android - it just feels complicated, and the
compatibility layer stuff seems like no fun. (I had trouble linking the jars
in for reasons I was not able to fully understand. I've worked with Java stuff
before, but the Android toolchain still has me confused.)

I hope that Flutter, with its massive backing, manages to stay up to date with
mainline without putting too much burden on app developers. We'll see I
suppose.

------
lkrubner
Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the
kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm
thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic
in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the
basics of computer programming?

Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how
I got started back in 1995.

Look at what happened on the Web between 2005 and 2015, where we transitioned
from using HTML/CSS to instead building systems with React/Relay or Angular or
Vue.

Especially since 2005, it’s unclear that we gained much — the old system gave
us Google Maps and Gmail and a lot of great online software, none of which
seems obviously worse than the kind of software being created today. And,
contrariwise, the biggest missing piece in 2005, a good Open Source tool for
animation to replace Flash, is still missing now. What do we do nowadays when
we want to mix images, sound and video in an interactive interface? We can
build these sites with complex Javascript, though we are still missing a good
authoring tool to match what Flash used to have — in particular a tool that
allows people with little skill to do a great deal. Using React/Relay/GraphQL
requires a tremendous amount of skill.

(There also used to be the argument, put forward by folks like Phillip
Greenspun, that Flash did not belong on the Web, because the Web was
fundamentally about text and images and HTML. I read Greenspun’s book in 1998,
and I strongly agreed with him then and for many years following, but we have
to admit that debate is now long dead, along with ideas such as semantic
pages. The way people use Javascript now is in the spirit that Flash was once
used.)

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-
productivity-h...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-
has-been-undermined-by-the-hubris-and-power-grabbing-of-elite-computer-
programmers)

~~~
dkns
I disagree. If you're in a developer bubble you may believe that everyone is
using react or angular or vue but if you're beginner you're more likely to
stumble upon on something like codecademy or freecodecamp. On freecodecamp
they start by teaching you some basic css/html then javascript and (!) jquery
and after that you start building simple projects/sites using codepen. I think
codepen is really great begginer tool. You don't have to worry about bundling
stuff, what text editor you use, etc. etc.

~~~
criddell
Even codeacademy and freecodecamp are fairly advanced.

For actual beginners, there are even simpler tools. At school, my kids were
started in Scratch. They showed it to me a few weeks ago and it's very good.

------
darepublic
_Adobe recently confirmed the suspicion held by many in the games industry
that Flash is a dying platform._

I looked at the date of publication thinking maybe this was written in 2013 or
2014, but it was not the case!

~~~
zemo
Flash existed in places outside of the browser even after a significant
portion of the web development scene moved on from it. Building game UIs with
Scaleform was very common. AutoDesk only discontinued Scaleform earlier this
year.

------
ivan_ah
Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html
+ .js?

I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and
Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require
original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context:
educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations
with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do math. There is some great
content, but would have to be abandoned since Flash is no longer supported.)

~~~
EamonnMR
Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see
all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that
it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can
run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere,
I'm game.

~~~
disconnected
> I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the
> same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX.

Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm
on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done.
No need to reinvent the wheel.

If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency,
there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a container and you're set. The only niggle
is that gnash is... kinda bad. It's slow and a bunch of swf files I have don't
work (some don't work at all, others have weird graphical problems).

If you want to contribute, gnash would be a good candidate, I guess:

[https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html)

~~~
tritium
The problem with “contributing” to a project that belongs to someone else, is
that your contributions might be handily ignored, no matter how incredible and
wonderful they may be.

And so, often, the only recourse to such an outcome is to roll your own from
scratch.

~~~
imtringued
Why from scratch? You can take advantage of existing projects and make your
own fork.

~~~
tritium
True. However, depending on the manner of licensing applicable to a given
project, one might be forced comply with aspects of the protection a given
license affords.

So then the choice leaves one working with intellectual property controlled by
people who might ignore offers to improve their project, but in the same
breath, demand attribution for the burden they inflict.

Why bother playing the sycophant to an emperor with no clothes?

------
crescentfresh
> rewriting the entire codebase in ActionScript first to take full advantage
> of GPU acceleration, before porting it into Haxe

So let me get this straight. It was already written in ActionScript. They re-
wrote the ActionScript. All of it, then ported it to the Haxe language.

So the purpose of the first "re-write" was... refactoring it to use GPU
acceleration in ActionScript? I guess they just hadn't gotten around to that
optimization in the first place and used this as an opportunity to do so. But
was it strictly speaking, necessary?

~~~
sydd
AS3 has 2 rendering modes:

CPU - this is an old API that can render vector based graphics. Every game
before 2011 uses this API.

GPU - Adobe introduced a thin OpenGL wrapper around 2011. This is a completely
new API and looks very similar to OpenGL.

I guess Haxe code looks much more similar to a game written in OpenGL, this
they rewrote the rendering pipeline (and converted all assets from vector
animations to sprite sheets.)

~~~
untog
The Haxe code might even look similar to the GPU ActionScript - they're
(deliberately) very similar languages.

------
vr46
RIP Flash but long live everything it allowed us to create and everything it
inspired.

------
Xeoncross
I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would
anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing
(especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both
through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media.

~~~
camus2
> I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why
> would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash
> existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point
> faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for
> media.

i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API
were, and how different browsers implemented totally different flavors of JS
and DOM and standards were weak.

Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver
real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images.

Obviously it also came with a catch: the player was proprietary and full of
bugs and security holes.

Ultimately, Web API progress also staled when Flash died. You still can't
mesure canvas text properly in most browsers and API such as file system and
WebSQL were dropped, which is a horrible mistake IMHO.

~~~
ChrisSD
> Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to
> deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and
> images.

Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good
tooling for creators and not just programmers.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the
Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I
likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the
‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation),
on current web design principles and tools.

~~~
ChrisSD
Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really
took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's
that I remember Flash taking off.

My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.

~~~
Decade
In my recollection, Java was pushed into browsers as part of Sun’s Write Once
Run Anywhere strategy. Browser makers went along because it was the era when
everybody wanted to be a platform for plugins. Then Microsoft tried to control
the development of Java on Windows, and that was a mess.

The Java plugin was a pain. The runtime took somewhere on the order of 10
seconds to load, and the browser was completely unresponsive during this time.
This was also the era before CSS, so if you wanted animated buttons on your
web site, you had to use Java. Imagine loading a page, and then seeing a
column of gray rectangles that freeze your browser and eventually resolve into
dithered (“web-safe” color) buttons. Not a great experience.

Real Media only played video and audio. QuickTime played video and audio and
VR snapshots. There were also plugins for specific types of content like VRML.

I feel that Flash took off because Adobe spent lots of money pushing it
everywhere, but also because it ran better than Java. The runtime was smaller
to download than Java, it started up much faster than Java, and its vector
animations played very smoothly compared to the alternatives of the time.

~~~
merdreubu
It was Macromedia that made Flash, not Adobe. Adobe just ignored it and is now
killing it.

Edit: Adobe also killed 2 other brilliant Macromedia products, right after
acquisition, Fireworks and Freehand.

~~~
Decade
Right. I remembered that Adobe bought Macromedia, but I thought the acqui-kill
was earlier. I was getting the story of Macromedia mixed up with Aldus. And
actually, Flash came from FutureWave Software, before Macromedia acquired that
company.

But Adobe did not ignore Flash. They may have mismanaged it, but they did
invest in it, and tried to push Flash into places it does not belong (AIR, and
especially PDF). They also tried to turn ActionScript 3.0 into ECMAscript 4.

[https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html](https://www-
archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html)

Now that the Flash runtime is becoming banned, Adobe renamed the Flash
Professional content creation program to Adobe Animate, and made it able to
export to some flavor of HTML5. The content creation is where they make the
money, after all.

------
protomyth
I think the final legacy of Flash will be the knowledge that this was the
first major piece of software locked out of a platform and we lost a lot of
the history of the internet with its demise. As much as Flash was a pain, I'm
not sure I like the idea that it is acceptable for Apple or anyone else to
keep that software off their platform. I wonder if someone comes up with the
next step after the web will it even be allowed to run?

~~~
jstarfish
This has always been the fundamental problem with building anything on a
closed platform. This outcome was predictable, with or without Apple's
machinations.

But loss of internet history has happened again and again and will continue to
do so for time immemorial. We lost Webshots. We lost Geocities. Timecube is
gone. All of my old Yahoo accounts, groups, friends and associated content
have either been lost to data breaches or outright reassigned. Photobucket is
a shell of what it once was, what with their blocking hotlinks and purging old
data. Anything you created in Second Life will only last as long as the parent
company decides it's worth supporting their subpar VRML engine for the benefit
of its dwindling community of sexual deviants. As the internet becomes more
and more centralized on a handful of platforms that happily ingest our data
but refuse to efficiently excrete it for archival, bringing it with them to
the grave, and that will themselves one day be replaced with something more
hip, all your precious memories, photos and top-tier memes will be lost to
time like tears in rain.

It's nobody's fault. It's the natural order of things. Old technologies and
platforms die, and new ones take their place. Some data loss happens in the
transition. The internet circa 2000 might have sentimental value to you and I,
but it's counterproductive to insist that all web browsers need to be able to
support playback of Peanut Butter Jelly Time SWFs, RealPlayer-encoded Nine
Inch Nails videos, Metallica's homepage from 1997, or binaries of P.F. Chang's
menus in their original form in perpetuity. Sometimes it's best to let go of
sentiment for the sake of progress.

------
jack9
The article is describing an event that has been covered a couple ways. It was
also the basis for a presentation at the 2017 Seattle Casual Connect -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o)

I was one of those who asked some questions at the end.

------
jdonaldson
Even though the OpenFL api matches the AS3 version pretty closely, a porting
job of this scale would've been a huge ordeal to go through. To have this kind
of a positive trip report after the whole process is over is a great credit to
Josh's work on OpenFL.

(self-disclosure : member of Haxe community)

------
jdonaldson
As a heads up for folks interested in Haxe, the first stateside Haxe
conference is set for May 3rd-5th in Seattle Washington :
[https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-
summit-2018](https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-summit-2018)

------
joemanaco
1.4M Lines of Code in a very high level language? What the hell are they
doing?

~~~
teilo
They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option
at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire
codebase in something completely different, all while still running a
profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still
maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-
platform code base, and a non-deprecated path forward. What they did is
utterly rational from an ROI standpoint.

~~~
ZenoArrow
GP wasn't talking about the rewrite, they were talking about the original
codebase. In other words, how did the codebase for a couple of Flash games
balloon to 1.4 million lines of code?

------
microcolonel
This article is confusing, and sounds confused, but I feel like a lot of
problems like this could be solved by Adobe open sourcing the Flash Player. If
they did this, we would have a complete, correct view of how each and every
feature in the Player was implemented, and a working implementation to compare
to.

In the sense that there is so much art locked away in SWF blobs which don't
_quite_ work with gnash or shumway. The last patent needed for MP3 decoders
will, IIRC, expire at the end of this month, so we can include one of those
everywhere too (essential for most SWFs).

Also, it'd be nice to have access to the Shockwave player, boy oh boy, I think
just about nobody has tried to reimplement that (probably due in part to XTRAs
and other fun). There's still plenty of Shockwave content out there, don't
know if anyone here remembers playing the _Gorillaz Final Drive_ gamette, IIRC
released to promote _19-2000_ , or any number of other cool things people were
doing with Director.

~~~
shove
You're confusing the Flash player (no xtras) and Director a bit here.

~~~
microcolonel
No, not at all.

------
voidr
> Along with Javascript’s lack of strong-type safety

They could have just used TypeScript or Flow. It doesn't sound like they did
enough research on the HTML5 option if they haven't came across these.

~~~
BatFastard
I am looking at converting 40k lines of action script right now. TypeScript is
my top choice, while I like HAXE, I dont feel that is has a large enough
ecosystem. Also ActionScript to TypeScript is really easy.

~~~
singmajesty
OpenFL is getting TypeScript support in the next release

------
based2
[https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-
fle...](https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-flex-to-
haxe/)

[http://www.openfl.org/](http://www.openfl.org/)

[https://github.com/openfl](https://github.com/openfl)

[https://github.com/openfl/lime](https://github.com/openfl/lime)

------
jancsika
So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?

~~~
fenomas
It has tons of of licensed code. I worked at Adobe at the time, and everyone I
knew on the Flash team would have loved to open source the player.

~~~
jancsika
Would it be a license violation to release specs or design docs for Flash?

~~~
userbinator
Specs are already released, although not complete. Look around Adobe's website
for "SWF file format specification".

~~~
jancsika
What's missing?

Is what is missing the part that made efforts like Gnash fail?

------
quotemstr
Was it really less trouble to rewrite the codebase than to enhance something
like shumway and run the existing code on a modern platform? I think there's a
temptation to view platforms as given, inviolate, and immutable entities, when
in reality, we can and should make our own when necessary.

~~~
Jare
That won't cut it for mobile

------
bsiemon
If you go to one of the referenced sites:
[http://www.vegasworld.com](http://www.vegasworld.com). It asks you to enable
flash first then will fall back to the html5 site. I wonder why that fallback
is configured.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Doesn't sound that mysterious to me. By the sounds of it, Flash is still their
main platform (for performance reasons perhaps), and HTML5 is provided for
those who don't have Flash installed. Haxe can target both Flash and HTML5, so
this doesn't contradict the article.

------
didibus
Haxe is also quite a nice OOP language. A kind of Java without the annoying
parts.

------
avodonosov
It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex)

Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need
to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not
fully re-invented.

~~~
desireekdlo
I have mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed
manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a
pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to
support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as
someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It
seemed premature.

On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with
all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems
with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like
there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and
although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for
the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled
Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have
happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important
and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).

~~~
dilap
Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices,
so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think
history shows he was right.

Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid.

[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we
really be in a better place if that had continued?

(The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native
apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now,
and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-
parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass,
because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive
to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the
time.)

~~~
BatFastard
>Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices,
so they never allowed it.

I have a bridge to sell you too!

He took that position so that everything would be forced to go thru the app
store. Flash apps can run on iOS right now, but they have to go thru the app
store.

People wrote a TON for flash games, most of it was shit, but some was amazing
and creative. Much like what you see in the app store now.

~~~
dilap
I find the arguments convincing because they make sense to me. There's 0% of
me as an iPhone user that's like, "man, I wish Apple had done more to extend
the lifetime of flash."

And think about it: If Apple's only goal were to push people to the App Store,
why bother to build a mobile browser with good html5 support? Why add a
special mode where you could add websites to the home screen as icons, and
they'd show up just like normal apps, launching into full-screen mode w/o
chrome?

Maybe I'm buying bridges, but I take Jobs' at his word in the flash letter.

(Though, no doubt! Apple does love having ultimate control via the App Store.

(Which, as a completely separate topic, is _terrible_. They censor the whole
thing to a PG-13 level and reject apps for arbitrary political reasons (e.g.,
a drone-strike notification app, Gab).

(It's truly a shame that the most important medium of our time is run like a
totalitarian state.)

------
gadders
>>Backed by a codebase of more than one million lines of ActionScript and a
game suite that makes nearly $1 million in revenue per month, we knew finding
the right solution was not going to be easy.

That is good going.

------
finchisko
If there was ActionScript as WASM compile target, those guys would safe
themselves from 1.4M LOC rewrite.

~~~
sydd
Only in the short term. In the long run its more than worth it because:

\- It will be impossible to hire good AS3 experts. You will need to pay
mountains of money to train juniors or hire the remaining experts. Programmers
will always want to try the new shiny thing, which they cant adding more HR
problems.

\- Now they will need to maintain the AS3 -> new tech compiler too. New tech
evolves constantly breaking your compiler.

\- Current tooling will show its age quickly. The official IDE for Flash is an
outdated Eclipse plugin that wont work without patches. JetBrains has an
excellent plugin, but its in maintenance mode who knows when they drop it.
Also profilers, debuggers,...

If you don't fight the tech dept you will end up like banks where it takes a
day to make a simple money transfer because everything core is running on
mainframes in COBOL.

------
k0dede
You should really check out egret game engine. They offer typescript which is
very similar to actionscript. Link:
[https://www.egret.com/en/](https://www.egret.com/en/)

------
tombert
I remember hearing about Haxe about 5 years ago, put it on my list of things
to learn, and then forgot about it since I don't do web frontend anymore.

This article's praise of it might be a good excuse to install it and try
again.

------
k__
I had the impression it was dead for years now.

I know a few freelancers who made a living doing Flash stuff and they stopped
right after Apple said it wouldn't be a thing on iOS, because their project
requests dropped dramatically.

------
tambre
> The open-source nature of Haxe allowed our team to rapidly identify and fix
> problems [...] [like] issues with IPv6 support [...]

Yet the Gamasutra domain lacks an AAAA record. :(

------
georgeecollins
This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is
a Doug Pearson I used to work with at Activision. He was a stand up guy. But I
really can't tell if that is who wrote this. What worries me is that companies
push people in the game industry to write post-mortems promoting their
technology.

~~~
edmccard
>This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is
a Doug Pearson...

In the article, the author's name at the top is actually a link to a short
bio[1] which seems like it has enough information to identify him.

[1][https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/)

------
ralmidani
I have zero sympathy for anyone who feels pressured to convert a Flash app
these days. The writing has been on the wall for so long, and there are still
at least 2 whole years before Adobe cuts off support.

Flash is the established cause of so many computer crashes, so many security
exploits, and so much battery drainage. It is downright irresponsible for
anyone to force users to use Flash in 2017, even if Adobe promised to maintain
support for another 10 years.

Edit: removed specifics about my school and computer model to avoid
distractions.

The only time I bother with Flash is when I have to for an educational purpose
--that is the only situation I can imagine using Flash for a net gain. No form
or amount of entertainment is worth it.

~~~
minitech
What do your computer model and school have to do with Flash?

~~~
ralmidani
Thank you, edited to avoid distractions.

