
Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era - Osiris
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3awk7/flash-is-responsible-for-the-internets-most-creative-era
======
ArtixKrieger
Flash was my favorite game design tool of all time, and it changed my life.

In 2002 I created the original AdventureQuest. Because the game was created in
Flash (Actionscript 1) it was instantly cross platform. It could dynamically
load any number of animated monsters, weapons, cut-scenes, towns, and
backgrounds. Most importantly, those loaded items could have their own code
which let them do anything-- giving them new AI, features, or letting there be
a game within the game. Also, it was easy to communicate with the database
through posts to webpages. Because of this, your character was persistent and
the game was able to update with new things every week. (In fact, the game has
been updating for 17 years and is STILL updated with new things every single
week.)

As Flash evolved, we built more games: DragonFable, MechQuest, and a slew of
minigames. Actionscript 2 has a special place in my heart. It was my favorite
language. Not being a "real programmer", it was really easy to use. Making
things was ultra fast. Actionscript 3 was a challenge for me. our "real
programmers" loved it. But, it was so hard for me to actually make anything
happen with it. When it became the new standard and we started developing with
it, I stopped programming and focused on the content assembly side.

We have built several Flash Massively Multiplayer Video games: AdventureQuest
Worlds, EpicDuel, Oversoul, and HeroSmash. They all benefited from the same
features that the very first game did, allowing for weekly (or more often)
releases of new content. The games literally grew under your feet as you
played them.

Creating art, animation, and interactivity in Flash was the best. Flash 3.0
was probably my favorite version. Flash CS6 being a close second.

We are currently in the process of converting our most popular game,
AdventureQuest Worlds to Unity. Switching from vector to raster is a
nightmare-- ask anyone who has gone through converting 10,000 items with no
universal conformity.

Flash was just so fast and easy. We still use Adobe Animate (which is what
they call the Flash tool now) for creating 2D vector art. But I really do miss
Flash as a "one stop shop" tool to create... anything.

Battle on! Artix

~~~
smush
Man - DragonFable & MechQuest were great fun. I still think of Sir Valence and
the various knights with punny names!

I hope between godot, procreate 5, and open source flash runners, long term
Flash will be properly succeeded; for now it appears we have regressed unless
you pay Adobe for a CC subscription.

------
taneem
During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was,
looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in
the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country
called Lesotho.

Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living
there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.

However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these
came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of
Macromedia Flash.

Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations
blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single
feature, every single quirk.

Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all
this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was
several layers of abstraction away from that.

So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly
hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in
the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for
web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash
questions always were referred to me.

In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it
was really something special, especially in the late 90s.

~~~
krtkush
Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my
interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and
then other aspects of computers.

That era of discovery and expression was something special.

~~~
tombert
I had a similar experience. I learned ActionScript pretty early on (around age
age 16 or so) because it was easier to get something visual built than any
other thing I had used, while still feeling like "real" programming.

AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that
I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to
get something built when I was just bored and wanted to make a new toy.

For me, nothing has really come along to replace Flash in regards to the
"tangible" feelings you get. JS and WebGL and Canvas and whatnot are great,
and definitely lead to better results in regards to the user experience, but I
feel that they're a lot harder to "pick up and play".

~~~
krtkush
Agreed! The visual feedback was spot on in flash.

Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just
import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind
the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This
was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com
and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the
temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal
folder for later dissection.

------
l_t
I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino
Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the
stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was
blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic
tweening was a miracle to me.

Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still
think back to Macromedia Flash and how I, a child with no ability to code and
no knowledge of HTML or Web tech, was able to make my imagination come to life
on the screen.

I believe it's that powerful experience _for novices_ that we're missing. I'm
not sure how we should get it back.

(edit: phrasing)

~~~
hunta2097
Disclaimer: I'm an old git.

I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets
more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now
that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly.

The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio,
part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance.

Maybe there is a place in the market for framework to implement a flash-a-like
in a HTML5 Canvas?

~~~
dTal
Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-
complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim
to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a
great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the
surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of
worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to create a 'hello world' mobile app
- it seems awesomely, perversely difficult compared to the intrinsic
simplicity of the task. I would argue that this is _deliberate gatekeeping_ \-
if ordinary people could create content, this would threaten an awful lot of
business models, including and especially the business models of people who
run app stores and take a cut of the profits. Can't have the techno-serfs
_programming_ , can we?

~~~
heavyset_go
Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA
and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have
picked.

Software is one of those spaces where there is an _incredible_ amount of
capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator.

There are _so many_ resources for people of any age and background to learn
practical skills in this field. There are summer camps where 7 year old kids
learn to program.

~~~
big_chungus
Not exactly. Such camps certainly exist, but they're not for everyone. I was
tinkering with Linux at 7, but only because I had a technical parent who put
it on the family computer. I'd say the important part here was that I wasn't
given a coding bootcamp course to go through, I just got to play. Eventually,
I figured out how to use single-user to re-set the root password and play as
much supertux as I wanted. This probably shaped my passion for technology and
"solving puzzles" of a technical nature more than anything else.

I'd say if you really want youth interested in technology, you basically need
a "montessori model" for computers. I don't believe that's likely to happen in
school; you need funding, which requires measurable results. There's also too
much bad stuff on the internet for schools to run that risk at that scale.

There are two rough classes into which I would break "tech guys". The first is
the sort who enjoys it for what it is. Shaves yaks configuring his system,
tries out new languages for the heck of it, that sort. The second has a
perfectly respectable career in software, and enjoys other things when he
comes home at five p.m. I'm not saying one is better or worse, but at seven
years of age, you'll only have the few of the first type _really_ interested.
Type two will often switch to a different toy once frustrated (i.e. upon a
serious bug). You can't expect everyone to derive the same level of marginal
benefit from just playing with tech.

Type twos necessarily better or worse, but we don't put kids into "plumbing
boot-camp" at seven expecting them to develop life-long passions. Maybe a few
will, but not many. To put it another way, you'll get a lot more kids into
architecture letting them play with legos free-form than handing them a kit
and saying, "Build this model by following the instructions."

~~~
anon9001
I had similar experiences to you and definitely fit into the yak-shaving
variety (or at least I did before work destroyed my soul).

There's no question to me that early exposure and encouragement makes all the
difference in educating kids. I can't understand why we're not engineering
experiences in all these different fields for kids to build real stuff that
can eventually turn into a trade. If you're a kid, even today, and you want to
learn an adult trade young, your options are still pretty much just artist or
programmer.

If there was a way to start doctors or lawyers young, maybe it'd make a
difference. As a kid, I knew one girl that was a hospital volunteer, and she
ended up going to Africa as an adult to try and make the world a better place
by helping others. People don't realize how activities in formative years
really stick with kids.

Instead of giving kids meaningful work, we're raising a generation that's
going to be great at self-promotion and fortnite.

~~~
wiseleo
There is a way to start children young to become lawyers and doctors. Lawyers
need perfect English. Doctors need perfect English and biology.

Our entire school system is wrong. :) I am working on it. We force parents to
go to school and that is wrong.

The key to rapid education is teaching the correct subjects. All science is
functionally math. Physics is math and chemistry is math. Music is math. All
written homework is functionally English. Art is functionally understanding of
light and shadows, which is best taught through photography. Photography
decouples ability to render (drawing) from ability to compose. Until the child
is fluent at algebra and written English, teaching other subjects except for
athletics relies on the child's innate talent or, more likely, their parents.

~~~
big_chungus
There's _at least_ one more critical component you're missing, logic and
analysis. It will also be harder to keep a pupil's attention on two subjects
for half a day than on a multitude of subjects for forty-five minutes apiece.
After three hours being lectured on the same subject, I would get tired even
in college; how do you plan to force eight-year-olds to pay attention in such
a manner?

In other words, you cannot swap all time for study of english and mathematics
and expect to simply achieve twice as much in english and mathematics.

~~~
wiseleo
That's not the plan. The plan is to give them a reason to want to learn.

Learning 45 minutes at a time is silly. It's far more effective to master one
concept at a time.

Logic comes with math. I haven't fully thought it through, but my initial goal
is to eliminate the need to rely on parents to do well in school.

------
excessive
I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The
early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins
directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good
performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very
portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter,
simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s.

It's easy to imagine the various security vulnerabilities could have been
fixed by a more responsible/responsive company, and the abuse by advertisement
companies should've been solvable with an ad blocker.

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML have come a long way in capability, but the mashup
is much more distasteful to me. Flash was elegant despite its frequent misuse.

~~~
evrydayhustling
Something that's not easy to appreciate about Flash if you weren't there is
that it is the first tool that really put multimedia interactivity within
reach of non-devs -- and, almost gratuitously, made it dirt simple to
distribute your creation at the same time.

A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a
publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly
build and send something around the world in a week. No wonder it uncovered so
many creative projects waiting to happen!!

~~~
cmroanirgo
Disclaimer: old timer

As someone who wrote a complete 3d modeller for a game, including animation,
even before 3dsmax was a thing, I was surprised when a few years later (10+) I
saw how easy the Flash UI was to understand, especially the way keyfames were
added. The UX was rather extraordinary. Unfortunately even at that time (early
iPhone) because Flash was so synonymous with security flaws, I would regularly
uninstall it. Since then, I've yet to see a solution that's as easy to use and
doesn't have some kind of vendor lock in (like Flash did). Maybe I haven't
looked hard enough tho.

As much as I personally disliked the artistic Flash- only sites at the time,
hindsight shows that they were rather invaluable. We lost a lot of diversity
when Apple killed it off.

------
pippy
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a
propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with
similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media
Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and
webassembly.

It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's
also a shame that Adobe didn't simply release the swf spec.

~~~
The_rationalist
What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

~~~
theobeers
Nothing, of course. Anything that could be done with Flash in its heyday can
be done better (in several senses) with modern tools.

But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s _actually
being done_ in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough
to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your
friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative pages on the web.
Picture that personality type. What place does it have in the universe of
websites that we visit today?

The answer, as far as I’ve seen: user. We spend time on a smaller number of
sites/platforms. The design of those sites tends to be (at its best)
streamlined and optimized. And people who want to share their creativity are
given little frames within that structure.

Even personal websites are usually built through WordPress, Squarespace, or
similar. Something has been lost. I’m not going to say things are worse
nowadays. That would be too sweeping a judgment, even if I substantially
agreed with it, and I think I don’t. But I get this weird feeling when I spend
time online, like it’s a tree that died some time ago, but it’s being
reinforced, made to stand straighter than ever, given artificial leaves that
never turn, etc.

~~~
newsgremlin
Talking about this to certain devs is like talking to them about sports. They
just don't get the learning curve was the most accessable for the average
user, not just those who know how to program.

We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's
not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that
people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the
web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect
for the other side of the brain.

~~~
robertoandred
Except the Flash development tools still exist
[https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

------
etaioinshrdlu
I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything
with Flash.

When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have
full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and
encourage competing authoring tools.

Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and
native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-
breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance
and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not
all that different from an SVG to be honest.

One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the
very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash
never made.

Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of
the old internet by deprecating it.

I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the
economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like
digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that
benefits no-one.

~~~
aikah
What Adobe destroyed is the community existing around Macromedia products. It
was just unprecedented to my knowledge. Most Macromedia solutions were
extremely easy to use AND improve via plugins. You could use Javascript to
easily create add-ons for Flash, or Fireworks, or Dreamweaver and there was
that "community" aspect that did not exist with Adobe product.

And then Macromedia got "Eloped"...

It's crazy how Adobe never leveraged that community and just pissed everybody
off then it died out...

There was also that kind of "friendly" competition where teams add to come up
with the most bad ass interactive experience and brands had huge budgets to
promote this or that product. It was an healthy relationship between marketing
and creativity. Everybody even now, remember at least some Flash websites.
"2advanced" anybody? Who remembers the design of the web sites they visit
today? It's all the same.

Obviously at some point, Flash ads became a nuisance, and mobile kind of
killed it in the browser...

> Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization
> and native support in browsers.

Unfortunately no, because TC39 rejected Ecmascript 4. Ironically, Microsoft
who is responsible for Typescript is to blame for that. Because they had their
own solution "Silverlight", it was short-sighted.

~~~
dkh
I was in 9th grade when I first came across 2advanced, a time in my life when
I was was figuring out what my interests were. Torn between continuing to
learn programming and changing course to something that seemed more
“creative”, suddenly here was this thing that clearly blended both in a way I
hadn’t known was possible. I consider 2a to have been a big influence on me,
and to this day I remember the music, sounds, and animations from their v2 and
v3 sites crystal-clear.

------
buboard
You can set up a video chat lecture with text chat and pretty good video with
the free red5 java server and something like Avchat.com . That's 20 year old
tech and works today, but will be removed from the net in a year. There is no
HTML5 alternative. Why?

I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more
homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded
corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. Dev tools
are more about saving programmers from themselves rather than pushing things
to the limit. Flash is probably an example of it

~~~
cookie_monsta
I'm not familiar with red5 but it seems that webRTC does a decent job on video
and text chat with the browser doing the heavy lifting in terms of encryption
and permissions. Am I missing something?

~~~
buboard
You can set up red5 in a few minutes, at most hours. Replicating a similar
setup with something like Janus is a lot more complicated, and there is no
HTML5 equivalent

Plus webrtc is proving to be a resource hog every time, and a lot more
complicated to set up in an app (separate media / data stream etc). flash/red5
works literally out of the package.

~~~
cookie_monsta
I'm not asking what webRTC does worse - obviously it's going to improve over
time, I'm asking what it can't do that flash can.

~~~
buboard
that misses the point. If its slow and laggy, user is not going to use it and
laptops are going to become portable heaters. This is exactly what webRTC does

> obviously it's going to improve over time

When? webrtc is like 10 years old. How long we have to wait to go back to
1999?

~~~
cookie_monsta
> When? webrtc is like 10 years old.

Well, 8 from initial release. 18 months from first stable release.

Far as I understand it, lag and overheating are hardware/network problems.
Considering the amount of development going into both of them, that situation
is only going to improve but of course I don't have a roadmap.

FWIW I haven't noticed problems with either and I don't have a mind blowing
setup.

I look at what browsers are doing now compared to 1999, there's no way I'd
want to go back

------
nojvek
I only got into CS because of flash. It was simple to get started. Draw some
shapes, add color and start tweening. Point and click got you very interesting
animations. Deploying was a swf that worked in a ubiquitous manner. Then I
learnt a bit of Actionscript on my own before even learning any sort of formal
programming. It was a ton of fun to add event listeners and do basic
interaction. I learnt what object oriented programming was. The sprites were
the objects and I could program them and create dynamic instances.

I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then
got into mxml and Flex.

Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun
as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create
impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing
games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what
effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too.

Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.

~~~
dluan
I got an A in 7th grade biology because I animated the electron transport
chain in a little flash movie over a holiday break. I burned the swf onto a CD
and gave it to my biology teacher who then showed it on his computer during
parent teacher night.

------
jrwoodruff
In my personal opinion, Flash was ruined by Adobe when they tried to 'fix' it
(improve it?) with ActionScript 3, which followed the ECMA script standard.
AS3 changed everything about how flash worked, and if you weren't a software
engineer, the learning curve was steep. I actually went and took some basic
programming classes (literally in visual basic lol) and learned how to write
proper code.

Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun
toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing
classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and,
for me, less fun.

And besides that, plenty of real coding tools already existed, and HTML/CSS/JS
was improving really quickly as well. So I ended up learning those instead.

All of that was actually great for my design career, but Flash just didn't
have a place anymore. And I'm still sad about that.

~~~
woutr_be
I actually quite liked the changes in AS3, and it being more programatic, I
think it paved the way for what I do now.

After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any
current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty
sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I
think it was for the better.

~~~
hunterloftis
I was a front-end developer during the AS2 -> AS3 -> Flex era. These days,
I've been messing with Web Components (via LitElement) and the similarities
with Flex/MXML are uncanny.

~~~
woutr_be
You're right, and it feels very similar to what we have in Vue/React these
days. How are you liking Web Components?

~~~
hunterloftis
I've enjoyed Web Components; using LitElement (a WC subclass) feels like
writing React with native browser APIs. Working with the browser instead of
hacking around it.

~~~
woutr_be
Good to hear, I was thinking about using Vue for a new project, but now
decided to give Web Components (LitElement) a try. I didn't really need all
the SPA functionality anyway, just wanted small and fast components.

~~~
hunterloftis
Ping me on Twitter (@hunterloftis) if you have questions while working on your
project. The community around WC/LitElement is small relative to Vue/React but
amazingly responsive.

------
Fr0styMatt88
Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]?

It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different
backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with
that as a teenager.

I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected
what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how
you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the
character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you
just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc,
then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.

Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to
appear and repeat the above process.

New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set
the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.

It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it,
hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove
it and record further as needed.

It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love
to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989)

~~~
smush
The scrubbing features remind me of Microsoft 3D movie maker which was a Win
95-era product that had the same easy approach, but with 3d characters.

------
jayd16
People are looking back with rose tinted glasses, I think. This was an era
where you could build rich media with absolute canvas values and it would look
great and it was easy for an artist to take that canvas and do things.

The iPhone killed flash but not just in the obvious way. These days everything
needs to be reactive and run on well on mobile hardware. Even if iOS supported
flash it would need to be a different beast. Different screen sizes, an
explosion of aspect rations, heavier security requirements, accessibility,
touch controls and more led to the downfall.

~~~
phaseshifter
I remember sideloading the Flash Player APK on my Android phone around 2013
(they stopped official support in 4.1) and most of the Flash content was
effectively unusable even then.

Pecking on a tiny video player with your finger to change volume, quality, or
playback position was a terrible experience and the battery drain wasn't great
either. Watching videos outside of YouTube was a terrible time for phone users
before sites transitioned to HTML5.

------
rezmason
I might have missed a few names, but I'd like to contribute a list of folks
and sites from the old Flash community who seemed like rock stars (in order of
how much I idolized them).

Once I typed it up, I realized it was all dudes, so let me first link to
[https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/](https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/) ,
who shone a spotlight on the women who worked in the same space. (Shoutout to
Lisa Larson-Kelley, fellow alumnus of FlashCodersNY, and Stacey Mulcahy, whose
hilarious AS2-to-AS3 migration talk was fucking awesome!)

If you wish to view any of these links, I recommend pasting them into
web.archive.org and setting the Wayback to the mid-to-late 2000's.

mrdoob.com (Mr. doob, later created three.js) audiotool.com, lab.andre-
michelle.com (Andre Michelle) wefail.com (Jordan Stone, Martin Hughes)
gskinner.com (Grant Skinner, later created EaselJS, etc) quasimondo.com (Mario
Klingemann) bytearray.org (Thibault Imbert) bit-101.com (Keith Peters)
vectorpark.com (Patrick Smith) hoogerbrugge.com (Han Hoogerbrugge)
levitated.net (Jared Tarbell) blog.joa-ebert.com (Joa Ebert (also audiotool))
orisinal.com (Ferry Halim) hospital.apoka.com (Edouard Artus) kirupa.com
(Kirupa Chinnathambi) mosessupposes.com (Moses Gunesch) gotoandlearn.com,
theflashblog.com (Lee Brimelow)

Most of these folks also spoke at tech events, sharing techniques and hard-
learned lessons. Like that time when Wefail gave a talk that took a memorably
heavy shit on Jakob Nielsen. Hell yes.

Also worth noting the HBO Voyeur promotional site made by Big Spaceship:
archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur

The Flash community was creative and groundbreaking as hell. Most of the folks
who criticized it for being proprietary and insecure are lifelong users of
proprietary, insecure platforms; the worst aspects of the Flash-equipped web
linger still, namely ads, inaccessibility and site bloat; and let's face it,
as capable as the modern web client stack is, it's lost so much ground to the
walled garden platforms, that Steve Jobs's 2010 agenda can no longer be seen
as anything but duplicitous.

Godspeed, FutureSplash! You were to good for this web.

~~~
jjirsa
All of that and no 2Advanced

------
JohnBooty
We're.... misattributing some things here, I think.

Flash was a bundle of good things and bad things, as we all more or less
agree. Good for creativity, bad for usability and accessibility and security,
etc.

You could, obviously, do so many things in Flash that were impossible with web
standards.

But, why was there such a gap between what you could do in Flash and what you
could do with web standards? Why was Flash even necessary?

This was due in large part to how Microsoft acquired a stranglehold on the web
_right_ as it was beginning to really take off -- IE4, IE5, and IE6 were the
defacto standards, and Microsoft used them to quash innovation on the web as
they (successfully) tried to hold on to their desktop software business for
another decade or so.

Perhaps we haven't lived through the worst possible timeline, but there was
certainly a better outcome possible - where Microsoft didn't stifle innovation
on the web for close to a decade.

(And now, of course, we're approaching another dark age as Google heads toward
IE6-like market share....)

~~~
redisman
Flash had a VM that truly was "write once, run on anything" and a great
(software) pixel and vector renderer. Cross-browser compatibility with HTML
standards was completely bonkers and HTML had none of the features Flash Games
and Animations needed. Try to move or rotate a picture at 30 fps with old
HTML.

~~~
bbanyc
I remember Flash being slow and buggy on Mac and Linux at the time, and
updates lagged far behind the Windows version (on Linux in particular). And
then I saw an article from a Macromedia/Adobe dev saying that it was heavily
optimized x86 assembly code targeted towards Windows and very difficult to
port to other platforms... given the IE6 monoculture at the time, it made
sense, but I felt like a redheaded stepchild for daring to use a minority OS.

I don't think it was 64-bit clean, either, so now no modern device runs Flash
"natively."

~~~
redisman
Definitely true. Most game engines still have poor Linux (and often Mac)
support.

------
someexgamedev
I made games in flash for over a decade and miss the ease of dropping an
experimental game idea onto the web where everyone could enjoy it. If you had
a free weekend, you could release a game to 99% of the internet.

JavaScript game libs simply aren't as featureful, even the ones promising the
scenegraph API. They don't work as well cross platform (by the end of that
decade I had one codebase which could deploy to web, iOS, and Android); and
that's where the audience has headed.

I hope this book spends some time on flash's contribution to video game design
as well as web design.

~~~
zanny
You can make a game today in Godot / Unity, export to HTML5, and drop it on
itch.io to play in browser in minutes.

~~~
greggman2
also thousands of games made with pico8 on the net live. Sure pico-8 is not a
replacement for flash but people are posting live games and they are making
them quickly. Celeste, one of the top 10 games last year on many lists,
started as a pico8 prototype live on the web.

Also flash never worked cross platform in the modern sense (phones + tablets +
desktop). It's a very hard problem and no system I know of handles it
automatically for anything more than simple HTML text forms

------
kaolti
Lots of good points made, I'll add mine.

Flash got me started in web design as a kid and put me on a path to earning a
good living. Lots of things changed since then but I want to hear your
thoughts on one specifically.

It used to be cool to try things and put something together that in the grand
scheme of things is kind of bad. I get the feeling that's not the case
anymore.

Seems like there's so much pressure to sell the image of you being an expert,
there is no room to try wild things and see what happens - which is the basis
for learning and development btw. What we get then is everyone copying the
"expert" patterns, but hardly anyone doing anything original or truly
creative, because it feels risky.

This is probably true for a lot of other creative endeavours that have big $
behind them - the movie industry comes to mind. Sure, there are more movies
being made now than ever, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like we're in the
most creative era and you know it's got nothing to do with the tools.

Someone please tell me otherwise.

~~~
redisman
I feel bad for people coming of age now in the world of programming. There's a
lot of pressure to follow the best practices and they sure as heck don't
involve an easy way to draw a Z colored pixel at coordinate (X, Y). Or to coax
a programmed beep out of the speaker. Which is basically how I learned 50% of
programming.

You don't really get that visceral moment of magic reaction from web
technologies or super polished game engines which is where that happens now.

------
metafunctor
Flash sites were creative, in that they were occasionally built by people with
amazing talent and great skill.

Most of the time, though, Flash was the multimedia CD-ROM of the web. Flash
was an extension shoehorned in, didn't feel like the rest of the web, and
didn't deeply integrate with the browsing experience.

Flash content was an alien rectangle, a wormhole into a strange dimension,
where a mouse click would often not behave anything like a mouse click usually
would.

Flash pretended to be _on_ the web, but Flash was not _of_ the web. That's why
it's now gone.

~~~
excessive
Heh, this is really a matter of perspective. If you think the rest of the web
was wonderful, then Flash was a turd floating in a swimming pool. If you think
the web is a poorly designed shoddy mess, then you might think Flash was a
raft keeping you afloat in the sewer.

HTML and JavaScript are so sloppy and incrementally improved by accretion
rather than taste, I lean towards the sewer point of view.

------
milchek
As a former Flash dev that worked through those glory days, I tend to agree.
The format was just a lot more open and less restrictive in what you could do
- especially compared with the early web. We built a lot of different things
with it, including games and animations.

Contrast that with the first pure HTML sites I created, which were built with
tables and frames. I shudder thinking back at some of those sites, which were
an absolute clusterfuck of nested tables. Flash was like a playground compared
to the restrictive environment of building in HTML and CSS in those days, and
it seemed like every client project I worked on was very different in its
function and UX.

Fast-forward to today, and even with what we can do with modern web
technologies, if you look at many sites these days, they're all pretty much
the same - especially if they're sales sites. They all use a very familiar
cookie-cutter style format. You know the sites I'm talking about; top nav bar,
hero image with a wanky quote, 3-block row outlining the nifty features, a
call-to-action button etc.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautiful sites come about in the post-
Flash era, and some pretty nifty effects (parallax movement seemed to gain a
lot of popularity for a time). I think that modern web design really just
shows how far we've come in terms of optimisation.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Most of this has come about because we've
all spent collective time and effort to get here and discovered what works
best for users (in most cases) what converts sales the easiest, etc. It's a
culmination of the evolution of tooling, frameworks, boilerplates and various
styles we've all built with along the way that continues to evolve.

We know through other mediums and media that users like familiarity (The Mere-
exposure effect - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-
exposure_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect)), and so,
the web ends up all looking the same as well because more familiarity equals
fewer barriers and distractions and hopefully more sales/conversions/eyeballs.

------
djsumdog
Home Star Runner!!!

Go to the old homestarrunner site, grab a flash file and play it (in the
browser if you still have support, or using a rendering library) on a UHD
screen. Yes, you can render that ancient 2000s era video .. in 4k. Flash is
dead as a door nail though, and Homestar will now only be at the resolution of
when they rendered it for YouTube.

~~~
nevster
Trogdor!!!!!! I introduced my kids to Strong Bad when they were young but just
about zero of their friends know about it. :(

------
dillonmckay
Nobody has mentioned Youtube using Flash initially to create the experience of
‘it just works.’

We had RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others, but video on the web was rather
difficult.

~~~
PBnFlash
HLS DASH are never going to be as simple as RTMP was with flash. It "just
worked" in a way the internet just doesn't anymore.

~~~
buboard
it s as if we are regressing

------
jugg1es
I couldn't possibly agree more with this article. It is still possible to do
the kinds of things that Flash did now-a-days with HTML5 canvas, but it
requires a lot more programming abilities than Flash required.

Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms
have beautiful, yet predictable, websites.

The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical
stack of buttons, no top nav bar. Designers back then encouraged exploration.
You just don't see that anymore.

Overall, websites are way better now. But we have certainly lost something as
the entire web has become commoditized and homogenized. No one is willing to
take risks anymore. The late 90s and 2000's was a different kind of internet
than it is now, for sure.

~~~
bredren
But there is far more competition than there was before. People have devices
allowing them shorter attention span to get to value than before.

This change is not only because of the loss of flash.

~~~
buboard
The people competing are the top 3 companies who won the race. The rest have
quit trying and are just copying them. There is far less competition, the
internet became an oligopoly

------
fortran77
I think Flash has been unfairly maligned. I agree that its era is over. But
the functionality it provided, at the time it was available, paved the way for
a lot of good features on the Web, including YouTube and many interactive
websites that work more like applications--now of course implemented in HTML
and JavaScript/WebAssembly.

------
quickthrower2
The bad thing about being "creative" on the web is it not being obvious how to
use your site. I remember back in the day a lot of website using Flash only
that were like this.

~~~
code_duck
Flash developers were responsible for a lot of heinous interface experiences
that informed every rule of good UI and resource efficiency.

~~~
code_duck
(I meant 'ignored')

------
mateo1
When I was a teenager I wrote a couple flash games with actionscript. I think
the biggest thing about flash, asides from running consistently on all
platforms, was how simple it was to build functional stuff on it. Adobe's
Flash Professional had a nice monolithic IDE that worked out of the box and
included visual design aids.

------
MisterTea
I was going to add how I'm surprised that no one is trying to emulate it in js
or wasm but I appear to be wrong. someone on Newgrounds is doing just that:

[https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1444275](https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1444275)

~~~
kbumsik
There was an effort to run Flash using JS by Mozilla, called Shumway, now in
Mozilla Graveyard.

[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway)

------
archie2
My wife and I both grew up in the era of Flash on the web. We were both
inspired by it, I became a developer because I wanted to make games like the
ones I played that were built on Flash, my wife became an animator and
designer because of the cool animations she could find and create using it.

The death of Flash meant the death of her childhood and while I still make my
living developing for and on the web - my wife has basically been locked out
of it because she hasn't been able to find anything "modern" that really takes
Flashes place. She can write HTML and simple CSS, and even tweak tiny bits of
Javascript or even PHP here and there but nothing at the level of expressivity
that she could do with Flash.

Ultimately, the death of Flash was the death of our childhood.

------
smt88
It is very, very silly to suggest the Flash era was more creative than the
YouTube/indie-game era.

In general, the Web is more commercialized now, so creative content doesn't
always rise to the top, and there are incentives to be a low-quality content
factory.

But there are thousands or millions of online videos (some, like Flash, are
animated) and indie games on major platforms that are just as creative as the
most experimental, interesting stuff on Newgrounds.

~~~
buboard
youtube and indie games literally started as flash

~~~
smt88
What does that have to do with my comment?

Flash was a platform for games and video. Now we have much, much larger
platforms with more contributors and more consumers. There's likely more than
one order of magnitude more content being produced now than 15 years ago.

It's possible that the _average_ level of creativity has gone down, but the
amount of highly creative output has surely gone way, way up.

------
notatoad
Flash was a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things". As a
platform for web mini-games or self-contained interactive animations, it
remains unparalleled.

As a tool for building whole websites meant to convey information, it was
always shit. If lazy web developers hadn't collectively abused flash to make
annoying websites and dumb ads, perhaps we could still have fun flash games on
the web today.

~~~
valtism
It was not discontinued because people were making annoying websites with it,
it was discontinued because it was a nightmare for security.

~~~
cortesoft
Yeah, I thought security was where they were going with the "can't have nice
things" comment

------
irrational
Amen to this. At my job we create training content. In the Flash era we had a
team of animators that created the greatest content. Our clients in Asia
especially loved our content. Then the iPad came out. Overnight all of our
clients decided that they were going to use iPads for training (we were
training sales associates who previously had to use a manager's computer in a
back room, now with iPads they could train on the sales floor). Of course, the
iPad doesn't support flash. So we moved from awesome animations to plain text
and images web pages with a few short videos for really important content.
This is still what we are doing. At this point these is no chance of going
back to the time of web animations, and I think it is a real shame. Content
now sucks big time.

Why has nobody been able to build a Flash clone to create content for the
canvas element? I've looked at Adobe Animate and it is nowhere near being in
the same class as Flash.

------
Causality1
Flash was special even without the UI experiments. Flash allowed the creation
of vector-based movies with tiny filesizes that accommodated the miniscule
internet bandwidth of the early 2000s. The vectorized nature means videos
created and uploaded scale almost perfectly to modern resolutions, even 4K.

------
kizer
BTW, for all the elderly ;) HNers, the mid-twenties came of age during the
golden age of Flash, which almost defined the internet at that point in time.
Dammit, I'm getting teary-eyed. It was elementary, junior, and high-school for
me. Many memories of consuming content through Flash, AND also PRODUCING
content with flash. Learning how to program with pirated versions of then-
Macromedia's flagship product - now working at... the company that proved old
dogs can (sort of) learn new tricks ;). Perhaps it's analogous to a Commodore
64 or something for the older guys, hahaha.

------
PBnFlash
There were dozens of sites dedicated to flash tutorials and getting started
for amateurs. It was a highly focused _creative_ environment with low barrier
to entry. It allowed and encouraged cross pollination. Flash was a drawing
program, Animation, IDE, Game Development, Web development even audio and
video editing, with no clear lines between any of the functions.

It was a one stop shop for creative expression with thousands of people
learning the program and excited to share their knowledge.

Nothing does what flash did, because flash did everything and everyone was
using it.

------
dmje
It's a good piece (and damn it, book added to basket - that looks ace...) but
I think it's confusing to suggest Flash was the [only] creative bit. What was
truly creative / inspiring / enabling in the 90's / 00's IMO was the fact you
could see something someone had made and then view source and see how they
made it. Then with cheap or free tools you could edit locally, fiddle with it,
upload to a cheap host if you wanted. This is clearly the opposite of what
Flash gave us which was a black box with no way of seeing inside.

Nowadays you've got no chance of working out what a site is doing or how it's
working - view source is a litter of external resources which you've got to
follow until hell freezes over. And apparently now you've got to brew-grunt-
git-node-fuckknowswhatelse in order to get anything running at all.

I'm an old git and it's hackneyed to say it but I miss the simpler old days.
I'm really hoping the Javascript trend dies quickly so beginners / amateurs
can get back in the game.

Now: Flash: what's interesting to me is that what Flash offered genuinely
doesn't seem to be a thing that can be done any more. We do a lot of rich
content work and frequently get asked about making online experiences to help
explain concepts or ideas as infographics or games. Flash was may bad things,
but the universality and really easy to use building tools just don't seem to
have been replaced by anything comparable. Or maybe I've missed it?

------
kizer
Thank god someone is saying it. ActionScript 3 was my first programming
language! Without flash (and I know the many reasons for its extinction),
there's nothing that truly "bundles" an interactive experience altogether into
one little file, which plays in just one little box. To be honest,
"responsive" concerns shouldn't be the job of the creative. That's an external
concern. Video games generally simply scale graphics to fit the screen using a
simple algorithm and that's that. But when you design, for example, games on
the web, you have the luxury of fine-grained adjustment based on browser,
resolution, DPI, etc. But that freedom is exactly what creates an ambiguous
"boundary" for internet games. They aren't guaranteed to fit in this 800x600
div that __* 's games portal site requires.

In short, I think that the open & open-ended, non-strict support-all-the-
technologies nature of the web is too free for creative production. There's
too much. There's a known principle that limitations are crucial to creative
expression to the same degree the "tools" and "medium" are. We need an open-
source spiritual successor to flash which utilizes the wonder web ecosystem
but exposes a more constrained API so that games/interactive experiences are
portable and to an extent LIMITED again.

------
rendall
It was Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" essay that really turned the tide on
Flash. Flash, as a direct threat to the gigantic revenue stream that was the
Apple Store, could _not_ be put on the iPhone. I immediately saw that essay
for what it was, and didn't pay much attention. Rather than say "Flash
threatens Apple's revenue" Jobs' _had_ to employ FUD.

But within a day, Wired magazine published an op-ed masquerading as a factual
article, hating on Flash; and never stopped that drumbeat. "Flash. Must. Die."
it (literally) wrote.

And then, it was a total pile-on. No "serious programmer" would go anywhere
near it, nor admit that there was anything positive about it at all. One could
not mention Flash without devs asserting loudly that it was "riddled with
security holes" (always "riddled", always "security holes").

I learned some lessons that year, about tech, devs, corporations and people.

------
larusso
Flash is the reason I’m a developer. I’m a self studies software developer. I
wanted to become a screen designer in the early 2000 but also liked to bring
the pages I designed to life. JavaScript for interactive content was
impossible to use for me. I stumbled upon flash and was hooked. I started of
with simple timeline animations, learned to structure and control the whole
player from one script file. Learned basic OOP concepts and with AS3 the lot
of OOP paradigms and patterns etc. I had a 3 year fun period with Flex and
moved finally to mobile development. I never regretted to spend so much time
on this now dead Technologie. I can still draw from my experience even when it
comes to thinks “how not to do it”. I have to work Indirectly with Unity now.
And it has it faults as well. I often joke that I preferred flash over it.
There was only the Textfeld implementation to work around ;).

------
pjmlp
Many apparently have missed that Flash is pretty much alive, Adobe has renamed
it into Animate.

In fact some might even been playing Animate AOT compiled games on their iOS
devices.

[https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

------
marban
Simply put, Flash was the Web's 80's moment — It influenced generations to
come, eventually ending up in monotone conformity.

Obligatory Gabo Corp Intro:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c)

------
WheelsAtLarge
I can also say that it was responsible for the Web's most irritating era.
After Flash came out every site suddenly had to have an animated homepage. It
was fun once, twice but after awhile it was incredibly irritating. I'm so glad
it's gone.

------
ironfootnz
I'm part of that forgotten industry, since Flash 3. I can tell you that Steve
Job letter hurt a lot the industry but I don't believe destroyed the
creativity. We're more focused on clicks than interactions in the industry
today.

~~~
scarface74
Flash barely ran on Android - Adobe could never get it working correctly on
mobile.

------
robmoorman
Looking back at 10 years AS 2/3 has brought us more than we have ever done
within the Javascript era. The major lacking stabilities, compilers like
TypeScript makes the modern toolset so incredible bad. Lovely to see as most
of old AS programmers still approach these modern Javascript webapps way
better than people started with Javascript without knowing the language behind
it.

"R.i.p. Robotlegs" (lol @ [https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-
library](https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-library))

------
devsatish
Flex was immensely powerful. Back in 2007 I was able to prototype a Flex app
for a financial firm where I could load 20K complex records on UI super fast
for various streaming views/Charts/trading views etc. All possible with AS3,
BlazeDS/LCDS Java back-end; building trading/streaming applications was fast.
Wish Adobe and rest of the guys supported Flash/Flex platform on Desktop at
least. Moving to open-source/apache didnt help either; Apache Flex is pretty
much written off. Sigh !

------
davidu
But finally there are viable, open, replacements that are emerging:
[https://www.2dimensions.com/explore/popular/trending/all](https://www.2dimensions.com/explore/popular/trending/all)

which uses Flare: [https://www.2dimensions.com/about-
flare](https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare)

(and is using an Open Source runtime that runs natively)

------
neop1x
What prevents someone to replicate the Flash experience with modern web tech
like JS, HTML5, CSS or Canvas/WebGL? I mean something with similar editor
functionality, producing result drawable in modern web browsers. EDIT: There
actually is Adobe Animate so what prevents people from being as creative as in
the Flash era?!
[https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

~~~
whatever_dude
My theory is that the web has overall matured. A lot of what Flash did is now
possible and even better/faster/easier, but the reason for those aren't there.
In many ways Flash websites featured novel navigation and interaction
experiences, the likes of people never had seen before, but that's a gimmick
that gets old fast. No insurance company wants or needs an animated 3d intro
in their website; they want and need good SEO, and information that's easy to
reach. If they want to impress with something visual, they'll go to YouTube or
Instagram.

------
oblib
I started playing with FutureSplash when it first came out and loved it. It
was so easy to use and just a lot of fun.

I was pretty heartbroken when Macromedia acquired it because I knew they'd
muck it up. It was hardly anytime at all before they added huge amounts of
complexity, and bugs with it, and jacked the price up to a painful point.

I never did buy anything from MacroMedia and I quit buying Adobe software
around ten years ago. I don't miss them a bit, but I do still miss
FutureSplash.

------
cowmix
Homestar Runner.. 'nuff said.

------
askvictor
Flash was to multimedia what Delphi was to GUI programming. They made it easy
and fun. Then we managed to make everything complicated and brittle.

------
juniorplenty
I vividly remember following yugop.com (Yugo Nakamura’s Mono*crafts) in
college around ~2000, waiting for more experiments to be posted. To me that
was what the web was for, far reaching and experimental design. This article
was a reminder of how absent that kind of design experimentation is now, even
as businesses and applications have gotten more experimental.

------
Zenst
s/Internet's/Web/

The most creative Era of the Internet was the Web.

------
microtherion
Flash may have had its merits, but it was massively overused to build crappy
non-searchable, non-accessible web sites.

------
guggle
I can understand the nostalgia and creativity and all of this. But there are
two sides to this story. I had flash courses where a significant amount of
effort was put into making loading bars... and that pretty much sums up Flash
for me: something abused in a way that it slowed down access to meaningful
content.

------
apignotti
Our take on how to preserve Flash content in the WebAssembly era:
[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-
webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

------
bbanyc
Sturgeon's law applies. 99% of Flash was garbage - animated autoplaying ads
that slowed your browser to a crawl, unnecessary unskippable splash pages for
every restaurant website ever, DRM'd audio and video players...

And then there was utter genius like Homestar Runner, which made it almost
worth it.

------
xellisx
[https://html5zombo.com/](https://html5zombo.com/)

~~~
nevster
The only limit is... yourself!

------
mattkevan
As far as I’m concerned, the whole field of web design peaked in 1999 when
this website was made:

[http://superior-web-solutions.com/](http://superior-web-solutions.com/)

Enable Flash, turn up the sound and whatever you do, do NOT skip the intro.

~~~
ktpsns
Wow, clicking this link I just realized my Firefox/Linux installation still
has the Flash player plugin. So I could view this gem of 90s Flash-only
website.

It shows all the problem the web had back then: It took me four clicks to see
actual text about _what_ the authors are trying to say/sell. Everything before
was crying "wow look at the amazing technology we can build".

For many web developers at that time (including me), this was a reason why we
hated Flash (and intro pages, in general). At some level, the web got more
professional after the Flash times, when content was written in HTML again,
and SEO was a thing. Unfortunately, today, Javascript takes over the role of
Flash and at many sites, without JS there is no text appearing/embedded in
HTML only.

------
sehugg
Anybody remember FantaVision on the Apple ][?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7V5nfmveI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7V5nfmveI)

Vector tweening in 1985. Though not interactive. (and I think the video is
sped up a bit)

------
classified
Yea, the "internet" apparently needs a festering cesspool of bugginess,
resource hogging, and remote code execution vectors to be "creative". A
programming language that lets you take control safely would just be too
stifling.

------
tambourine_man
Not strictly on topic, but I still have clients stuck on Flash. Which tools do
you advise to extract text content from swf?

I tried swftools with not much success. A few commercial apps weren’t much
help either. And Google’s tool (forgot its name) was taken down.

------
jonplackett
I still miss flash.

Why is it so hard to replace with something equally as good that works on
mobile?

------
meerita
Flash died because Macromedia and Adobe wanted to replace the open standards
for their solutions. It just took Jobs to stop them to crumble and dissapear.
They focus on get all instead being a being a complement.

------
kizer
I think this [0] is a large reason why. 0
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation)

------
phs318u
Or Flash’s heyday coincided with the explosion of the web from tech-circles to
widespread public use, and critically, before the big walled gardens (FB etc),
became the hub for most publication on the internet.

~~~
Mirioron
FB and other sites like that themselves were popular places for flash games as
well.

------
obituary_latte
Glad to see Joshua Davis (Praystation) in there. Now known as
[https://joshuadavis.com/](https://joshuadavis.com/) he was way ahead of the
times IMO.

------
brylie
Is there any open source tool/community trying to create a simple HTML5
animation studio similar to Flash? That would really open up doors for
widespread creativity and the adoption of web standards.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I've been asking the same question for years.

Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash
to me.

But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript.

[https://greensock.com/](https://greensock.com/)

~~~
brylie
Same here, been wanting this for a long time. I even started a project called
Hypermedia Canvas, but didn't have the skills or collaborators to get it
started.

I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to
help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create
a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web
standard technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG) directly in a web browser. We would
build on existing efforts and prior art where possible.

~~~
brylie
Also, while Canvas, SVG, etc. imply 2D or 2.5D (excluding the timeline) there
are a couple of WebGL projects that could serve as the basis for a
Flash/Hypercard-esque web standards studio:

[https://github.com/jagenjo/webglstudio.js](https://github.com/jagenjo/webglstudio.js)

[https://github.com/tentone/nunuStudio](https://github.com/tentone/nunuStudio)

~~~
brylie
WebGLStudio.js uses the litegui.js framework to build the UI

[https://github.com/jagenjo/litegui.js](https://github.com/jagenjo/litegui.js)

It looks like litegui.js is capable of producing UI widgets similar to Adobe
Animate, and other desktop animation software.

------
cousin_it
If you feel the urge to animate something right now, try
[http://flipanim.com](http://flipanim.com), it has an awesome non-commercial
feel.

------
jeffml84
Radiskull.

Lord Destros.

I'll await Bloomberg's coverage of when those two get topped.

------
EamonnMR
In so many ways, the dream of computing died with flash.

------
_pmf_
And Microsoft invented AJAX and the dynamic web.

------
scotty79
Just another great piece of software Adobe bought and killed by mixture of
neglect and quality Adobe software engineering.

------
milesward
Ok, so yup, flash rocked. Why can't we capture what was rad and ship it now?
Who was critical to building it then?

------
JordanFarmer
Flash died because Steve Jobs knew that it would cost Apple much money since
the to grossing App Store items have always been games and Flash was what most
of the web based games were programmed in. He couldn't cash in on that market
plus it was a direct competitor. He had the leverage and opportunity to do
so... so he defamed and killed it. Jobs was all about innovation... as long as
it was coming out of Apple.

------
fbn79
Flash was a cancer for the web (poor usability, incomprensible web interfaces,
low importance to the real content, quasi-zero accessibility), no responsive,
closed source insecure and monopolistic platform. I has never been a fan of
Jobs and iPhone but I was very happy when the iPhone success signed the start
of the decline and extinction of Flash tecnology.

------
madiathomas
Flash is one of those technologies that I refused to learn. It was in fashion
when I was still starting my career in Software Development. I didn't like the
experience on websites using flash. I saw Flash and other similar technologies
as cancers to the web. I didn't want to be part of the problem.

------
tanbog
Security breaches used to be so much more aesthetically pleasing.

------
wolco
With the end of flash came the end of the intro splash page.

------
mycall
There is tons of things going on on YouTube these days.

~~~
Latty
Yeah, while the Flash era was definitely great for animation, that was really
more because animation was the only real option for video. Streaming video has
largely replaced that, and cheap cameras mean animation is way costlier to do
now.

It is a shame that the tooling for animation online doesn't appear to be good.
I guess the reality is probably that it's just cheaper and easier to render
your animation to video, or release as a game. Game engines are working harder
to target browsers as a platform, so the latter option will probably come full
circle.

------
sgammon
*And Also Most Of The Early Internet's Bugs

------
robflaherty
Today’s internet is far more creative than the internet of the Flash era.
Creativity has moved on to more consequential things than graphic design.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Flash wasn't "graphic design" it was a unique cross over of design and code in
harmony and at the time most graphic designers I encountered used to say "web
designers are not real designers" they only considered print work important.

Funny how things change.

------
Mugwort
WASM will eventually catch up to the glory days of Flash and far surpass them.
It will be amazing.

------
jaimex2
tbh Adobe killed Flash after it bought it from Macromedia.

------
moisto
Strongbad Email FTW

------
drawkbox
Flash was an amazing creative interactive development platform, it was a ton
of fun. Creatives designers and developers could create some amazing projects
with it because it is very approachable. Flash provided a place for people to
create games, web shows/cartoons, eventually video and with almost no limits
except creativity. The compression and optimization of Flash was unmatched in
the early days. The vector based nature of Flash was fresh and was also an
excellent drawing tool. All this combined attracted a special type of creative
designer/developer and some unique platform progression pushing innovation.

The community from Flash 4 (late 90s) / AS2 to FlashDevelop + AS3 (2007/8) was
very fun to be a part of. AS3 was big and was based off of ES4, it really
kickstarted Javascript development as well into overdrive. Everything big
early on the web was Flash, From Joe Cartoon to Stain Boy to Praystation to
Papervision which inspired three.js to gaming sites like Newgrounds and
Kongregate and more. Flash pushed WebGL in the browser and HTML5/Canvas/video.
Flash made the web interactive and fun. Flash was apps before mobile apps.
While there could be overuse of Flash intros, on the flipside some of the most
amazing game, video and interactive experiences and platforms started with
Flash. Promotional games and game sites in Flash were huge pre-mobile.

Flash revolutionized video and made Youtube possible. Video was a mess before
it. Both Flash and eventually Silverlight pushed innovation in this area
leading to H.264 and HTML5 video capabilities. Flash was during a time where
developers with plugins were pushing trends in the browser, not large corp.

Still to this day it is hard to recreate all the features of Flash with web
standards but Flash was the plugin that pushed us forward the most on the web.
The self-contained platform nature of Flash allowed focus on the
app/game/interactive content and less fighting with technology, it was almost
like an early console. Flash could do web requests/services before AJAX, so
for a time it was the way to do web apps. I'll miss plugin innovation that was
always ahead of standards. I will miss innovation on the web from Flash and
the access that plugins had to push forward.

Flash was very well run when Macromedia ran it. Adobe bought it mainly for the
video platform and to take competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator off the market
in Macromedia Fireworks/Freehand. Adobe let both Director and Flash wither and
did not react to hardware/software rendering soon enough. If Macromedia had
kept in the game it might have gone differently. The period where Silverlight
and Flash were competing was also quite nice, just before the mammoth mobile
arrived in 2007/8 that changed everything. Smartphones revolutionized
apps/interactives and game development, leading to a new handheld gaming/app
platform that attracted most if not all Flash developers.

I got started in interactive development and game development professionally
with Flash in the mid to late 90s. The release of Flash 4 was the beginning of
a decade plus of massive innovation, pushed mostly by Flash. I made my first
professional game in 2000 and did Flash games/interactives for a decade+. Now
I do Unity, Unreal, WebGL/three.js and others for apps/games/web. Flash
allowed me to work at agencies and helped the leap to professional game
development. Unity/Unreal and WebGL became the places that most people in
Flash ended up who were focused on games/interactives.

Adobe should have moved faster with Adobe AIR and HTML5 support as well as
native/hardware acceleration, ultimately the slowness on mobile let it slip,
the browsers blocking plugins pushed Flash from the web. Amazing creative
designers and developers ended up either doing Unity games/apps/interactives
or WebGL/canvas/three.js games/apps/interactives.

OpenFL [1], Haxe[2] and Lime [3] with FlashDevelop [4] is still out there for
Flash development. In terms of empowering people to learn technology and see
immediate results it is still a great platform.

Adobe Animate CC (renamed from Flash) is still great for animation, most large
animated shows use Animate/Flash [5] or ToonBoom. One of the earliest exciting
things about Flash was the ability to create cartoons and shows online, it is
still one of the best tools for that and most popular animated shows use it
that are 2D based. Flash being vector based really helps out for animation and
scaling. For animated shows, there isn't another tool that comes close yet,
Flash is still king in 2D animation.

[1] [https://www.openfl.org/](https://www.openfl.org/)

[2] [https://haxe.org/](https://haxe.org/)

[3] [https://lime.software/](https://lime.software/)

[4] [https://www.flashdevelop.org/](https://www.flashdevelop.org/)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series)

------
epopt
lol. era.

------
samstave
I loved flash games, the only thing I couldn’t stand was the lack of ability
to scale the gaming window on most sites, so you’re playing through,what,
320x320, or something so small...

I also hated the anti-flash tech crowd in Silicon Valley. One person I knew
‘Jason’ would get violently angry about flash...

And he was so vehemently opposed to flash, that regardless of his arguments
against, he just made himself look like an ass.

Think BOFH or typical NetworkNazi against flash... but he couldn’t succinctly
state “why” other than “it’s a piece of shit”. - fuck that guy. (And the other
guy who wanted to fight me when I said that apple was going to go to intel
based procs...)

Flash was GREAT (from a creative) aside from “give me a bigger damn game
screen!”

------
mastrsushi
Flash isn't responsible for anything. It was the technology used to animate
the web. Something else would of came along, and of course did.

------
hoelle
The premise of this article is just weirdly wrong and out of touch. There are
monstrously huge creative spaces on the modern internet, powered by better and
better tools. YouTube. Unity. Scratch. Roblox. Twitch. Itch.io. Blender.
Minecraft. And so on.

It is noteworthy that professional/corporate creators haven't followed the
hobbyists and kids into some of these spaces to represent their brands as much
as they did into the land of Web+Flash. I don't see how that matters when
measuring the "Internet's Most creative Era."

Consumers are more savvy, and brands are have gained some wisdom to not step
on territory that makes them appear inauthentic and creepy. Second Life was an
interesting experiment, but I'm happy that big brands haven't made ads in
Roblox yet.

~~~
omegote
Wat. Those you're mentioning have nothing to do with the creativity that Flash
provided. How are you comparing Flash with Blender?

~~~
hoelle
Did you read the article?

~~~
buboard
I assume we are talking about web technologies.

