
Two men wrote the original Adobe Flash in 1993 - where are they now? - shandsaker
http://www.attendly.com/two-men-wrote-the-original-adobe-flash-in-1993-where-are-they-now/
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tkiley
The Flash history lesson is cool. However, the idea that Adobe has "admitted
defeat on mobile" is just plain wrong.

In spite of the massive hype differential vs. appcelerator and phonegap,
Adobe's AIR is one of the best ways to build & deploy cross-platform mobile
apps right now. That's flash, that's mobile, and it's a far cry from
"admitting defeat".

Flash on the desktop browser is increasingly limited to a small set of niche
uses. Flash inside a mobile browser was never a good idea, and it's dying. The
decline of those two specific use cases should not be construed as a general
death of the flash platform.

~~~
Dove
_Adobe's AIR is one of the best ways to build & deploy cross-platform mobile
apps right now_

As someone who has built and deployed a cross-platform app on AIR, I must
respectfully disagree.

AIR doesn't give you access to a lot of native features of smartphones. As the
most glaring oversight, I had to do some deep hacking on AIR's launcher to
support in-app billing. Phonegap's extensible plugin approach looks a lot
easier.

And the user experience is different, too. After months of work, my first
review rolled in: one star, and said simply, "AIR crap." And no wonder.
Without so much as the ability to display my own splashscreen beforehand, AIR
simply asks the user, "Hi, would you like to do a 16 MB download to support
this app that you don't even know what it does yet?" I've had my _friends_
give me funny looks at that prompt. "When I'm done looking at this, I can
delete that, right?" one of them asked.

If you do Phonegap -- or heck, even just raw HTML5 -- I'm not sure your users
even need to _know_.

~~~
deeringc
Yikes - sounds very similar to trying to deploy Java desktop apps. Not a
pleasant experience. Why don't they just bake the AIR runtime into the
original download? Sure it would be bigger and you'd end up with duplicate
copies, but almost anything is better than trying to get end users to download
runtimes.

~~~
Dove
Well, 16 MB is a really quite a nasty large size for an app. For reference,
one of the low-end phones I target has 180MB of internal memory. (And I don't
think I can tell an app -- and certainly not an AIR app -- to install itself
on the SD card, though a wizardly user certainly can.) You can get away with
16 MB in a graphics-heavy game, but something that's mostly forms and screens
really ought to come in under a megabyte.

Phonegap gets to bundle the platform because their hello world is only 300k. I
really don't think AIR could get away with that.

But I agree, the user experience might be better if that was an option.

~~~
Haplo
I think bundling makes it a lot smaller than 16MB. Rather something like 8MB
(which is still a lot of course).

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smoody
Jonathan Gay also coded Dark Castle -- an early, awesome Macintosh platform
game.

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petitmiam
It's interesting, but a shame the article doesn't go deeper. They looked up a
guys LinkedIn page and grabbed a paragraph from a 2 year old article about the
other guy.

I'd love to know why Jonathan Gay made the switch to small business in
agriculture.

~~~
veb
I grew up cutting lawns, doing landscaping with my Dad. Now I'm in a 9 - 5
job, I often dream of simply escaping this programming world, growing
something, and applying my IT skills to get the best of both worlds.

It feels like I'm missing the world, by being behind a computer 8 hours a day,
5 days a week. In the end, it all just doesn't seem very fulfilling.

Programming has always been a passion, and a hobby. I always wonder if I've
made the mistake of combining it with a career.

~~~
philbarr
I agree completely. I used to get excited when I saw a new framework or
language out and would always download it, play with it, etc. Now I just think
" _another_ one? I hope I don't have to learn that one day."

Maybe I just need a break to get my enthusiasm back. But it's going to have to
be a lot longer than two weeks. It's a shame, because I worked really hard to
get into the software industry in the first place.

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kayoone
Flash still has a future in gaming. They now have hardware accelerated 3D and
with AIR you can bring your high quality 3D games to the browser, mobile and
the desktop.

That said, the Unity Game Engine can do the same thing and will soon support a
full featured flash export option, so most people wont develop their games in
Flash directly but as a browser gaming deployment option it will be around
until WebGL and HTML5 is mature enough.

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magoon
Won't there always be a dominant plugin? If it's not Flash, isn't there some
other optional-yet-ubiquitous installable that gives certain sites an edge
over the lowest common denominator of browser tech?

~~~
dsirijus
That has sort of delegated to browser choice now.

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conradfr
> Seems a bit of an oversight that he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page –
> any enterprising soul care to rectify this?

Well someone tried and it get deleted because Wikipedia :)

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gkoberger
It's time for Flash to die now, however it had a good run. We've had usable
video on the web for a decade thanks to it -- and even now, HTML5 still hasn't
caught up. Flash did a great job of advancing the web while open standards
caught up.

~~~
citricsquid
Please can you direct me to an open source HTML5 (or not) alternative to Flash
for video that supports advertisements and DRM? Flash can't (and will not) die
until such a thing exists. It isn't time for flash to die until there's
something to replace it.

~~~
ryanpetrich
Open source and DRM are fundamentally incompatible—if neutering the DRM is a
mere recompile away, what good is it to the sorts of organizations that
require DRM?

~~~
cpeterso
DRM'd media is encrypted and cannot be "neutered" if you don't have the
decryption key. [Well-designed] DRM relies on secret keys, not secret source
code.

~~~
sp332
Here's the problem: either you have the decryption keys and can get to the
content, or you don't and can't. If you can watch a movie on your computer,
you already have everything you need to pirate the movie.

~~~
cookiecaper
Which, of course, is true for any cryptography, regardless of the openness of
its implementation. It may be harder to keep the keys obscured in open code,
but then the keys usually don't stay secret that long anyway.

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neovive
Great to see that the original FutureSplash authors are doing well. Flash is a
great example of how far software can diverge from its original audience and
goals.

Regardless of Flash's future on the web, it is still excellent for animation
and Adobe seems to be refocusing back on this market, which is much closer to
Adobe's core competency. My most fond memories of Flash are back in the v3 and
v4 days (you could barely write loops in Actionscript) but it was so much fun
drawing and animating with a tablet and making cartoons. Then MXML and RIA's
came along and we all know what happened next.

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NinjaWarrior
People who say "Flash is dying!" don't know what Flash can actually do. Flash
is active technology. If you think Flash is obsolete and outdated, STOP USING
ALL OF THESE IMMEDIATELY.

\- Most PC browser games HTML5 is not ready to handle rich games for many
practical reasons. You may not have an interest to games, but browser games
have a big market and very lucrative.

\- Quite a lot of iOS/Android apps Using AIR to develop crossplatform
applications. Currently HTML5 solutions such as PhoneGap have a major
performance issue because of the lack of iOS JIT. AIR compiles ActionScript
codes to LLVM and compiled code runs relatively fast (and I think it's a
clever and balanced way to develop applications on low perforamnce
smartphones. C++ is inefficient to develop, and JavaScript is too slow).

\- AAA console games on Xbox360/PS3/PC Using Scaleform to redner 2D user
interfaces. Do you know the title screen, game menues, HUDs and so on are
actually SWF? Game artists author them with Adobe Flash CS!

\- Streaming video sites Hulu never exists without Flash DRM streaming.

\- Many kiosk terminals Using Flash for their UIs. Both Flash runtime and the
authoring tool (Flash CS) are needed. Indeed HTML5 is coming but HTML5 can
only replace runtimes.

Certainly Flash has many problems but it's not so bad technology overall. And
it will used for relative long time (I guess 5-10 years or so). Flash has many
reasons to be used widely.

And you must admit that HTML5 is improving rapidly because it is trying to
overcome plugins like Flash. Flash is a very good stimulation for browser
vendors. Because of this, I can say so-called "plug-in free" is not a good
idea. Copmpetiton is healthy (WebGL developer also is saying so!).

Actually, there is a great demand for Flash animators to develop recent social
games. Currently Japanese major social game company GREE forcuses Unity and
AIR and they are saying HTML5 doesn't meet their needs for now. Of course that
will change in coming 2 or 3 years though (looks like iOS 6 has some important
improvements. Web Audio API, requestAnimationFrame and multitouch bug fix).

By the way, this author Scott Handsaker made this Flash grave picture? Soft of
obsessive. I look down on the guys like this. They don't have respect for
important technologies.

Sorry for my poor English, but I can't stop saying something for the current
situation. Flash is a poor and underestimated technology.

~~~
outworlder
Do not take it literally. Being "dead" doesn't mean there are no users
anymore. It means that it's a walking corpse.

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chinchang
Being a flash game developer from the very first day of my game dev days, it
really feels sad to see how flash is being "overcome" by HTML5 and stuff. :(
But I'll still be a Flash game developer always :D _flash FTW!_

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Zenst
Interesting read. Ironicly had they both gone into the field of selling flash
expliots then they would of made more money form that than they did from
flash. It's a mad World.

Though I can't help but feel they are both grounded people doing what they
like and for that there probably happy people.

