
Macromedia Flash  – A New  Hope for Web Applications (2002) [pdf] - MrBra
http://www.uie.com/publications/whitepapers/FlashApplications.pdf
======
ThePhysicist
I still remember playing with one of the first versions of Macromedia Flash as
an intern at an IT company during high school. The "hot thing" back then that
people mostly used Flash for was to realize cool "intro" sequences for their
website. As an example, here's the intro that I made for my company (courtesy
of the Wayback machine):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030605160730/http://kimweb.de/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030605160730/http://kimweb.de/flashframe.htm)

Everything in Flash was pretty limited back then, for example Actionscript
didn't even have sine and cosine functions! I remember that for another
project of mine I ended up re-implementing these functions using a Taylor
series approximation, which was pretty wild but worked.

Today it seems that Flash gets a lot of hate and ridicule by the IT community,
but honestly back in 2001 it was a huge deal and allowed you to do thing on
the Web that were completely impossible using HTML/CSS (Java applets were an
alternative but much clunkier and harder to create). One example of this was a
small thing that I built which would allow you to specify some text as a
parameter and then would let this text "fly in" using user-defined animation
sequences. For example, you could have the letters "fly in" from above or
perform some wave-like dance. Creating these animations could be done by
defining a sub-tween (I might misremember the name for this) for each letter,
which would take the letter value and position and perform the rendering,
which was quite flexible and allowed for object-oriented use of animation
sequences. So, even back then Flash was a pretty decent and versatile tool and
probably had a large influence on later technologies like HTML5.

~~~
kaoD
To be fair those things you couldn't do in the web, like intros and text fly-
ins, were really obnoxious. That's what got Flash a lot of hate (and rightly
so).

What made Flash great were games, video, real-time communication (e.g. web
chats) and cartoons. Flash was great as its own medium, even if embedded in
the web (not _replacing_ it).

Shoehorning Flash into the web medium was a mistake, just as obnoxious as now
is hijacking the scroll or adding thousands of fade-ins in HTML5 (which
fortunately as a fad seems to be dying).

~~~
fenomas
People forget though, web designers didn't start using Flash to replace the
web for kicks - HTML sucked pretty hard as a visual medium in those days. Just
getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious
challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the
same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of
interactivity.

Obviously HTML has always been the best medium for marked-up text, but for
pages whose value came from interactivity or design, Flash was simply a better
medium for a long time - its entire heyday plus 1-2 years beyond, IMO.

~~~
arbitrage
> Just getting a page to lay out similarly across NS/IE/mac/PC was a serious
> challenge, let alone getting the text to show up at the same size or in the
> same font, or scripts to run the same way, or having any kind of
> interactivity.

Hardly the fault of HTML, a layout markup language. Put the blame where it's
due, on a non-cooperative, or rather openly combative, market place.

~~~
fenomas
> Put the blame..

I was just trying to deflect the blame from Flash. ;)

But yeah, HTML's woes were due to browsers not cooperating, but then until
their lunch was getting eaten I don't suppose they had any incentive to. To
me, the Story of the Open Web is one that validates both standardization and
proprietary innovation, in that sense.

------
michaelolenick
I was in the middle of this way back when. Software I created (well, I
prototyped and hired somebody else to create), won the very first Macromedia
Rich Internet Application. It created name badges from a Flash app.

For those who don't remember -- and judging by the comments I think that'd be
many -- there was no AJAX back then, and when I first saw AJAX I remember
thinking that's the end of Flash.

It wasn't a love of Flash technology but a love of stateless UI that inspired
our line of thinking. Stateless UI was possible with Java, and I first wrote
the program that went on to win the award in Java, but Java looked even
clunkier than Flash and ran worse. Flash looked nice, ran well, and was easy
to install and maintain (back then it was already installed and enabled in all
browsers).

Now I have lots of grey in my beard and have been working mainly on mobile
tech lately. But those days -- not long before this PDF came out -- were great
fun. We knew the web had to evolve and saw this type of user experience, if
not this specific implementation, as the future. Today, that's AJAX and mobile
apps. But Flash was a necessary stepping stone.

------
superasn
A lot of people hate anything Flash but Adobe Flex was a really great tool to
create web apps at one time (before the spark components). It introduced a lot
of cool things for making web apps like two way data-bindings, asynchronous
requests, event listeners at core of everything, MXML components with
repeaters, etc - many of these things that AngularJS does now with Javascript.

If their browser plugin wasn't so buggy and non-standard it could have been a
really good alternative.

------
leejoramo
If Flash had been open source early on it might have succeeded and become a
core web technology. Microsoft, Apple and Google would have been in charge
making the runtime secure and high performing.

Macromedia/Adobe would have continued to be in the position of providing the
leading development tools.

The web would be very different. I actually think that we are lucky this did
not happen. I find our current web technologies to be a much better solution
over all.

~~~
factotvm
> I find our current web technologies to be a much better solution over all.

Really? It what sense? I just now see TypeScript coming close to parity with
what ActionScript provided several years ago--and the tooling is nowhere near
there (though I have not used Visual Studio). I feel like our current web
technologies are more the VHS to Flash's Betamax.

------
planetjones
I think the article completely missed the trend towards mobile devices. Also
it fails to take into account the propietary nature of Flash and the fact it's
look and feel doesn't fit the 'web experience' (users like to copy and paste
text, etc. and don't want the UX to be different on each site). Oh dear. Looks
like UIE are still in business though - you can't predict every trend.

I remember an investment bank in London building their whole trading platform
in Adobe Flex. They really thought this was the future and spent literally
millions on it. I am not sure what's happening now, but good luck resourcing
and maintaining that project. I imagine someone has just asked for a whole lot
of cash to rewrite in HTML5, because you know standards, multi-device
compatibility, etc. are important!

~~~
jaimex2
What are you on about, HTML5? This was written in 2002, when a Nokia 3210 was
bleeding edge, AJAX wasn't a thing and everything was written in PHP and JAVA
Applets.

~~~
planetjones
The second paragraph wasn't dated - that was about 2009 when my friend was
trying to encourage me to apply to join this fledgling Flex team - so even
after 2002 people were still following the Flash / Flex mantra.

~~~
bshimmin
I'd say that in 2008-2009, Flex, for that sort of application, wasn't
necessarily a bad bet. Most people date Flash's demise to the start of the
mainstream smartphone movement, but the first iPhone was only released in
mid-2007 - obviously it had no Flash support, but it notably didn't have a lot
of other things too (like copy and paste!), so it wasn't immediately obvious
that it would never get Flash; and the Android devices that followed the
iPhone _did_ support Flash (it was even touted as a differentiator from iOS
devices), albeit poorly.

Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" piece was published in 2010 and that probably
did hammer a few nails in the Flash coffin, at least in terms of public
awareness. I think if you were betting big - millions of pounds big - in
mid-2010 on Flash, you could be accused of making a silly mistake. Before
that, I think it's more forgivable.

Flex was always bunk, if you ask me, but it did some of the same things that
people like about Angular, with the addition of a bunch of (fairly poor) UI
components. In theory you could build business-oriented / data-driven
applications with it quite easily, so finance was very much its intended
audience.

~~~
robmcm
There is a tendency to group all flash content together, if you break it out
into say: Websites (typically micro sights) Banner adverts Creative websites
Games Video players Audio players Applications Desktop AIR applications Mobile
AIR applications Web site components

Each use case has a date when they became a bad bet, some never were. Even
today web components (shims/polly fills) are written in flash and are
acceptable.

------
thetannedman
When I first started tinkering with algorithmic art, Java applets and Director
was fast and spiffy but not many people installed the runtime and Shockwave.
DHTML was a headache due to browser compatibility. C/C++ with OpenGL were
blazing fast but had no web presence (and was really really hard to learn at
the time). Flash had the least amount of barriers to get me going and
publishing.

I rode the flash train for a while and have since moved on. The awesome thing
about flash was knowing that the stuff I learned is completely applicable to
any programming language I chose to focus on.

------
byron_fast
Sigh. Look how sideways technology moves.

------
werber
I got a little distracted and transported back to early 2000's and felt a
strong urge to switch to this magic technology. So glad it happened, so glad
it's gone.

------
sirwitti
I totally like the fact that this is published as Pdf :)

------
thinkindie
UIE website dates back to 2002 too

------
milkers
Hope is like a bread for the poor.

~~~
buraksarica
off-topic, There is a word-by-word translation of this phrase in Turkish.

