Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create.

Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opportunity and dropped the ball.

Flash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab. But Flash missed a chance to contribute to its defense.

If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, Flash support might have been a required feature. Lots of people would have launched apps as Flash apps instead of iOS- or Android-specific apps, and we might have gotten much more open and cross-platform devices as a consequence.

I kind of blame Flash's lack of follow-through for the App Store hell we have today.

The web that could have been...

Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites.

Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days.

I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things.

I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.

I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy.

Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.

That's not how we do things anymore. Now everything is an appliance and the user is cattle as far as the developer is concerned.

It's a kind of gatekeeping behavior - "I suffered through memorizing a bunch of git commands by rote, and now you have to as well."

As you said in your last paragraph, Flash _raised up_ a generation of engineers by _lowering_ the entry barriers to a minimum. TikTok is just a showcase for attw's.

It's just that when we look back we remember the gems but not the river of crap, but when we look at the present we see the river too.

Don't 90% of Youtube videos get less than a thousand views [0]? There are millions of videos on TikTok, I'd imagine the algorithm results in the same 80-20 ish sort of balance.

Yes, there were bad Flash projects. But just like everything else, we remember the good ones.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/almost-90-of-all-uploaded-...

TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.

Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.

I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.

Arguably, it's the case today to some degree with company meetings/team meetings/etc. typically recorded for people who couldn't attend live. But it's pretty low bandwidth for most purposes to communicate basic facts in the absence of interaction. I for one rarely listen to recordings of meetings I miss and I assume I'm pretty typical. For many purposes I'd much prefer a 1 page email.

It's like all the how-tos on the Internet that don't really have a visual component but are a video anyway.

From experience as the corporation gets larger communicating and communicating-adjacent activities approach 90-95% of the time. The remainder is doing.

I think there's a future where long tail art can be funded on an artisanal level by patrons, and the network will connect consumers to artists that satisfy their interests.

Are you interested in an alternate history Oregon Trail where an alien invasion forces westward migration? Or perhaps a time travelling Jacques Cousteau serial where the protagonist searches for love across the ages?

Somebody will make something weird that satisfies your interests and you will pay them directly. And it'll be better than canned Star Wars spam. It'll be real, and the creator will know you by name.

ML and automation will bring down the cost of content creation dramatically and make it look and feel more compelling than the studio stuff we get today.

...that you know about. :)

Don't go into creating porn with that mindset, it's not a guarantee you'll make significant money. It's still better than creating advertisement though.

0.1 per cent of those on TikTok, or any other sharecropping platform will be able to extend their online persona into something that makes money.

Only a few make a living out of it

And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them

They did open it up...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications

Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats.

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...

If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, they might have been a required feature.

...but the feature bloat that Adobe created with the platform was part of the problem, introducing not only security issues but inefficiency. SWF started out as a small and efficient vector format, and then accrued far more features than were really necessary for its core purpose.

(HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)

Adobe themselves pushed for using open web tech. I was working at Adobe in AS3/Flex during the transition and they were going to great lengths to promote and encourage development of open standards.

Apple realized very early on that you needed hardware acceleration for common computing tasks in order to have laptops that last more than an hour on a single charge. It took Adobe several years after the launch of the iPhone to actually support some amount of hardware accelerated video decode, and as far as I'm aware vector rendering (the core of the platform) was never meaningfully accelerated. As far as I'm aware, pre-iPhone efforts to get onto phones involved a special cut-down Flash runtime that was perpetually out-of-date and was only really popular on early-2000s Japanese handsets. This wasn't at all built for the "computer in your pocket" that Jobs wanted.

As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%.

All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.

But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.

In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development.

And they just abandoned it.

In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.

The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.

And then some genius decided "What if we ran JavaScript on the server?" and Node was born.

Then came the node_modules black hole and the left-pad debacle.

Sometimes I think JavaScript was a mistake.

I had a manager in the late 2000's who was giddy with the possibilities of HTML5 "It can do everything we do with flash!" Whilst that may be technically true, in practice bloated libraries like D3 are required for even the most basic vector manipulation and coding every tiny detail of an animation feels like groping in the dark when there used to be a source of illumination.

I'm not sad about the demise of Flash, but I think there is a gap in the market for a more graphical keyframe based approach, where things can be rapidly prototyped, resulting in clean code.

I tested every application I could find a couple of years ago. Lots of pretty prototyping apps, but generally the end code is somehow garbled or proprietary.

No it isn't. It has degenerated into being only browsable in its entirety by Chrome, with all other "browser vendors" except Apple having given up due to sheer complexity and infeasibility to keep up - Opera, Microsoft, and now Firefox. That's what you get by putting Google (ie WHATWG, consisting of Chrome devs) into the role of defining so-called "web standards", with W3C (a self-declared "standardization body") depending on Google's and other big player's money having done nothing meaningful for years except brittling and foobaring CSS.

https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...

So at least from my perspective this had a big impact

Flash is mainly self-cancelled by Adobe itself. It looks they couldn't get expected revenue from this product. However, I think they are short-sighted at this point.

Then Apple announced they weren't going to support flash and overnight everyone realized flash was dead, and Air and Silverlight were both a dead end.

I was working on a Silverlight product at the time and it got canned soon after too, with Microsoft soon losing enthusiasm for it too.

Some oldies from here:

2007 - Steve Jobs saying Flash is bad for video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496

2008 - John Gruber being prescient about Apple banning flash compiler:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431

2010 - Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (2nd comment thread is pg saying he's against it ideologically):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799

https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/05/ftc_believed_to_b...

It's a GUI-based web animation tool that exports to HTML and MP4, with the ability to write custom JS if you need it. Being able to visually look at timelines and set tweening by dragging a slider is much more my speed, and reminiscent of Flash, which I haven't done anything on in more than 10 years.

Best of all, it's a one-time payment. I considered Adobe Animate, but monthly subscriptions are a total no-no for me.

1080p streaming in real-time is "good enough" and YouTube will not only host it for free, but even share ad revenue. You could deliver vector animation in HTML5, but a pure animation platform will have a hard time against something that can do both animation and camera recordings.

I should also point out that you seem to be remembering the days of Flash 5-8 where development was primarily on the timeline and AS2 classes were fancy new tech. By the time Adobe and Apple were feuding over Flash, most developers were using AS3, which was a lot more like modern JavaScript development. Hell, Adobe was specifically pushing to make AS3 the next version of JavaScript. You could still develop AS3 on the timeline, but it was less powerful than AS1/2 and most developer resources assumed all your code lived in separate files using Adobe's APIs to interact with the display list directly.

Easier said than done, but fun to think about how things could have played out if Flash was given a dedicated hardware platform and follow on generational iterations ie- today maybe we'd have one more option other than iOS or Android. In fact, an allegience with Microsoft probably would have been best and saved both companies' endevours in the dedicated phone/tablet space but now I'm just spitballing.

For basic animation and graphics that's true but not for creating anything interactive. ActionScript was based on ECMAScript / JavaScript and was very similar. If you knew JS you could easily write AS and vice versa.

If you mean it didn't have the complexity of today's JS-based apps that may be true but that's a choice, not a technical limitation.

https://createjs.com/ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Also as a direct substitute, Unity has much inferior font rendering, and no built-in vector graphics capabilities.

If I was doing a 2D animation tool for browser export, I don’t see that unity would offer me much, and would come with a lot of downsides.

Is the source code for Flash available? That would be brilliant.

[1]: https://www.wickeditor.com

Flash should have never been used to create websites. end of story.

I see that as a good thing. Flash was a power hungry, slow and obnoxious technology. Not to mention it was a security nightmare.

I'm glad the barrier to entry to make pointless animations is atleast slightly higher

Every now and then some poor soul realizes what a mess they're in and writes a blog about the miserable state of web development, but the wider community cannot face the truth, because it would mean that the last 20 years of "progress" have been wasted.

And indeed, after two decades of support from every player in the industry, shoving countless APIs in the pseudo web standards controlled by Google, modern web applications work almost as well as a Flash app - except with thousands of tiny packages and tools cobbled together into one big ball of nonsense.

I’m not happy it’s dead, I just don’t think it’s a good choice these days. As an artistic tool it’s perfectly valid, but I wouldn’t use it to design my next project.