I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.

Is there a friendlier format that I can export from illustrator that imports better into Affinity?

I haven’t had enough time to play with it and my days of working with the Adobe pdf spec are a little in the rear view.

Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.

it will hurt to go cold turkey, but the industry will thank you.

A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12. IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer to the ground rather than use that again.

That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?

Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.

It sounds like a joke, it isn't.

But the overall player was a massive codebase - buildable for literally hundreds of platforms - that was developed over a decade with tons of external tech and external partners involved. Open-sourcing something like that (legally) isn't something you can just pay money to do.

I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems.

This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1].

[0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit.

[1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.

And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood.

In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal.

[0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.

To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...

Oh and yes, the opening bars of "Doctor" are permanently burned into my head now.

[0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/7858

The Flash renderer was also state-of-the-art for the moment, with really awesome anti-aliasing and blending. All while using just fixed-point integer arithmetic.

you don't just buy someone's entire workflow and then not fix any of it. not at least, if you intend for people to believe you when you say you're the future.

I know that Adobe shared the Flash Player source code with Apple, but Apple assigned an intern to try porting it to iPhone. The Adobe developer working with Apple told me the ported code that Apple sent back to Adobe didn’t even compile, so we don’t know if they even tested it on a real iPhone. We jokingly called the iPhone port “Project Boomerang” because the code that came back was basically the same that we sent them. :)

The Flash Player’s source code was very ugly, but you have to remember that its roots trace back before Macromedia to SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for the PenPoint OS in the early 1990s. The core rendering and scripting code had since been ported and squeezed into new platforms and applications. And then the dot com boom happened. The development team grew to about a hundred developers and no one person understood the entire code base. Code was copy/pasted freely for fear of introducing regressions that would break existing Flash content. Multiple rewrites were attempted but failed due to backwards compatibility and product management’s pressure for new features.

Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company was being press-ganged into giving Steve Jobs an iPhone demo that wouldn't crash on stage.

Everything you said about Adobe management also tracks. I'm reminded about Jobs' quote about Xerox being filled with copier-heads[1].

Also...

>second system effect

Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?

[0] Said thread also revealed that Jobs felt snubbed from not being able to have Adobe's CEO on speed dial

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer.

A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). Before AVM2, a team was evaluating whether the .NET JIT (or a cleanroom implementation developed in-house) was technically and legally an option.

Much later, long after I had left, I heard from friends still at Adobe that somehow JVM developers from Oracle had joined the Flash team in the mid-2010s and were eager to attempt yet another VM, based on their JVM experience. But by this time, Adobe no longer wanted to invest in modernizing the Flash platform when it could simply milk the cash cow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

I know Adobe will never open source the final Flash Player code (because of third-party code licenses and there’s nothing for Adobe to gain), but I wish they had at least open sourced their internal test suite so open source players could improve their Flash compatibility.

No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were.

The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.

Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.

Collecting data from a form sent via POST to be processed server side?

Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around.

But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of it competing w/ AEM.

They’re missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack and almost dead.

I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code based was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.

According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC).

Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you forget in ten years..

"HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included in AIR."

When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI component library that you could use to create advanced and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).

When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you can't do instant searches and filtering on.

ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were actually used to improve performance.

Adobe's inability (or unwillingness?) to come up with a competitive product killed Flash. Jobs' unwillingness to hitch his wagon to Flash was a symptom not a cause.

Once flash was used for ads, that didn't help either. It wasn't just "flash was slow", it was "webpages with a dozen yelling, flashing, dancing, cpu sucking flash ads" slow.

I wouldn't want that crap on my new shiny phone either.

Careful when looking up Flex, it might trigger the past, and then seeing echoes of it present in today's techs :)

It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).

Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.

It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.

The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.

Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe build a way for people to build iOS apps from Flash. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times. Then riiight before the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and transpilation from other languages was disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction.

(Working from memory here, details are approximate.)

[1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license...

The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application.

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_develop...

(In practice of course it didn't matter what the terms precisely meant, because Apple never enforced them apart from removing flash-based apps.)

Edit: I forgot, at the time I was between jobs (2008) and had used a chunk of my money to buy an iPhone to learn iOS Dev on, they wasted a load of my time, and money.

Neither did third party developed apps, only what apple put on the smart phone like a featurephone.

Flash sucked ass on every single platform aside from Windows. Android, MacOS, Linux. Adobe sucked at porting.

Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.

At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.

And then Google amp came along.

At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.

At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.

Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.

If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.

Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.