Before it was Flash, it was a vector drawing tool called FutureSplash.. in the early 90s i worked at fractal design corp (creators of what's now corel painter) and the Futuresplash folks were interested in selling it to us.. that was before it had an animation timeline or scripting features. I was kind of an in-house artist and the founders really wanted my opinion on whether or not it would be appealing to our customers, like how i as an artist felt about it.
My feedback was that was kind of cumbersome compared to our other tools, and didn't see the potential appeal to our user base and recommended against it, and we declined the offer.
Ultimately I'm glad Macromedia did acquire it because adding scripting and animation appealed to the already diminishing Director/Shockwave platform.
I do wonder how things might have been different had we decided otherwise and acquired Futuresplash-- there'd have been no Flash as we know it!
It's amazing how little decisions we make in the past can project out over time and have larger repercussions.
cronocr · 1m ago
Interesting, I always supposed it was related to Fantavision from the Apple II days:
In the article (which is quite good to read), they wrote "The iPhone is often cited as the reason for why Flash started to decline, since it led to significant user demand to have Flash-free sites. However, I think Flash’s fate was truly sealed once Google made an HTML advertisement designer app."
I worked in the industry before flash, during flash, after flash, and in my little corner of the world, the iphone not supporting flash was the biggest factor in the decline of flash. Every executive and bigwig could not drop their blackberries fast enough, and grab the newest status symbol iphone. Once management all had iphones, then flash just would not do, and the directive came down to make the website "good" for iphones, which usually entailed adding excessive white space, large lettering, and big buttons.
flomo · 1h ago
Yep, I worked in advertising at the time. I was constantly explaining to the creatives "no, we can't have a flash main menu because of SEO" "no, we shouldn't make the website as 25MB flash file" "see, here's the problem with flash..." and so on. Then Steve Jobs said so, and that type listened to Jobs, not techies. And Flash was pretty much dead after that point. (Often replaced by some jquery slideshow plugin, and everything was fine.)
teleforce · 1h ago
Fun facts, in the very early days of YouTube it used Flash Player to display compressed video content on the web [1].
Just wondering what's the today's equivalent of Flash like technology open or proprietary?
^Search 177,508 games and 32,156 animations, all playable online without a plugin
bdbenton5255 · 5h ago
I loved tinkering with Flash as a kid in the early 2000s. I taught myself programming through ActionScript and wrote a little physics engine that modeled 2D physics using loops, conditionals, basic trig, and increments.
It's definitely outdated at this point by HTML5 and WebGL, but I will always fondly remember all those little flash games and experimenting with ActionScript, learning programming fundamentals.
I would highly recommend tinkering with the HTML5 Canvas element and WebGL if you were a fan of Flash. The web browser has evolved into an OS of sorts as personal computers have evolved along with the introduction of mobile devices.
Web browsers now handle email clients, word processors, photo editors, even video and code editors. Check out this neat fluid simulator experiment in WebGL, you can build even more advanced applications of this nature with this technology.
Flash made it ridiculously easy to animate and export to the web. One tool and you could make an animated video, or an interactive app, or a game. There were fantastic competitive showcases of work, which made kids excited to learn and do it. It was low threshold multimedia and it on-boarded a lot of people into tech, including me. I worked on the Flash apps behind CNN and other Turner properties. The flipper tickers during the Obama election on CNN and Time inc, the Times Square billboard, all flash. My first visit to Silicon Valley was by invitation from Apple. Steve Jobs brought the developers from all major media sites (NY Times, Turner, ESPN, etc) to show us how to run non-flash video on safari. We had to redesign the video players on CNN and a dozen other big sites so jobs could demo the upcoming unveil of the iPad and have enough content to show without “ipad doesn’t support flash” boxes. That was beginning of the end.
The reality was that since Flash wasn’t indexable, search engines couldn’t index it but also you could pre-screen the content either. There could be really bad stuff hiding into easy to release apps. Plus if people could make cross-platform games on flash, why would they make them for app stores.
It was also too energy intensive and would have made battery life much smaller on iDevices.
Caitlynmeeks · 3h ago
Tumult Hype is a very slick, modern equivalent to Flash and it exports HTML5! It's definitely the easiest way to develop Flash-like html5 apps if you miss the Flash workflow.
I still remember Flash 5 launch screen and its glory back in the day. Lots of stunning creations and lots of jobs.
btw Adobe Flex anyone?
pan69 · 1h ago
From about 2000 util about 2010 I was a die-hard ActionScript developer. I used to work for a number of digital advertising studios building gigantic full browser Flash monstrosities for our clients. Never really dabbled in Flex but it was on my periphery. I do remember that it was part of the RIA [1] push of the mid-2000's. Interesting times.
I was just today looking to see who owns Flex and Air. There is Apache Flex but it does not look like it is widely used. And it looks like Air was sold to Harman an audio electronics subsidiary of Samsung.
It would be cool if there was a browser that had a full set of components that would allow fast construction of internal dashboards, CRUD apps, etc. via new html tags. if not that then maybe a custom browser with flex enabled for internal use only. The security and performance would have to be improved but seems like a really fast way to prototype and build internal only sites.
Multicomp · 5h ago
I enjoyed this article. But Godot, SDL, and TIC-80 still have a much higher learning curve vs. tweening animations and throwing in some Actionscript to make a stick figure fighter, which gives you a self-contained artifact .swf you can pass around.
It's amazing how much creativity that used to go to Newgrounds and Flash games is now funneled into TikTok shorts.
Kids these days! But Super Mario Bros 63 is still fun.
ElCapitanMarkla · 4h ago
It’s a shame nothing has really come along with the same functionality that the Flash editor had. The vector based graphics, animation and scripting all in one. And easily exportable to the web. Yeah you have Godot / unity etc etc but nothing as easy as flash was to pick up
bdcravens · 4h ago
Adobe Edge was supposed to be the successor to Flash, to target the web and other platforms, but ultimately never caught on and was discontinued in a few years.
Not familiar at all but the article says Ruffle can still run flash games now. Is the issue just that flash editors aren’t great?
cft · 4h ago
It's not impossible that what's now called HTML5 would have been Flash, had Adobe not acquired Macromedia. Steve Jobs had long-running personal bad blood with Adobe.
charcircuit · 5h ago
Just because it's less popular it doesn't mean it's dead. You can still create flash animations, you can still share them, and there are still flash game websites that exist.
sdsd · 3h ago
Yep, I sometimes go on 4chan's /f/ board to see what people are creating. They even have a little on-site emulator so you don't need to have Flash installed on your system.
My feedback was that was kind of cumbersome compared to our other tools, and didn't see the potential appeal to our user base and recommended against it, and we declined the offer.
Ultimately I'm glad Macromedia did acquire it because adding scripting and animation appealed to the already diminishing Director/Shockwave platform.
I do wonder how things might have been different had we decided otherwise and acquired Futuresplash-- there'd have been no Flash as we know it!
It's amazing how little decisions we make in the past can project out over time and have larger repercussions.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k4ysfd8r0fA
I worked in the industry before flash, during flash, after flash, and in my little corner of the world, the iphone not supporting flash was the biggest factor in the decline of flash. Every executive and bigwig could not drop their blackberries fast enough, and grab the newest status symbol iphone. Once management all had iphones, then flash just would not do, and the directive came down to make the website "good" for iphones, which usually entailed adding excessive white space, large lettering, and big buttons.
Just wondering what's the today's equivalent of Flash like technology open or proprietary?
[1] Adobe Flash Player:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player
(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649245)
I've chatted with a colleague who used to work at Macromedia, and she has some great stories.
Also any history of Flash which doesn't mention shockwave.com (or Princess[1]) is incomplete.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_(web_series)
^Search 177,508 games and 32,156 animations, all playable online without a plugin
It's definitely outdated at this point by HTML5 and WebGL, but I will always fondly remember all those little flash games and experimenting with ActionScript, learning programming fundamentals.
I would highly recommend tinkering with the HTML5 Canvas element and WebGL if you were a fan of Flash. The web browser has evolved into an OS of sorts as personal computers have evolved along with the introduction of mobile devices.
Web browsers now handle email clients, word processors, photo editors, even video and code editors. Check out this neat fluid simulator experiment in WebGL, you can build even more advanced applications of this nature with this technology.
https://paveldogreat.github.io/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation/
The reality was that since Flash wasn’t indexable, search engines couldn’t index it but also you could pre-screen the content either. There could be really bad stuff hiding into easy to release apps. Plus if people could make cross-platform games on flash, why would they make them for app stores.
It was also too energy intensive and would have made battery life much smaller on iDevices.
https://tumult.com/hype/
btw Adobe Flex anyone?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Application
It would be cool if there was a browser that had a full set of components that would allow fast construction of internal dashboards, CRUD apps, etc. via new html tags. if not that then maybe a custom browser with flex enabled for internal use only. The security and performance would have to be improved but seems like a really fast way to prototype and build internal only sites.
It's amazing how much creativity that used to go to Newgrounds and Flash games is now funneled into TikTok shorts.
Kids these days! But Super Mario Bros 63 is still fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge_Animate