Is Flash dead?
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- microkorg6
My folks brought round some old boxes from my childhood the other day. In there was a load of Creative Review CDRoms - Including the holy grail that was the Tomato/Underworld/AntiRom one!
Need to get a CDdrive hooked up to my mac to see if it works.
Was explaining to a designer in my team the history of creating CDRoms in Director ... then using Flash to build websites and why 'they' killed flash.
- microkorg9
I still use Flash (Animate) I use to create generative art.
Same as I did 20+ years ago.
Not dead to me.- ooh sounds intereting. Got any examples to show off?Projectile
- Everything I've released on FXHash was built in Animate.
https://www.fxhash.x…microkorg - and these...
https://objkt.com/as…
https://objkt.com/as…microkorg - Love your work Microkorg ❤❤❤PhanLo
- dead for commerce... used by hobby artists on the side i guess..neverscared
- PhanLo6
- Flash is to current web development what the original GTI is to a public transit_niko
- everything is a product or service and you must pay somehow, and if not, they will find a way to make you pay.shapesalad
- When Flash died...I had to reinvent myself, it was a huge financial blow to me.utopian
- Adobe Animate is pretty much identical (in terms of what you can do) to Flash and does it all without a plugin. Weird it never transitioned to that.fadein11
- same here utopian
+1000YakuZoku - I thought it was because flash ads were draining iphone batterydrgs
- grafician-1
Yes.
- :-(PhanLo
- I updated my machine recently so can't properly access my old Flash stuff properly as CS6 doesn't work.
Was great for generative stuffPhanLo - Touch Designer seems fun, I reckon I'll learn that properly next year.PhanLo
- Yeah, believe Apple and Adobe worked together on updates since it seemed most designers were using Apple to push them to the pay to play.hydro74
- zaq1
"How I still use Flash in 2022"
- evilpeacock7
This is a pretty nifty example of what can be done in the post-Flash web:
https://y-n10.com- 8-bit sweetprophetone
- !inteliboy
- runs way too slowStoicLevels
- BusterBoy3
Anyone remember Flash Den? Started by a Melbourne based couple. Was a pretty ordinary competitor to some of the other Flash component sites around at the time.
Well it morphed into Envato and the company has been valued at around $6bill...the founders worth around $1.5bill.
Who woulda thunk it!
- Wow, I remember FlashDen. Some of the flash stuff was sub par compared to what you could get elsewhere but they had a lot of stuff.microkorg
- Did NOT know that it became Envato though. Pretty epic!microkorg
- Crazy. I see they never updated this page.
http://www.flashden.… to match the Envato brandingdbloc - Remember this one?
http://www.flashkit.…dbloc - https://i.pinimg.com…spl33nidoru
- oh yeah, Kit and Den,
didnt realize Envato was Den, cool!YakuZoku
- shapesalad2
https://tympanus.net/codrops/202…
^ seems 'flash' websites are back, at least in style if not technically.
- dkoblesky2
yes
- drgs3
https://www.zdnet.com/article/so…
"The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser," reports ZDNet, "for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms."
- PhanLo2
- The only thing that’s dead is .swf. The app itself has been renamed to Adobe Animate long time ago and is widely used for 2d animation.NBQ00
- @NBQ00 this!OBBTKN
- exactly NQBfadein11
- ah man... amit pitaru, mr doob bringing me backkingsteven
- brought a tear to my eye.dbloc
- Uhhh huh huh huh... his last name is Gay huh huh huhjagara
- yuekit0
I remember when AS3 launched Adobe was making a serious push for it to be used for what they called rich applications. In other words Flash would not just be for banner ads and marketing sites, it would be the the underlying technology for portals and other large-scale data-driven web apps. I think they envisioned it taking over a significant portion of the web eventually. Talk about getting ahead of yourself!
Flash came close to being a serious player. At the same time there were always issues with Flash taking on such a role...even if he had ulterior motive Jobs wasn't making things up when he listed its shortcomings.
- monNom4
Twenty some years ago, when I was just first getting into web design I built a portfolio website in flash. Not a portfolio really because I didn't have any work to show, but more a website to show my capabilities. I didn't know javascript, I hardly knew html, heck, I hardly knew flash! But with some dedication and some were-here.com tutorials, I was able to learn enough to build out a concept website featuring animation, interactive movement, multi-channel audio, and an exploratory style of navigation.
That website got me my first real job, where I actually learned how to design and build websites. They told me later that they made their hiring decision on the spot when they saw it, because they hadn't seen anything like it before. That's a pretty powerful tool to have lost, especially for someone just starting out.
I learned actionscript because of flash. Because I knew actionscript, I was able to figure out javascript, and c++ and java, and python, and on and on. I don't know that I would have gotten over that initial hurdle in learning to code were it not for the direct feedback and powerful toolkit within flash. You got so much for such little effort that it made learning to code really approachable.
I recall a hire later in my career, who I was asking about his portfolio website (built in flash). It seemed so sophisticated to me and I imagined that he must have achieved the interactive animation with some very clever code. But it turned out that it was all just timeline animation and gotos. He had just figured out how to achieve his vision using the simple tools in flash, and not knowing how to code didn't stop him.
Flash wasn't all good of course. It sucked trying to integrate with a cms. It was completely opaque to search engines. There was a lack of standardization and accessibility. AS3 was a nightmare for many. And later it became a security liability to even have it installed, but in its prime, flash was a tool that allowed non technical designers the ability to create rich experiences beyond anything available today. And I'm sad for this new generation of designers that website design is now exclusively an act of stacking up blocks of responsive content on a very long page. I can only imagine how impenetrable it must all seem now, and for such little creative benefit.
So this is my love story and lament for flash. It was a great tool. And it's a tragedy we lost it as designers.
- great story. you touch on I think the key thing about flash. It allowed timeline based visual animators to create interactive experiencesdkoblesky
- as you said, you could do it from a timeline or a code perspective....eithe... waydkoblesky
- +1 you summed up my experiences/sentimen... about flash to a teehotroddy
- Direct feedback of AS, and the forgiving syntax of AS1 was perfect for a beginner to learn. I wouldn't know where a young designer could start these days.shapesalad
- My story was similar to you. I'd tried to make a little interactive animation loop, just happened to be in banner like dimensions, it got me my first jobshapesalad
- I then learnt AS1 fully by messing about trying things at work, due to producers giving generous deadlines.shapesalad
- When they hired a junior Dev guy, on his first microsite project he caved and I had to code the thing. Even though I was supposed to be a designer.shapesalad
- Thanks to AS1, after effect expressions, javascript, html, css, php etc.... all easy to learn and understand.shapesalad
- Loved the tool, and done lots of money thanks to it, Flash freelance gigs helped me a lot to raise my family, be sure. Rip!! :(OBBTKN
- dkoblesky0
Since this discussion is about that state of technology from 10-12 years ago, and since the name 'Steve' keeps getting dropped in comments....I thought this little brilliant film would be enjoyable.
"Steve is not happy"
- SteveJobs0
I remember when I'd get in heated debates with other QBN'ers on here back in the day.
Boy those were the days!
Idk, to me it was exciting times for many of us. It was a huge creative outlet that seemingly had no boundaries in terms of what could be achieved. There was an entire community showing off visually interesting interactive pieces that inspired others. And some people actually made a living on the technology. It really felt like 'the future', as much as anything could in those days.
I won't defend it beyond that. It had it's faults. It was hated by many who felt forced to learn it to stay competitive in their jobs, and ultimately, wielded by far too many who didn't really understand it, know how to use it correctly, and more importantly, *when* to use it. Imo, it's those reasons that made its fate inevitable. (Oh, and Steve Jobs <takes a bow>)
- Agree. It was an explosion of creativity. I remember flash sites that were so beautiful and so weird....dkoblesky
- It was exciting for US, but let's not get myopic here. Mobile and social media has genuinely changed the world over the past decade.yuekit
- That is the real revolution, not some artsy portfolio site. Billions of people in the developing world gaining access to knowledge and communication.yuekit
- grafician0
^pretty sure Flash was dead when you needed to learn Actionscript to do anything good with it...
Don't blame Steve, blame fucking Adobe for buying Macromedia to kill the competition and in the process ruin the web.
Blame also the shitty advertising industry, although many earned a lot of bread doing flash banners and stuff...
- still remember getting $250 per flash banner back in the days...grafician
- Nobody ever mentions that for years all those banners didn't allow using AS3 because their tracking was AS2-based.evilpeacock
- not to mention the insane optimisations like "make it under 200kb" while today a simple blog loads 10MB of jsgrafician
- I had to spend days to optimise assets, JPG 60-75% tops if you wanted anything decent looking while still small filesize, while today ppl upload 10MB directlygrafician
- idk but I think Flash was an amazing medium for design and web art, didn't deserved to be squashed by these big corporations...grafician
- People don’t use 10MB of JS in a banner adnb
- lol nb have you opened any website on mobile recentlygrafician
- nb5
To some extent, those of us who are nostalgic for the Flash days are looking at it in a good light. We're looking at the creativity, the fun, the possibilities and all the great work that came out of it.
We're ignoring all the mind-numbing bullshit and browser-crushing ad garbage that came along with it. The endless "this website has a script that is causing your computer..." or whatever. The beachball of death because of an embedded ad on a myspace page.
For me, some days I look at the web and hate what it's become. We replaced our world of bloated Flash (that at least allowed creativity) with bloated front-end frameworks (that were designed specifically to save money by reducing creativity.)
We're lazy, and we're letting fucking software engineers dictate culture.
- (Almost) everything is a generic, scrolling pile of images and text all made for a phone. It's damn boring.formed
- I went to siteinpire and clicked on 10 websites - all the same, all boring and ugly on a computer. Sad.formed
- Jobs did a marvelous job of killing it, but alas, I do own Apple stock and, from a biz perspective, it was brilliant.formed
- I think we are seeing the end. With the exception of massive sites, Wix, etc., will kill the small/med firms.formed
- AI will kill it all. It'll be here in 5 years. Check out what openAI are doing with text to code to site.shapesalad
- I don't miss Flash. Shit animation tools. Was happy to go back to AEdkoblesky
- A lot of creative work came out of that era but you have to ask what was the return on investment on all of those Flash sites? Did anyone visit them more thanyuekit
- once? People use the web to get stuff done, if they want an immersive experience there are other mediums that are better for that.yuekit
- For a time a lot of artists had a wonderful (somewhat) code free interactive playground...easily distributed to lots of people....that does not exist anymoredkoblesky
- Art vs money. A classic debate. Money wins the battles but in the long run, art wins the war.nb
- I never got the dis on Flash, it was awesome! I think the hate was from jelly devs. Long live the flash intro!atomholc
- Html5 can do most of what Flash did except the comic-style vector animations and characters that nobody really wants to see any longer.NBQ00
- In the end the internet has become mostly about simplicity, minimalism, clean navigation to focus on the content. I don’t want goofy intros anymore on websites.NBQ00
- And Joshua Davis can go fuck himself.NBQ00
- Agree with post and that this trancends Flash; HTML/CSS/JS sites can do open + performant creative things, but the market has pushed to templated CMSs.evilpeacock
- https://www.samuelda… petty similar to old flash sites, except you grind your scroll wheel..shapesalad
- I made more money in the early 2000's building Flash based website than in the past few years building HTML/CSS/JS sites. Fuck you Apple.utopian
- I look back on things like Hell.com and what Hi-Res was doing with sites and can see what some of you are saying. There's still tools to get that type of workben_
- done, but there seems to be way fewer risks being taken these days.ben_
- fwiw I don't even remember if hell.com was flash, but that spirit is the thing I'm referring to.ben_
- https://www.albinobl…cherub
- The internet is boring now. The way people like it. Stripping your data in a soul-less uni-style. Folk love it though.
Never underestimate people love of boringPhanLo - Hi-Res was doing some inspiring stuff. With mobile driving everything these days, it's all but killed web design, imho.formed
