![]() Running a few SWF files is quite easy, but implementing the whole Flash API is a large task hard to achieve alone. Unfortunately I was only working on this project only during my free time while I was studying: I did not have much time to dedicate to it. This happened around 2017-2018, before Ruffle was announced. I wrote a small renderer and VM, and was able to render a few simple files. At this point I was able to process my SWF files, and started to dream of going further and provide a full emulator. This prompted me to write my own parsers and emitters for SWF and AVM1 (the actionscript bytecode used by Flash < 9). I hoped to import Shumway's parser and reuse it for my own project but it turned out that Shumway wasn't modular enough. I wanted to write a Node.js program to parse and merge SWF files. ![]() It was started following the discontinuation of Mozilla's Shumway emulator. I maintain Open-Flash, another project around maintaining Flash. 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. Hell, Adobe was specifically pushing to make AS3 the next version of JavaScript. By the time Adobe and Apple were feuding over Flash, most developers were using AS3, which was a lot more like modern JavaScript development. 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. The FTC threatened to sue and Apple backed down a few months later. Apple was seriously considering banning all third-party development tools to stop Adobe from getting Flash games on iOS, and "Thoughts on Flash" was written and published to justify that ban. If you remember Steve Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash" - that wasn't a mea culpa for not supporting browser plugins. Adobe had app exporter functionality for Flash back in 2010. There are actually a large number of apps that did launch on Flash and were on iOS and Android. This wasn't at all built for the "computer in your pocket" that Jobs wanted. 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far as I'm aware, pre-iPhone efforts to get onto phones involved a special cut-down Flash runtime that was perpetually out-of-date and was only really popular on early-2000s Japanese handsets. ![]() 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. ![]() This wasn't at all exclusive to Flash, of course, but Adobe was uniquely unsuited to realize this problem.Īpple 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. Vector rendering & compositing? Software. ![]() Ergo, everything in Flash Player is done in software. Go forward a few years and hardware accelerators are suddenly crucial to energy efficiency. Go back just a few years and even basic multimedia tasks like playing music or decoding a JPEG require some amount of accelerator support. I kind of blame Flash's lack of follow-through for the App Store hell we have today.įlash grew up in a very weird time where nobody cared about hardware acceleration at all. 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. If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, Flash support might have been a required feature. But Flash missed a chance to contribute to its defense. I'm not deriding the web - it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab. They didn't see the incredible opportunity and dropped the ball.įlash was so much simpler than the Javascript "standards" layer cake we have today. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create.įlash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. ![]()
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