Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! 166
First time accepted submitter lars_doucet writes "I am a 15-year Flash veteran and nobody hates to say this more than me: Flash is dying, and the killer is Adobe. Where to now? HTML5 doesn't help me with native targets, and Unity is proprietary just like Flash was — 'don't worry, we'll be around forever! And so sorry about that neglected bug report — we're busy.' I'm putting my bets on OpenFL, a Haxe-based, fully open-source implementation of the Flash API that might just please both Flash refugees and longtime Flash haters alike. My article discusses my experiences with it and gives a brief overview for newcomers. In short: I can keep making Flash games if I want, but with the same codebase I can also natively target Win/Mac/Linux desktops, mobile, and more, without having to mess with Adobe AIR or other virtual machines."
Open Standards, Not stupid plugins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash was one of the few holdouts of the Plugins era of the Netscape vs. IE Browser War. It came out because There wasn't a standard between the two for vector based graphics.
Flash worked in different browsers and across many different OS's so it got well accepted. Then Adobe for the most part didn't let go easily and created more and more stuff to it, to make it rather full featured, killing off Active X and Java Applets for standard web pages.
That said. HTML 5 is not perfect, however it does give us a lot of features that we think we should use flash for, and we really should follow the standards that comes part of the browser then rely on plugins.
You Said "Flash" (Score:0, Interesting)
Therefore every asshole on this site will shout you down no matter what you actually wrote in the article. They don't even know why they hate Flash. They just join in because it's the latest "I are programmer" meme. (The last programmer to attempt to post anything useful on this site left ten years ago)
Never mind that Flash has been responsible for tens of billions of dollars in economic value.
Never mind that from 1993 to date, Flash is the only technology that has provided attractive animation and video on the web.
Never mind that the loudest and most obnoxious anti-Flash assholes have had TWENTY ONE YEARS to come up with a viable alternative, and so far they've produced nothing but bullshit-coated bullshit.
Never mind that in 2014, we STILL don't have decent HTML5 authoring tools. Oh sure, it's built in to tools that output everything else + HTML5, but HTML5 itself? Nope. Nothing even remotely close to Flash CS6.
Never mind that in 2014 HTML5 still doesn't have decent synchronized sound support.
Never mind that the way problems like this used to get solved would be that web developers (Andressen, Joy, Davis, Clark, Yang) would get together and solve them. Now people just bitch, wipe their ass on the tablecloth, bitch some more and go back to their bong.
Awww, you can't mod it down. Guess you'll have to grow up and face the facts. Lazy, illiterate, talentless, worthless ASSHOLES are all that's left in this hate-machine cult. Go back to your fucking LoL Twitch feeds.
Re:Native Targets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since you're a big HaxeFlixel guy, can you point me in the right direction to actually getting a working dev environment going on Windows? I tried a couple of times, but gave up because even the example projects would throw incomprehensible error messages when I test compiled. Only information I've been able to find on the errors was other people having the same problem, but no actual solutions.
Re:Native Targets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash is no more native than HTML5. At this point it doesn't make sense to "place bets" on Flash at all, unless like the article author you've spent many years on Flash and are not interested in change.
Flash can create a 'native' PC or OS X app (OK, it consists of a standalone Flash player bundled with your flash App, but the practical upshot is the same unless some strange permutation of misconceptions has led you to expect 'bare metal' efficiency from something like Flash).
Flash was actually a great system if you wanted something to write relatively small, animated, resolution-independent applets that can be embedded on web pages and downloaded as pseudo-native PC/Mac apps (Java was obviously better at coping with substantial projects - but its been getting a bigger and bigger pain for non-techie end users to install). Of course, it got abused as a way to add gratuitous animation to websites, and its only merit as a video player was that it was less annoying than RealPlayer...
The real killer, though, is that it doesn't run on tablets... however, when it was briefly available on Android I tried some existing Flash stuff and it quickly turned out that Jobs was right - apart from the bloat and security nightmare, lots of existing Flash stuff just broke on a touch screen.
Re:More than vector graphics (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I remember how my 233MHz computer could play full-screen video from a web page, with no tearing and my browser never crashing... Something my 2.4GHz P4 couldn't manage using Flash.