I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.
We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.
Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top.
One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.
That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.
But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.
Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.
The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done.
The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!
I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...
Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com.
I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.
I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.
(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)
It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.
I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.
Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.
EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).
The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.
I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.
We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.
Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top.
The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.
It was fun building it.
I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/
One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.
That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.
But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.
Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.
The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
Exciting! But I can't seem to find any where I can take a peek. It looks like a lot of UI is at least there, and the post makes some big promises about what's already done.
The vector icons in the side bar have the distinct cruft of LLM-generated SVGs, so just ideally hoping it isn't a quickly-made UI shell. The big claims about .fla import make me a bit skeptical. Though even so, we're not owed anything and I think it's a cool idea to share!
I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...
They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which has some very big customers.
Don't know much about this space, just curious why build this when we have Rive, Spline, etc?
This doesn't make it clear how people will run the end products.
Is it targeting the web? If not then it's not going to be useful for the same things as Flash was.
Apart from the HTML5 export mentioned by another commenter, there exists Ruffle[1], a Rust + WASM reimplementation of Flash that can play swf files. It's used a lot on archive.org or on some websites like https://homestarrunner.com.
[1] https://ruffle.rs/
It says:
> HTML5/Canvas export — Export to self-contained HTML5 with JavaScript Canvas 2D playback.
Thank you, I missed that. Excellent news!
Call me crazy, but I think the folks at newgrounds will figure out what to do with this new flash.
May the Gods be with him. The nostalgia is very strong. Opening Flash and start a new project was an immense source of joy to me in the 00's.
I wonder how much this would impact the react world
I don't think a modern flash would come after web app UI in the same way it once did. The niche this would fill would be in web games/interactive media I think.
Article title could use capitalizing Flash -- I thought it was about NAND at first.
I thought it was a camera accessory.
I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.
(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)
It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.
I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.
Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.
EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).
The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
The "pay to sell your work" model is basically what Autodesk does to provide a version of Fusion that's free/accessible to the hobby 3d printing market while still protecting their b2b revenue.
I haven't looked in a while, but I believe there's music and audio production tools with similar approaches.