Flash was two issues. One was security holes like Swiss cheese and the other was a political debate between Apple (rise of iPhone and lack of Flash support) and Adobe. Those issues forced CSS to be a lot more versatile than it was.
Nonsense that Adobe acquired it and developed it more, or nonsense that they didnât fix all the bugs and were so quick to drop it after Apple didnât support it?
I think thatâs a general statement.
Flash was a technology that couldnât cope with mobile devices. It sucked the battery live, that was the reason why Apple dropped it. Apple wanted the battery live of their products last longer and Adobe couldnât find a solution. So it was a battle between hardware developers and software developers.
This battle will continue. Hardware developers want speed and battery live, software developers want a wow or a click and wow factor. These ideas often have a different implementation in the real world.
@ ballard
Indeed itâs a general statement I gave. I canât look in my kristal boll and forecast the future; even if it would be nice (maybe I could win the lottery this evening) 
I just wasnât sure if you were saying that it was nonsense for Adobe to pick it up, or nonsense for Adobe to drop it the way they did when they did.
I never heard all the reasons, but I did hear something about Flash not being very compatible with multi-touch devices because it relies on a single cursor. As for the processing power and the battery life, that would explain the vector graphic rendering problem I mentioned on this other thread.
Flash was/is all of the following. Each of these things contributed to its demise, but when you add them up, Iâm surprised it lasted as long as it did.
- Much more time-consuming to work with than HTML
- Proprietary in an opensource-based web
- Buggy
- Not able to execute without a browser plugin
- An SEO nightmare
- Difficult to work with
- Was more about eye candy than content
- Was inefficient and slow
- Drained batteries
- Didn't lend itself to database-driven content without major effort
- Didn't play well with content management systems
- A major security problem
- Only partially functional on touch devices
And cured people of any desire to learn animation. Well, at least one person.
Iâm pretty sure that Adobe Animate borrows a lot from Flash.
3/4ths of the problems listed here were solved in some form or another. But that doesnât matter since the owner of Flash has decided to pull the plug on it. One sad part isnât that Flash is getting killed, but that it got killed by a foster parent that never wanted it in the first place. Back in 2000, the future foster parent tried unsuccessfully to kill Flash in its prime with Adobe LiveMotion which they dubbed âthe Flash Killer.â
The other sad part is that the lynch mob against Flash never knew Flash for what it was good for. They heard the bad news from information technologists who were afraid of graphic designers having more control over the web than they had. So rather than work to fix the problems, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Now we get to watch these same people brag about ânew capabilitiesâ from cramming together a hodge podge of technologies developed in silos just to do what Flash was already doing 2 decades ago.
Is the web better off without Flash? Sure it is. Every technology has a shelf life. Flash has had a good quarter of a century run. Itâs taught us a lot. It gave us an appetite for richer media. It gave us high quality fast moving animations and sophisticated interactivity at a time when dialup speeds were the norm. It gave us custom typefaces long before web fonts. We got to play some cool games online. It got YouTube launched. And now its DNA lives on through Adobe Animate. Anyone who didnât understand what Flash was good for probably wonât understand what its replacement is good for either. Anyone who canât distinguish the blessings of the graphic format from the curses of the plugin will throw the baby out with the bath water again. For those who are curious, this is a good place to start:
Sorry, but thatâs just not the case. Almost none of these problems were ever successfully fixed. Iâm puzzled by your passionate defense of this ill-conceived and fatally flawed software.
Some of Flashâs problems werenât fixable because of the inherent nature of it being an oddball, add-on, proprietary plugin technology grafted onto the web instead of being part of it.
Why Adobe never fixed those things that could have been addressed, but werenât, is anybodyâs guess. My personal guess is that, like most of Adobeâs forays into web-related software, they just couldnât get past their print-focused mentality of building bloated proprietary solutions rather than creating tight, focused products that meshed well with web standards instead of competing against them.
I canât lay all the blame on Adobe, though. Flash was already on the wrong path before Adobe acquired it. Macromedia suffered from the same sorts of problems â a company with its roots in print that never did manage to transition to the open, non-proprietary nature of the Internet.
Iâm certainly no expert in this area, but while Animate does do the same sorts of timeline nesting and so forth, itâs really a different platform. As the Flash format was wheezing its final breaths, Adobe took a lunge at its market with Edge Animate, their first shot at Flash-like authoring with output rooted in HTML5/Javascript/CSS3. I dabbled around with it for a few weeks and found it quite a bit easier to figure out than Flash, with a UI structure more like Directorâs and stronger visual correlations between the timeline and stage than I ever found in Flash. Unfortunately, I didnât have any serious animation projects on my plate at the time, so significant traction was never gained. Not long after that, for reasons at which I could only guess, Adobeâs marketing crew quietly opened an artery in the short-lived Edge mini-suite concept and re-badged Animate with a hint of âthe new Flash,â so while I havenât done the same sort of dabbling with the later versions of Animate, Iâm of the impression itâs more an evolution of Edge than Flash.
They didnât need to fix it because they never needed to fix it. Again, they never liked it because it wasnât rooted in their bread-and-butter standard, PostScript. The macromedia buyout was a competitive buyout. They didnât care about most of macromedia technology. They just wanted to kill the competition.
The web is made up of add-ons. The web browser itself was the first add-on that defined the web. The web itself is an add-on to the internet in effect. What you are saying is not part of the web is proprietary software. Just because a software is proprietary, doesnât mean it will always be. If a company decides to turn a software over to the open-source community, itâs just as much a âpart of the webâ as any other browser-based technology.
Some of the problems were fixed by 3rd parties and the open source community when Adobe made the SWF format open. But any add-on can eventually become a security risk, including PDF readers according to this article.
Flash started on a different path. It didnât come from macromedia. I met the developers on multiple occasions before they were bought by Macromedia. It was a company called FutureWave Software. The animated version of SmartSketch that eventually became Flash was called âFuture Splashâ. I almost joined the team as a tech writer before the company was founded in 1993 when it was developing graphic software for AT&Tâs PDA. I still occasionally do contract work with one of their former employees.
As for macromedia, they didnât start in print either. They started as a merger of two electronic media companies. They only tried to move towards print 3 years later when they bought out Altsys Corporation and adopted Freehand as the primary vector graphic development program. Iâve seen companies that were using freehand as their primary page layout program.
Macromedia was ahead of Adobe when it came to electronic display, which is what the web relies on. They could have owned the future. They could have worked with the W3C, made their own browser, and ran circles around Mozilla and Microsoft long before Chrome and Safari had a shot at it. But they probably were too distracted by their competition with Adobe and Quark in the print industry. In the end, they had an answer to every one of Adobeâs products, and had multiple products Adobe never had an answer to. They just didnât have a standard for print like PostScript that made any of their products a must have. But they could have made SmartSketch a standard for 2D graphics as the PostScript of electronic display.
I know this seems like another thread that has gone far off topic. However, this discussion of Flash and Macromedia is somewhat related to this topic too. Back on the topic of InDesign, itâs whole future hinges on print. PostScript is the foundation of print. Iâm not sure how much PostScript has changed in the development of PDF. But EPS was once the primary print file format. Macromedia had an answer to PDF which I think was the main reason Adobe finally decided to buy them out. It wasnât just to kill Flash.
Itâs all about the standards. Some of you may have heard of FlashPaper. It was Macromediaâs backwards approach from what Adobe took in developing standards. PostScript was designed for print, but was eventually translated for electronic display in the PDF. FlashPaper was Flash (SmartSketch format) designed for electronic display, but translated to print. Had that taken hold, PDF would have died before the web browser plugin ever established a foothold.
Itâs still possible for any company to develop a graphic format to take the same approach. If they can develop a graphic format that is superior to Adobeâs for electronic media, itâs just a matter of time before that format can be translated to print. What matters most is whether or not the big printers will adopt that new print standard. If that were to happen, Adobeâs monopoly would have nothing to survive on but itâs reputation and any new features it could manage to patent. They will have screwed themselves by moving to a software rental business model because the newer generation of renters wonât be as loyal as the older dying generation of owners like myself. Itâs already difficult enough to patents software algorithms. And all their newer must-have features could be reverse-engineered.
PrintDriver, you might be the most qualified to tell us how much the big printing industry is dependent on PDF/PostScript, or if they are capable of adapting to an alternative standard.
In summary, if InDesign dies, it will be either because print has died enough to make PDFs obsolete, or because another company has come up with a better alternative to PDFs that work just as well with the big printers and works even better for electronic display. Iâm surprised Quark hasnât tried it yet.
Print is VERY DEPENDENT on PDF files. Most print production is ran through PDFs and PDF editors, such as Pit Stop. Could the industry change file formats? Of course, but it will take time for hardware and software to start excepting a new format and for people to be trained. Thereâs also the point that print is considered more as written in stone than the web.
PDF files themselves have become a golden standard for everything from basic documents up to governmental official files due to their versatility in print, digital, signature, and security features. The initial use of PDF files was actually for lawyers, who had to search through extremely large libraries of books to find passages needed for lawsuits. So I doubt PDFs are going anywhere soon. That leads to if there is always going to be some sort of âdigital paperâ InDesign will have a purpose, but slightly different.
The term âdigital paperâ is somewhat vague and has a history of use as a hardware term. For hardware, it can mean anything from paper that translates pen strokes into digital data like a pressure tablet, to electronic displays that donât emit light, to paper-thin electronic displays. Iâve never heard it used in the context of a software content format.
Regardless of what you call it, the issue is how well the screen content format translates to print. The screen content format needs the flexibility to allow any dynamic and interactive feature that can be imagined for electronic display, while at the same time allowing for the highest resolution and accurate translation of vector graphic rendering for raster image processing (rip) in printers. Steve Jobs knew this better than anyone when he was developing NeXT computer after getting ousted from Apple in the mid 1980s. He was also working on the first tablet computer way back then, which he probably got the idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey 50 years ago.
This all goes back to the ideal of a paperless society. The closest weâve ever got to it was the tablet computer. The next step will be brain-computer interfaces which might finally do it. But until that happens, thereâs many evolutionary steps that will take us there. Xerox should have owned it all because they were the kings of print and were pioneers of electronic display for the first desktop computers that werenât main frame terminals.
If we get any closer to paperless anytime soon, InDesign will probably merge with XD. But a lot could happen before then. Google has been steadily positioning itself as the primary OS of web applications. Theyâve already challenged Microsoft Office domination with google Docs. They have become the Microsoft of cloud computing. It wouldnât be difficult for them to put out a graphic suite that crushes Adobe within a matter of months. Come to think of it, thatâs probably why Adobe moved to cloud based software. It may have been their last desperate act to compete against the free alternatives to come. The only thing I can think of would reverse this race to the cloud would be a return to local for the sake of protecting personal data in the wake of the facebook scandal.
Itâs difficult to imagine that Adobe will drop InDesign. If it happens, lucidpress and vivadesigner are the best alternatives tools all the time. Mostly professional designers prefer Lucidpress but Iâve tried vivadesigner personally. Itâs an effecient and easy to use tool.
Yes, I bought a copy of FutureSplash when it was first released. I naively assumed at the time that it was the WYSIWYG answer to the awkward nature of HTML. A vector version of the web similar to print. It didnât work out that way, though, for reasons that soon became obvious.
I canât remember when I first became aware of Macromedia, but I remember when they acquired Aldus, which had licensed FreeHand from Altsys. If I remember correctly, before Altsys licensed FreeHand to Aldus, they had marketed it as Virtuoso, which I never used. The very first Macintosh program I ever learned, however, was Aldus FreeHand. My familiarity with Altsys was due to my use of Fontographer (now owned by FontLab, which I still use). All this is from a long time ago â my memory about it all is getting a bit fuzzy.