You-collective can thank, to a significant degree, my wife Deirdre for the demise of Macromedia^W Adobe Flash -- in the sense that she was working as an engineer at Apple, Inc. in the 2000s on the Apple Safari Web browser team ... The material she provided went straight to CEO Steve Jobs, who relied on it heavily in his April 2010 open letter "Thoughts on Flash"
That's really a very significant piece of history there, Rick! Thanks for sharing.
There remains the problem of making sure existing Flash games and Flash artwork/animations continue to be usable. . . . . . . and why we should be on balance glad it's getting killed.
Yeah, I'm certain most people would not mourn the demise of Flash! I for one is also glad to see the back of it. However, I'm old enough to know that, over the decades, there have been a HUGE amount of contents, like online courses, apps and other learning assets (and of course, some cat videos) built in or published in Flash. My worry is, for some of the very old resource sites that no one is maintaining anymore (or do not have the resources to fix the contents), does this mean some of the contents out there, despite their historical value, may be inaccessible by future generations? I suppose this is one example where the demise of a once-popular proprietary format is leading to the loss of some of humanity's historical records ... Regards, Wen On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 1:06 PM Rick Moen via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Quoting Wen Lin (vwenlin@gmail.com):
Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective.
You-collective can thank, to a significant degree, my wife Deirdre for the demise of Macromedia^W Adobe Flash -- in the sense that she was working as an engineer at Apple, Inc. in the 2000s on the Apple Safari Web browser team, among other things documenting in fine detail the large percentages of alleged safari crashes and bugs that were actually caused by the Adobe Systems Flash plug-in on OSX and iOS. The material she provided went straight to CEO Steve Jobs, who relied on it heavily in his April 2010 open letter "Thoughts on Flash", where Jobs outlined reasons why Flash would be banned on Apple iOS platforms: crashes, short battery life, poor security, poor support for mobile devices with touch support, and other problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/tho...
That was the end of Flash on iOS, and the beginning of the end of the stuff everywhere. H.264/AVC (and to a limited degree Theora and WebM/VP8) and HTML5 did the rest.
There remains the problem of making sure existing Flash games and Flash artwork/animations continue to be usable. Apparently, there are solutions, sometimes (as your link suggests) involving conversion to HTML5, but not always:
https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaways-about-the-pl...
https://kotaku.com/with-flash-games-on-the-chopping-block-one-popular-sit-18...
Meanwhile, the fact that Adobe Systems's Flash/Shockwave interpreter has a kill switch gets added to the existing damning reasons why nobody should have relied on it, and why we should be on balance glad it's getting killed.
There have been open source independent Flash re-implementations -- Lightspark and GNU Gnash among them. All have needed to guess at the spec details, since it is proprietary, and therefore of necessity are partial solutions. Personally, I've never bothered.
-- Cheers, "Like looking both ways before crossing the street, and Rick Moen then getting hit by a submarine." -- Clarke Smith, age 9, rick@linuxmafia.com winner of Washtington Post's contest for best description McQ! (4x80) of the year 2020 in a single word or phrase. _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing list luv-talk@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-talk