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A drawing of a person laying on the ground, seen from the side. There is text on the image, “We still talk about you”. Deep in the ground, there is the Adobe Flash logo.
A drawing of a person laying on the ground, seen from the side. There is text on the image, “We still talk about you”. Deep in the ground, there is the Adobe Flash logo.
In it’s heyday nerds like us fucking hated it because it was a proprietary plugin that broke sites on an otherwise open web. We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives. In Winter 08/09 I was interning on the first season of Ugly Americans and they were still animating in an old version of Flash MX, even though like CS6 was out by that point. Today though there are creative apps where you can still do Flash-style vector animation, and the modern internet has no problem serving up rendered videos of the final output without the need for a plugin.
My problem with it’s death was everything lost because of it.
And simple games, too. But yes, I agree with you; what people remember fondly isn’t Flash itself, it’s what it enabled.
i think you’re right. the technology itself was arguably garbage, i’ve heard from many people i have no reason to distruss that it was a security nightmare, and i don’t especially miss going on any random website and seeing “you need to install the adobe flash player extension!”
still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.
I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it’s all… you know.
There’s still plenty of amateur web stuff around. It’s just not nearly as big a percentage. Lemmy is kind of amateur web stuff. (Not calling Lemmy devs amateur, it’s just not a big corporate bullshit platform.)
Yes, there is. But it’s more like a bunch of tiny nature reserves in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, full of “BUY IT!” flashy signs. When the old web was more like an expansion of wilderness, you didn’t need to look for amateur stuff to find it.
(I agree Lemmy has that same vibe.)
I don’t think that’s accurate. There’s orders of magnitude more amateur stuff online now than back in the Wild West days of the web. The sprawling metropolis didn’t shrink any of the expansive wilderness, they both grew, at different rates. It is harder to find the amateur stuff, but that’s not cause there’s any less of it.
…and a major Slovakian bank Tatra Banka used it for internet banking until 2019.
Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn’t exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.