Flash Player is Dead, Long Live Flash

As one of founding members of Flashkit and a part of Flash from the very beginning this is truly a sad day. My heart is heavy in the sense that this journey has finally come to its end. What started with mad excitement and made many fortunes is now finally being put to rest at least as far as within the context of html and the browser.

As I muse all the memories from hard to believe 23 years now it is amazing all the advancements that have been realized because of this simple program. Flash provided me a career, a platform to both learn and teach from and most importantly friendships that have stood the test of time. We built a crazy wonderful community that made a difference for so many people.

Flash was and is still a magical tool that transformed the web from a bunch of animated gifs or clunky java applets to a fully immersive experience. it provided anyone with the imagination and determination to create stunning experiences that entertained, enriched and inspired a generation of developers, gammers and artists of what things could be. Flash at the time could scale screen sizes, work in any browser and allowed a standardized language to a truly wild wild west environment of html and browser wars. But the very thing it provided would become its own undoing.

i'm thankful that Johnathan Gay started Future Splash which I briefly used and that Macromedia bought it and rolled Flash 2 out in 1997. I am truly thankful for Mark Fennel who founded Flashkit and allowed me to lead this community in the early days. Thank you Lynda for the opportunity to share at the Flash Forward conferences, the Team at e-rain maker of Swift 3D, the folks at Friends of Ed, Peach Pit, Pearson, etc. for the chance to be an author. Macromedia and Adobe who gave me the chance to help shape Flash back in the day. Flash truly changed my life gave me a voice and a platform to speak from. But the greatest gifts i received were all the people I got to know in the community. If I tried to list all the people Flashkit brought to me and me to them would take days. Thank you for sharing your vision, knowledge and passion with me, I only hope I did provided the same to many of you.

This is the end of a truly revolutionary period of human communication history. Some people may laugh at that but in time people will come to understand just how revolutionary and special this time was. The explosion that was Flash was the stuff of dreams. I am so glad I got to be a small part of it along with you. Thanks for everything.

Macromedians 1:1 - In the beginning the web was without shape and color, and the hype covered the darkness of the net. Then there was a Flash and life came to the web and vision became reality.

Flash is what got me really rolling learning programming and design.
20 years later these skills are what keeps the money coming in.

I on the other hand found my self spending 1k+ on software education and really used all my free time for the 8 out of 9 years that I have been programming even long nights where I can get no rest because I knew that I had to make my self a business or else I would probably be working for somebody else after high school, which everything did fail, no one showed money, only interest, And usually its that high interest rate of people commenting on something that could be a bad thing where they know someone who is getting ready to really put you down on your career and say they've got it and they know someone better, although it hasn't happened yet, and maybe I did put out software there that might take long to top but its at that moment I realized I can't be a client software anymore I must move to my own circuit board for my programs. The profit I really earn feels much like buying something off your boss in the store you work at, the boss lost more than he had won. I pay the apple developer license and I lost more than I had won, maybe the apps I do sell are purchased by people who are in on it.

Funny... I was just waxing poetic about days long past. Swift 3D, Vecta3D, Plasma 3D, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, North Code SWF Studio, SWiSH, et al. It was a wild west of expression and doing things that were equal parts experimentation and expression.

I miss those days. Half of the stuff you wanted to do then was right there in your hands.

It was a different time and spirit for sure.

I choked up a little when I saw this news. Flash no longer supported. Officially dead. Truly an end of an era.

I cannot believe I joined this forum nearly 20 years ago.

So much has happened in that time. When I first started using Flash I had my whole life ahead of me. And now I'm a geezer nearing middle age. Flash had a huge impact on my life. I've never been so excited about a technology as I was when my college roommate showed me his amazing flash animated intro. I knew I needed to learn it and so I dove in and was totally obsessed with it for. years. Flash gave me my first job out of college, and led to so many opportunities. What a great time to be a developer. Though I haven't used it since 2007 or so, I would not be where I am today without this software.

Many great times here in the coffee lounge. So many conversations. Friends made. Hey Gerbick!! What a great time to be on the internet, making new friends, discovering things, workign on projects together - all before the sh*tshow that is social media took over everything and poisoned our society LOL. Miss those days. Long live FLASH.

oof. I am a little embarrassed to say I did not get anything done with adobe flex, I just needed that backgroundframerate adjustment for my flash animation to run in the background in chromeless mode for android to get ready to grind. I really like that term, waxing poetic.

@visionray im not reaching middle age, but I am at an age where if I put out something its nothing impressive, im 26 now, it should of been impressive when I put it out at age 20 a few multiplayer iphone apple apps, I do believe I am left in quite a shellshock of what did not happen. But I know where I suspend now to others and the new motivation for my projects is that i'm doing it for my self and no money I can't get is going to block my vision of innovation.

Potential services provided by HARMAN may include, but are not limited to:

• Transitioning Flash content to alternate technologies.
• Creating custom downloadable applications that will load specified Flash content for end user distribution.
• Providing updated Flash Player installers that will allow Flash to run with compatible browsers in an internal environment.

Now it is possibly the best time to develop a flash client browser using air to load up only flash content, each swf owner simply hosts there swf file that will load up in our air browser as2 or as3. I know its hard to be in on this idea with all the obstacles that keep stacking up.

I will try to release a flash-content browser before February ends and post a download to it, its not limited to the client I will release.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gerbick

Funny... I was just waxing poetic about days long past. Swift 3D, Vecta3D, Plasma 3D, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, North Code SWF Studio, SWiSH, et al. It was a wild west of expression and doing things that were equal parts experimentation and expression.

I miss those days. Half of the stuff you wanted to do then was right there in your hands.

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I am adit_ya_sharma
I am the father of Resident Evil 2 Remake
Flash will never die.

Saw the news and had to come back for a visit. This forum was the genesis of my career and a large part of who I am today. A largely unsupervised 13yo learned not just Flash, but how to be an internet citizen here. I'll always be thankful for everyone who took the time. Pouring one out for Flash.