Comments on: Here Lies Flash

By: Brian G

Brian G — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 17:23:23 +0000

Saw another guy post about being webmaster for his band, and that’s exactly how my career with the web started. Had a Geocities site initially with craptastic HTML that I think I built in Netscape’s editor circa 1997. Definitely played around with the SWF editor you screen-shotted above but didn’t ultimately end up building anything that I can remember getting published.

Eventually, after 2yr college, I went into web development and not design, so I was doing enough HTML/CSS/JS work to get me to the backend where I spent more time coding and database-ing.

But you’re right on: The first time I saw a site using Flash in the wild my brain hit the floor and it took other “standard” technologies like a full decade to catch up. It was a rough final decade for Flash, but it really did give us a picture of awesomeness in its early years.

By: Dan Sumption

Dan Sumption — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:17:01 +0000

…I was actually at the FFK Conference (Flash Forum Köln) conference in Germany when Steve Jobs published his famous letter. Ironically I’d just developed the first mobile Flash version of BBC iPlayer for Android, which put the lie to his complaints about Flash being unsuited to mobile devices. Remembering the coffee break when everyone came out and, gradually, news about Jobs’s letter spread around the room. That was the first scene in a very long death. Jobs may not have killed Flash, but he did fling the first stone that led to an avalanche.

By: Dan Sumption

Dan Sumption — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:12:31 +0000

Ahhh… the memories. My first sight of Flash (or rather FutureSplash, as it was then) was the original MSN site in 1996. Like you say, it was the difference between a newspaper and colour TV. It took me a few more years to really get to grips with Flash development myself (and I was always more of a devloper than an animator), but it led to nearly 20 years of work, at first on games and “microsites”, but subsequently on advanced applications such as BBC iPlayer, video-conferencing and co-browsing software, and even embedded software (we build the interface for YouView set-top boxes using “Adobe AIR for TV”, a too too short-lived final throw of the dice for Flash technology).

Although I enjoy writing in modern JavaScript, I find it much much harder to throw together a quick demo using JavaScript than it ever was using ActionScript. Flash was, for the most part, a joy to work with (at least, once AS3 came along). But above and beyond that, the Flash community were such an incredible, creative, friendly bunch.

RIP Flash.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 03:39:37 +0000

Thanks for dropping by, @John Dowdell! I always appreciated everything you did for the Flash community back in the day. Was a great platform to build on and a great community of creators to learn from.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 03:20:29 +0000

Thanks for the article Mike, listing so many sites like that. To play them back today, I’ve heard there’s an emulation project at The Internet Archive, haven’t evaluated it myself.

Another option, particularly for that era of SWF3, SWF4, SWF5 files, might be to renovate the old third-party players built to the file-format specification… Oliver Debon in France had one archive going for awhile, but I know others also had non-Macromedia engines that seemed to work great. The video codecs were licensed, but the display and logic engines had well-defined functions.

jd/mm

By: Khaled Garbaya

Khaled Garbaya — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:56:33 +0000

I still remember my first event shape tween. Flash served me well and allowed me to get my first job as a developer. Has a lot of fun.

remember gotoandlearn.com, theflashblog.com, bytearray.org….

OMG I am not crying you are crying

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 05:09:22 +0000

Great obit. I think the death knell for Flash was OSS and web standards in general, but it may have also been when that god forsaken page flip trick/component was born, the one that turned any PDF into a multimedia extravaganza.

I remember the website for ‘Requiem for a Dream’ that revealed the power of parallax to a generation of designers. A simple effect for an appropriate context: https://youtu.be/SNuZjwX7Xxk

I also remember the indelible impression of that ‘Fly Guy’ Xmas card with it’s seemingly infinite canvas, Flash doing 2-bit: https://youtu.be/dXjIL54RoB4

By: Bryan Sleiter

Bryan Sleiter — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 22:56:59 +0000

Knowing how to make things in Flash was an absolute designer super power! Such an amazing tool. Thank you for sIFR Mike!

By: Bryan Cowe

Bryan Cowe — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 22:25:18 +0000

Really great article. Many dusty, nostalgic chests bursting open in my brain right now.

Remembering just HOW MANY 45-degree arrows existed on the web back then, compared to today.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 16:21:37 +0000

Like Peter mentioned, I also came across it as Futuresplash.

The agency I worked at then was doing work for Microsoft’s MSN, and we started using it for them. Going from using bloaty and pixelly animated GIFs to optimised animation with (albeit basic) interactions was a revelation.

Later at Preloaded we built our reputation on the back of Flash, creating all sorts of weird and wonderful games, branded entertainment and educational content for some of the world’s biggest brands. Good times.

In those early Futuresplash days we recommended to Microsoft to snap up the app – they didn’t. Macromedia did, the rest is history.

And now Flash is too.

Flash!

By: Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 02:21:42 +0000

yugop.com blew me away. Who knew maths could drive such incredible graphic trickery! After seeing it, Flash became a compulsion for me.
I’ve another, if you have time to browse before the 31st.
A New Zealand studio packed with talent where I started my design career in 2001—”wm3″ by Webmedia
http://webmedia.com/

By: Christian

Christian — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 21:53:34 +0000

Oh wow. What a great article. It sparked so many memories for me that I spent a couple hours trying to remember and find a few flash sites that inspired me that were not listed.

I tried to copy V3 of 2advanced in photoshop, cut it up and added my own “spin” on it. I was so proud I was able to do it, even if it wasn’t animated. Then I found a site dedicated to exposing all the sites that copied or cloned 2advanced and realized I was a hack. I was so relieved that my site hadn’t been found yet and listed there.

FakePilot (Mattias Lindberg) was one that has stayed with me. Such an innovative style of motion graphics (https://youtu.be/P_dg_MAL3Sw). His style has now become very popular but at the time it blew my mind.

I’ll never forget the amazing and clever work from Who’s We Studios (https://youtu.be/RVfu6WOk630). I spent hours in 3D Max trying to replicate that glowing ball and I never could get it right. The behind the scenes video for this site was very clever. I hope it’s not gone forever.

Thanks for letting me wallow in nostalgia for a few hours. Really nice.

By: Petr Kovar

Petr Kovar — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 21:41:53 +0000

Great article. Thank you for your memories.
Here you can see Jeffrey Zeldman’s website how looked in 1995
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/jeffrey-zeldman-presents-1995

By: Pablo

Pablo — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 20:07:26 +0000

I remember the most impressive flash site I ever saw derbauer.de and it’s various iterations. BTW S.J. killed Flash https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1344002591034920961?s=20

By: Peter Sylwester

Peter Sylwester — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 20:05:23 +0000

When I first encountered Flash, it was still called FutureWave (soon to be FutureSplash). I always told people that I likened that moment to when you experience an earthquake. I had lived in the Bay Area in the late 80s, so I had to explain it as the same feeling you get when you look in the rearview mirror and see a cop car—Crap! But a good crap. I was mostly worried about how far behind I already was. It’s like whenever you are in a place and think enough to click video and then record. Something’s gonna happen, you’re not sure what, but now you are ready. I think I had it on record for 10 years. But now it’s like I’m deleting that file. Too big to open, but good times. But what I wouldn’t give for a kick in the pants like that again. My website link is for just one of those things for good time’s sake. Hit /games for a few others. The hours are ticking down.