The editor was a scripted timeline, similar to a video or animation timeline. It was fantastic for creatives, but counterintuitive for programmers, so most devs hated it.
> No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow.
By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing.
It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.
For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard technologies ahead into something way, way better.
> The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.
Sorry, that's simply not true. The tech was ahead of its time. The implementation was intuitive. Only developers and Steve Jobs hated it, because Flash made it way too easy for anyone to make something fun.
And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion of content.
Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.
It was definitely amazing, especially as a creator. It's how I learned to program! Actionscript was my first language. The only thing kinda close to the experience now is Processing. There may have been issues with the tech, but it kickstarted so many creative and engineering professional careers. There were so many good apps and games. It had such a rich ecosystem.
Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery.
Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment?
Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity?
I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine.
People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users.
Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back.
If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour)
You're completely (and I think intentionally) missing that flash enabled people to easily create those things... and that creativity and ease of use still hasn't been replicated (your example of Unity - doesn't come close to the ease)
People loved flash for what flash was good for (creative toys) they disliked flash when certain sites started making it the core of the navigation etc.
When people are nostalgic for flash it's for finding random toys from other people who weren't "IT people".
Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet
At the very least, this is needed for iPadOS and macOS, since both have resizable windows.
I'm currently working on a responsive app in Swift and had to develop my own responsive layout system. SwiftUI simply isn't up to the task, except for one very specific, generic layout.
I learned about the Pacific Handy Cutter from my local grocer. It's cheap and excellent. It has a dull edge for 95% of tape cutting needs, and a safety guide for when you need to use the blade. Admittedly, it's not useful for slicing up / cutting down boxes.
This model is right handed, but they make a lefty too.
> I live in California, cancelled about five years ago, and they forced me to talk to a person who demanded a reason for my cancellation, and then argued with me about wanting to cancel.
That was 5 years ago. California's "click-to-cancel" law was amended in 2024, effective July 1, 2025.
Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
> When can I download my movie onto my Linux laptop and play it through an HDMI cable?
Probably because the Linux market is too small to support an iTunes for Linux.
By my understanding, the Linux market prefers free, open source, community effort. So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers?
> So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers?
This is always the dumbest style of argument.
P1: Healthcare sucks!
P2: Oh yeah? Why aren't you a doctor?
Be serious. It's perfectly fine to criticize things and the answer is extremely rarely change your life and become a domain expert in something else to meet some kind of "oh yeah, be the solution" nonsense by somebody that often themselves refuses to get off the couch for anything meaningful.
I actually have made movies and they are all available to download online for free. Not the gotcha you think. And also totally unrelated to the idea of Steam for Movies.
Valve made the Linux market work by bloody persistence, because Gabe Newell saw the Microsoft Store as a threat to turn Windows into a walled garden (which would have hurt Steam a lot). It's not the Linux user base as such which attracted Valve.
But it's really beside the point, since supporting games on an OS is a hell of a lot harder than supporting video. You're right that movie stores have no excuse - except the control argument, working the other way than it did for Valve.
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