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Comment by dumpsterdiver | Hacker News Reader

Well, I suppose they do have the rights. Despite the one abomination that Adobe has birthed (Flash), I'm actually still a big fan, and subscriber. Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)

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Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia.

Also, Flash gets a lot of flak, but it saved us from applets and ActiveX. It also enabled multi media content on a web that was not yet as standardised and functional as today's.

Acrobat reader on the other hand, is pure cancer, and has seen many security holes. PDF is useful, but there are far better PDF readers.

And Flash enabled such a rich multimedia experience on the web in a time when broadband wasn't to be assumed. I remember playing very in-depth games on Newgrounds back in the day via Flash, via a very slow 56k dialup connection. There's no way to replicate that experience these days (easily anyway). The tooling around Flash was all very impressive. Sure the web changed and people turned on Flash, but that doesn't mean it didn't fill a very important niche for a long time.

> There's no way to replicate that experience these days (easily anyway).

There are still a few dialup services that do 56k.

But also Macromedia did not birth Flash, they acquired FutureWave and renamed it (from FutureSplash Animator to Micromedia Flash).

But your point still stands, it became popular during Macromedia age.

I did not claim Macromedia birthed Flash! :D

But I also didn't know about FutureSplash Animator. Thanks, learned something new.

Funny April Fool's from Keith Peters with a nod to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFBTzGuaONU

> Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia.

Thanks for the correction. I didn't know that.

And of course After Effects is not originally from Adobe either, being bought through Aldus who in turn got it from CoSA. It's funny how much pointless early 90s computer trivia I still recall from playing with promotional CD-ROMs as a child.

As a perpetual license holder that got royally effed over by Adobe, I can proudly say Adobe will never see any money from me anymore. For almost everything Adobe makes, there are other applications that are equally capable or sometimes miles ahead. Photoshop for example seems to be stuck in the 2000s, everything about it is dated, it's slow (due to a massive code base with a lot of legacy baggage) and missing many features artists can take for granted in modern graphics applications. They add fancy AI-powered features all the time while completely ignoring the basic productivity features which wouldn't even be hard to implement.

What is the equally capable or miles ahead version of Photoshop?

Affinity by Serif makes good replacement Adobe products

Adobe didn't birth Flash, they bought it.

Tangentially related, I worked at Adobe around 2002-2004 on an Acrobat multimedia plugin that supported multiple media players: QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Real Player, and whatever other players were popular. I suggested we should support Flash too. Management was like "sure, whatever, it's good to support a lot of players, but don't spend much time on it."

Obviously this was before the Macromedia acquisition.

I used to hate on Flash in favor of the grand unifying standard that was HTML5 and JavaScript. Turns out we just exchanged one monopoly by another. And Flash actually enabled artists to do games and shit, as opposed to the idiosyncratic HTML/CSS scene graph attempts, canvas, WebGL, and audio/video sync crap still not matching Flash. Certainly, the web with Flash was more creative and fun.

We lost Flash because Steve Jobs didn't want another platform ruining his vice grip over iPhone. The battery life "issue" could have been fixed in short order.

Flash was light years better than the HTML + JS platypus we have today.

> We lost Flash because Steve Jobs didn't want another platform ruining his vice grip over iPhone. The battery life "issue" could have been fixed in short order.

Flash is notorious for being riddled with security holes.

Also none of the flash content was designed for touch and so it produced a garbage user experience.

Jobs was right not to support it.

All of those were easy problems.

Jobs didn't want anybody to be king of his castle. We're all lowly jesters on iPhone.

>Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)

After Effects was one of the most astounding pieces of software I ever used, it's like pure computing + code + art working together as one.

But neglect and some missteps the past 7 versions or so have ruined it, it's all extremely single core constrained for no good reason and basic things like the playback with sound and basically broken at this point, no matter what the platform or system power it can't consistently play back a ram preview with sound without it slurring or cutting out completely.

Used to work perfectly on a Core 2 Duo 10 years ago, now it feels like a joke on a far more capable machine.

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