Software from the Pits of Hell: Remembering Flashstuffer | Hacker News Reader

Software from the Pits of Hell: Remembering Flashstuffer

thewiretap.io

37 pointsoliverjudge12 comments

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The killer line is of course the last.

Killing Flash did not kill punch the monkey ads and it didn't suddenly make web pages note efficient.

It just changed the delivery mechanism.

Mmmmm yes we have 5MB of web assembly garbage instead of 50k of flash. All when 5k of HTML and CSS would do …

Very little genuine value added in the process.

> Very little genuine value added in the process.

And 25 years worth of content lost because Adobe couldn't open source flash.

The Flash Spec was open.

There are loads of Flash Player implementations.

> Now if you were one of those unlucky people who had to code Actionscript

Unlucky? Adobe had us writing typesafe ECMAScript, JSX and SwiftUI in 2006.

The unlucky ones were folks who thought they had to use PureMVC, cairngorm or RobotLegs to build large applications.

> writing […] SwiftUI in 2006

Huh? How?

I'm exaggerating; Adobe Flex's MXML was an XML schema for building application UIs declaratively. It supported custom elements, which would correspond to classes you'd write, whose constructors, fields and methods would mirror the attributes and events on the DOM, kind of like a stricter HTML5.

That's a good description of the Flash ecosystem from 2006 onwards, actually: before its time, and more stringent than what came after. That strictness was the legacy of ECMAScript 4, I suppose.

MXML

Flex was built on top of Flash and gave a very nice, wildly ahead of it's time, environment for building Rich web Business Applications.

Am I the only one who sees bright horizontal lines while my eyes are closed, after looking at this article for a minute or two?

You're probably getting retinal detachment.

Is your brightness set very high? Maybe after-images of the white text.

These are the after-images, sorry I wasn’t clear about that.

But the brightness is quite low. I look at my monitor for living (software development), and I’m always very particular about having the best possible ergonomics regarding brightness, ambient lighting in the room etc.

And I always see after-images when reading bright text on dark background. From my perspective, it’s a mystery why (some) people like “dark” mode - it always gives me problems I don’t seem to have in the “light” mode.

I was just wondering if there was anybody else who sees the same thing…

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