[hackshack]

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs.

Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good.

I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments.

The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions.

Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

[mike_hearn]

Worth noting that the SWF format was towards the end of its lifecycle and open standard as well. Fully documented with open source players and tooling available.

[ac29]

As someone who has used Linux on the Desktop for 20+ years, I can say with pretty high confidence that open source flash players could not run more than a trivial amount of real world flash content at the end of its life cycle ~10 years ago.

[stuaxo]

Ruffle.rs looks pretty promising for playing flash.

Adobe still has the editor as Adobe Animate - if they made it more widely available, I think there is a big demographic of designers that would like to make a bit of animation or active graphics that is not being served any more.