Google’s motto should also be “We Only Prove Concepts!”
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I fondly checking out fancy Flash sites (does anyone remember tokyoplastic?), animations and games every day with my classmates in graphic design school with a dozen people huddled around a single screen. Flash was a portal to animation, coding, video editing and a whole new way of creative expression for me. You’re damn right, it was good.
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Macromedia was a great company. I got my start in multimedia using Director, and a lot of what they first did there carried over to Flash. Things like the cast, the stage, the timeline and so on. And ActionScript was just another variant of ECMAScript, so it kept JS skills relevant in the years when JS was often turned off due to exploits and it being dog slow. SWF was also superior in how small it could compress interactive files, something we forget.
If Macromedia were still around today, I probably would still be updating my licenses for Fireworks and FreeHand as well. And Flash (the IDE) would have most likely moved on to being a tool for making complex web animations like it was originally intended to be, only exporting to HTML5 instead of SWF. Heck, maybe even Dreamweaver would still be a usable tool, more of an IDE than a WYSISYG editor?
sigh
Oh, who am I kidding? Part of why Adobe had no problem devouring Macromedia was because the management had gotten greedy and didn’t care any more about the product. It was doomed.
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Adobe takes a delightful, quirky community garden that everyone loves to visit on their off days, and:
-fires the volunteers
-puts a razor wire fence around it
-charges $300 for admission
-charges another $500 for food and drink once you’re in there
-threatens to take your children and throw you in jail if you don’t sign up for another visit next year
-goes around to the other community gardens at night and throws molotovs on all the plants and shits on the pathways
-calls up the other garden directors next day, “pity what happened last night, we have an offer for you.”
-offers a low-ball offer well below the value before the “incident”
-acquires the other gardens and shuts them down
-patents the first garden
-strongarms community gardens around the nation, such that the original garden becomes the only garden in existence, except for one tiny free one somewhere on the outskirts of Montreal
-forays into food production, so that if you want peppers and tomatoes, you have to first sign up for a subscription to the Adobe Garden
-strongarms grocery stores to only carry Adobe Garden produce
-sells cookware that will only work with Adobe Certified™ produce
-strongarms the cookware market
-pressures the stove market
-influences the kitchen remodeling market
-makes inroads to the new home building market
-establishes an Adobe Home loan program
-lobbies for and successfully corners interest in Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac
-former Adobe CEOs become heads of the FDA, USDA, HUD and commerce departments in a Republican administration…
Etc., I could go on about this all day. You see where this is going. Fuck Adobe. I’ve hated their business since 1982.
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I wonder if WebAssembly will open another opportunity to expand the capability of non-programmers on the web, assuming one or a few really excellent languages/systems targetting WASM can actually gain a foothold. Maybe not due to the inherantly larger complexity of talking to a larger colmplex of modern browser APIs all rooted in the JS runtime and DOM rather than just being given a window to do anything by the browser.
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