July 25th, 2017. The web changed on this day. Well really it changed in April of 2010. What do these dates mean? What was Flash? Soon many of you won’t even know. Dead, like beta and laserdiscs and walkmans. Was this technology revolutionary or a curse? Whatever you think or know, Flash was world-changing for thousands of designers and developers. Their body of work laid the foundations for much of the modern web and for much of what is still to come. Collectively our learnings from successes and failures with this technology have shaped the future of interactive design and technology. Join Rick on this nostalgic journey through the era of Flash as we celebrate the people and projects that brought joy and wonder to so many people and sowed the seeds for an endless number of careers in interactive. Objective To remind us all of the enormous contribution Flash made to interactive design and development and possibly foster some conversation about where we are now and where we are headed. Target Audience Designers and developers new and old. Lovers and haters of Flash. All are welcome. Some Things Audience Members Will Learn Why Flash was great Who some of the key people were during this great time in the web’s history

1. A Love Letter To Flash

2. FlashInTheCan ⇨ FITC

3. Actionscript 4??
Adobe Keynote
AE and Flash CS3
AIR Conditioning
Beyond the Buttons Building AIR Applications with
Adobe Flash Professional CS3
Building Red5 Applications
Data Visualization with Flex and AIR
Flash 2D & 3D Effects
Flash Now and In the Future
Flash on Mobile Devices
Flex Solutions for Your Daily
Development
Harnessing Flash Video
Kaboom! Flash Pyrotechnics (and other particle
effects)
Making Real Music
with Flash
Mastering AIR
Development
Papervision 3D from the Core
Paperworld 3D: A new
multiplayer experience
Play with Pixels, Bitmap
Manipulation with Flash
RIA Meets Desktop:
Introduction to AIR API’s
SWFObject 2.0: The Fine Art
of Embedding Flash Content
Under the Hood: The Nuts and
Bolts of Flash Video

4. July 25th, 2017

5. “But as open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have
matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the
capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have
become a viable alternative for content on the web.
Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically,
we will stop updating and distributing the Flash
Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content
creators to migrate any existing Flash content to
these new open formats.”
https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/

6. April, 2010

7. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
“Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical
drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more
important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We
have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive
content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to
create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of
software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results
in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the
platform.”

8. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/15/a-brief-history-of-flash/

13. A Browser Plugin…
and so much more!

14. Adobe Animate - Flash Builder - FlashDevelop - Flash Catalyst
- Scaleform - Flash Lite - Adobe AIR - Flex - Actionscript -
PowerFlasher FDT - Haxe - Flash Remoting - Flash
Communication Server - Red5 Server - BlazeDS - Stage3D -
Away3D - Flare3D - Papervision 3D - FutureWave -
Macromedia - Adobe - Flashinthecan - FITC - Flash Forward -
Flash on the Beach - FLA - SWF - FLV - Starling - SWFTools -
Ming - SWFObject - OpenLaszlo - Shumway - PocketPC -
QNX/Blackberry Playbook - Symbian - Palm OS - webOS - to
name a few.

15. “Flash was our interactive
swiss-army knife.”
Flash was the Future
by Craig Swan
http://bit.ly/2tBS9fA

16. Websites
Rich Internet Applications
(RIAs)
Animation
Video Streaming
Art
Experiments
Multi-user Experiences
Games
Video Streaming

17. HTML XHTML2 W3C WhatWG HTML5

18. Do you think Flash is here to stay?
“Definitely. With the latest browsers and three or four plug-ins you can
achieve maybe 75% of what you could do in Flash 7 on the web.
With Flash 8, and the upcoming 8.5 player it bumps down to maybe 50%.
I'm a fan of open standards for HTML and the broader web, but Macromedia's
(Adobe's) unilateral control of the Flash platform is what enables them to
innovate so quickly.”
- Grant Skinner
https://thefwa.com/interviews/interview-138-with-grant-skinner

19. Innovation and Iteration

20. html5zombo.com

21. Joshua Davis

24. Yugo Nakamura

25. Books

26. Colin Moock

27. Homestar Runner

29. Robert Penner’s Easing Equations
///////////// QUADRATIC EASING: t^2 ///////////////////
// quadratic easing in - accelerating from zero velocity
// t: current time, b: beginning value, c: change in value, d: duration
// t and d can be in frames or seconds/milliseconds
Math.easeInQuad = function (t, b, c, d) {
return c*(t/=d)*t + b;
};
// quadratic easing out - decelerating to zero velocity
Math.easeOutQuad = function (t, b, c, d) {
return -c *(t/=d)*(t-2) + b;
};
// quadratic easing in/out - acceleration until halfway, then deceleration
Math.easeInOutQuad = function (t, b, c, d) {
if ((t/=d/2) < 1) return c/2*t*t + b;
return -c/2 * ((--t)*(t-2) - 1) + b;
};
http://robertpenner.com/easing/

30. Erik Natzke

31. Grant Skinner

32. Jared Tarbell

33. This could go on for days...
Keith Peters - Mike Chambers - Kevin Lynch - Philip Kerman - Craig Swann - R
Blank - Chris Allen - Stacey Mulcahy - Mike Downey - Hoss Gifford - James
Patterson - Amit Pitaru - Robert Reinhardt - Jared Tarbell - Mario Klingemann -
Joa Ebert - Andre Michelle - Tom Green - Branden Hall - Aral Balkan - Lee
Brimelow - Jim Corbett - Jared Ficklin - Seb Lee-Delisle - Todd Purgason - Jason
Krogh - Pete Barr-Watson - Véronique Brossier - Brendan Dawes - Andries
Odendaal - Beau Amber - Brooke Burgess - Giacomo Guilizzoni - Jon Lorenz -
Randy Knott - Jessica Spiegel - Robert Hodgin - John Grden - Joshua Hirsch -
Peter Elst - Ralph Hauwert - Serge Jespers - and on and on and on...

38. John Cooney of Kongregate
Flash Games Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023967/The-Flash-Games

39. Flex

41. Where are we now?

42. Petition to Open Source Flash
https://github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash
“Flash along with its sister project
Shockwave is an important piece of Internet
history and killing Flash and Shockwave
means future generations can't access the
past. Games, experiments and websites
would be forgotten.”

43. Newgrounds prepared for death of Flash
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/newgrounds-flash-animations-will-survive-flashs-death.html
● 84000 Flash games
● 150000 Flash animations
● Created a swf to video exporter years ago
● In 2012 re-designed the site to remove mentions of
Flash
● Hoping that by 2020 someone has either a SWF to
JavaScript crosscompiler, or a SWF player that runs
in WebAssembly

44. Community
Feature Parity
Experiments
Fun!