domeet webmaster

Flash is a legend of the Internet. This used to be a common platform for unified Internet content creation. It was a real time to write and run everywhere, so that everyone could become an animator and artist. But with the advent of the mobile era, power consumption, slow operation, and security risks have caused Jobs to close the door to Flash. Since then, Flash is on the go. Adobe plans to completely retire Flash Player by 2020, and Google has completely disabled Flash Player since Chrome 76. At the end of an era, Wired magazine has published an article reviewing the history of Flash’s rise and fall. You can review and remember it. The original author is Will Bedingfield, titled: The rise and fall of Flash, the annoying plugin That shaped the modern web.

Flash Rise and Fall History (1): The predecessor was born in another productionProduct failure

Before 1996, the Web was a boring place. But the unexpected birth of Flash has turned it into a chaotic place full of noise, color and controversy, a harbinger of modern networks.

On June 9, 2008, Apple’s annual WWDC conference was staged in California. About an hour after the keynote speech, Rob Small was waiting for a breakthrough inside the cake. At this time Jobs was standing on the stage and seemed to be particularly satisfied with himself. Small was in London at the time and was watching live.

The cake is about the size of an elephant. It is neatly embellished with brightly coloured summer fruits. It has a candle on the top and a red light on the big screen to the left of Apple CEO. Jobs raised his voice: “As the iPhone’s first birthday arrives, we are ready to take it to the next level.” The cake was cut open and a sign appeared. The audience cheered slyly. Jobs shouted: “Today, we will be launching the iPhone 3G!”

As early as 2001, when Small was in his 20s, he discovered an opportunity – an opportunity he found to be ignored by existing companies in the cultural industry, that is, a compulsive, simple form of popularity. Entertainment is pushed to the public. At the time, he didn’t know what kind of entertainment would take, but he set up a company called Miniclip, and the inspiration came from this idea.

Small and his co-founder Tihan Presbie are trying to find the right platform to achieve this goal. They quickly identified an animation software that would display interactive multimedia in any browser and almost any Internet connection, just download a small player. This thing is the Flash that was acquired and renamed by Macromedia, a web development company, in 1996.

Results Miniclip became popular. Dancing Bush, an interactive animation of former President Bush’s “Weekend Night Frenzy” style dance, was initially sent to 40 people via email and later became one of the world’s first games to gain viral popularity. By 2002, the company had grown to become the web’s largest publisher of Flash games and has maintained this title for the next four years. In 2006, Disney bought Miniclip’s Club Penguin for $500 million. In Small’s words, it was just “a few penguins swaying left and right in Flash.” At the peak, Miniclip attracted 75 million users every month.

Disney buyIn the same year as Club Penguin, Adobe wrote a press release to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Flash. A few months ago, the company just bought the software for $3 billion, and the press release highlighted the sheer size of Flash. Adobe boasted that “nearly 98% of Internet-enabled desktops have Flash Player installed.” About 70% of the Fortune 100 offer Flash content on its own website. The software appears on “65 million mobile devices, consumer electronics, TVs, media players, set-top boxes, digital billboards, cameras, educational toys, and even refrigerators.” It provides support for the “single screen delivery” of the Jaguar XK4 integrated audio, navigation, temperature control, telephone and vehicle. In 2005, three former Google employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, built a video site based on the software, which was called YouTube.

By 2008, Flash became the standard for web video. It helps animation, games and multimedia design penetrate the web. It activates the content creation culture that we now take for granted. But when Jobs was on the stage, Small realized that the iPhone 3G would change the way his audience used the game.

He has previously explored the possibility of extending the game to Java-enabled mobile devices, but found it difficult to replicate the Flash experience on his phone. The app store shocked him and thought it would be a revolution. He recalled: “Obviously, this will be a breakthrough moment for mobile phones. We hope this will allow us to create a richer experience for gamers.” But the iPhone does not support Flash.

Future Splash Animator, the predecessor to Flash, was born out of the failure of another product. It was created in May 1996 and the developer is Jonathan Gay. In high school, Gay witnessed his family working with local artists to build houses in the mountains of San Diego. Inspired by this, he dreams of becoming an architect and drawing drawings for his house on the drawing table. He will soon discover that what disappoints him is that most architects have never been exposed to cement mixers – they are simply designing buildings, not building them.

Gay decided to “reform the computer.” Programming seems to offer a combination of design and construction that is not available in architecture. He developed a graphical editor in the programming language Pascal and put it in a high school market. His father quickly bought him a Macintosh. In the Mac user group, Gay’s father boasted to organizer Charlie Jackson (who later became one of the early investors in Wired America) that his son had first-rate programming skills. Gay recalls: “Charlie wanted to start a software company at the time, but he didn’t have much money, so he probably thought about it at the time: Oh, high school students, he doesn’t need to pay a fee until the software is done. So, I have to develop this expensive, $10,000 system and write game software. This made me sing an animation.”

In January 1993, after convinced that the way stylists and tablets interacted with computers became popular, Gay persuaded Jackson and another former colleague, Michelle Walsh, to set up a new company with him: FutureWave Software. This company has not succeeded. Their graphical editor SmartSketch intended to live in the expected stylus computer operating system failed. SmartSketch was eventually ported to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms, but sales were average.

In the summer of 1995, Gay attended SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference, where SmartSketch was presented. But none of them soldGoing, he feels very embarrassed. But those who had tried to get the software at Gay’s booth told him the same thing: he should turn it into an animation product.

Although Gay had considered this path before, he thought the animation market was too small: the distribution could only be limited to videotapes and CD-Rom, so the only organization that made the animation was the large studio. But then he heard about the ability to be called something new to the Internet. Gay recalled in a 2006 memo: “It seems to be very popular, and everyone wants to be able to send graphics and animations on the Internet.” The company then added animation capabilities and changed the name of the software to CelAnimator first, then Also changed to FutureSplash Animator. The software was released in May 1996 and is marketed as a “complete website graphics tool”.

Success is almost a hit, the key is that users download the player. Microsoft needs software that can display video on its own website, MSN.com, which was the default home page for every Internet Explorer user. It chose Future Splash. Disney later used the product to animate its own online website. In December 1996, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, which further opened up its popularity and distributed it as a free browser plug-in. Adobe thinks the name of the software is too clumsy and renames it again. FutureSplash Animator becomes Macromedia Flash 1.0.

Flash Rise and Fall (2): Great changes in the life cycle

Like most long-lived and regularly updated software, Flash has changed dramatically throughout its lifecycle. (Anastasia Salter, co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web, was forced to comment on the software: “It’s hard to cover a book.” But in essence The appeal of Flash stems from its low entry barrier – its simplicity allows anyone to quickly learn how to be an animator.

Every Flash user is faced with a canvas – a blank page. Users can draw pictures on this page; for convenience, imagine a happy little cloud. Like all the other things on the canvas, your cloud has its own time.Axis control is divided into different frames.

Now, your happy little cloud is still. Now imagine that you want it to float on the page. You must first choose where you last stay and how many frames you want to get to where it is. Now, if you press the play button, Flash will use the algorithm to generate the motion between the two points (called the keyframe), and then your small cloud will float on the canvas. (By over-reliance on this kind of calculation, bad Flash animations can be very stuck.) Later versions of Flash, especially Flash 5, added deeper interactivity after the introduction of the scripting language ActionScript, which is the basics of the game. Building blocks. You can add a behavior, for example, maybe let your cloud viewer click the mouse and let the cloud evaporate.

This kind of motion between keyframes is called “tweening” in the animation industry. It is short for “in-betweening” and is traditionally done by artists downstream of the animated food chain. The process is lengthy and costly. Flash fills this part. Adam Phillips found that Flash was 30 years old and was an expert in making water, smoke, and fire effects for Disney: “With this little program, I can complete the entire line of processes, basically what the studio can do. finished.”. He recalled that an animator’s peers created a three-minute pilot’s dive animation that piled up the paper and overtook his head. Then he has to spend $10,000 to digitize it. This process took seven months. With Flash, similar animations can take only three days. (His unfortunate friend discovered Flash just after paying the money.)

As Gay expects, Flash is inherently visual. He said: “Our model animation is very simple, it is frame-based – you can start with graphics and painting, and then add and develop skills for step by step.” He believes that the success of Flash is not surprising. It implements three functions that the online world desires. The first is that everyone is eager to create something richer than GIF or HTML: Flash provides a platform for short videos on the Internet. The second is the popularity of Flash, which can be applied to different browsers and different devices.

In Gay’s words, the third point is that Flash lets designers (“right-brainers”) develop interactive media and reach them to a wide audience. Flash brings visual artists to the line. Marty Spellerberg, a designer who contributed to the early Flash site Halfempty.com, said: “You can pair visual effects with programming actions, when the animation loopsWhen you release, your behavior will also play in a loop. Flash Dad combines these two ideas, which I think is an important opportunity for many visual artists to participate. We don’t even know that we are programming — we think we are just learning Flash.

The online world that Flash enters is basically static. The flashing GIF provides most of the online actions. The early sites were built using HTML and CSS, and are basically a tribute to magazine design: box and web formats, with borders and sidebars, and almost no clickable numbers to flip through.

Flash has changed all of this. It changed the way the web looks. Just like your happy little cloud floating in the sky, just like Bush swinging his hips, the website glows with life. Spellerberg said: “Flash is sound; it is movement; it is interactivity. The kind of Internet depicted in the movie is like that, right? When you see the Internet in pop culture, it is this kind of dynamic, in its presence. Experience – you can use Flash to create these things.”

Animation may be limited to adding an interactive box to the page — a small video or game on the MySpace page — or possibly the entire site. Small said: “This is almost similar to what we see on the console today, as seen in VR. This is a huge leap in terms of complexity, depth and level of interaction.” /p>

In short, some of these sites are absolutely junk. Everyone enthusiastically and inappropriately embraced Flash. The animation of the restaurant website is particularly horrible – kitsch, and may also be accompanied by rhythmic brass and invisible transmission. Ishkur’s “Electronic Music Guide” is a famous example of the era you still see today – messy pop art lines, bubbles and audio samples that look like a tricky mind map.

Even an excellent example of that era, such as Vodafone’s “Future Vision” – a fantasy of film, video and sound – looking forward to the company’s products for the next decade – seems I also hope that users will be attracted by the fun of their own exploration. Spellerberg said: “Those things are confusing! Now no company will commission such things – we have business expectations for things, we know what can be done.” Contrary to the aesthetics of web modern, business-like, market capitalization A billion-dollar multinational company uses Flash’s worst drawbacks (long-loading, flashy cartoon graphics, annoying sounds, and incomprehensible purposes) to create a website that is somewhat ridiculous and almost emotional.

Salter said: “Although I like itThe web design of that era, but it still has a lot of problems. This is completely inconvenient because there is no metaphor for the page inside Flash. Browsers, screen readers, text, everything has become a disaster. When you look at it from the perspective of an archivist or a screen reader, these sites are terrible in many ways, but they are fun!

Flash Rise and Fall History (3): Jobs asserts that the Flash era will end

In all of these sites, there is one of the most powerful legacy. It gives everyone an understanding of the Internet that is now taken for granted: as a gateway to an infinite audience, where everyone and their creations are viewed and judged.

This was discovered in Perkasie, a small town in Pennsylvania, when a teenager named Tom Fulp released a magazine to celebrate his favorite game console, Neo Geo. He called his magazine “New Ground” and published the magazine on the web with the early online service Prodigy. In 1995, when he got his first web page, he called it New Ground Remix; in 1998, when he was preparing for a TV interview for one of his earliest works, he changed the URL to A URL that I think can make TV viewers easier to see. Newgrounds.com This domain name has been retained until today.

Fulp Early attempts to animate were very laborious, to be created with Deluxe Paint on Amiga and then programmed with Pascal. He hasn’t found a software that allows him to create complex animations. He said: “I always hope that there is a tool that allows me to apply programming to art animations. Because when I want to start game development, I have to go through a steep learning curve, which is always much more difficult than it seems.

In 1998, he discovered Flash. He immediately realized the importance of it. He said: “Even if the limitations of the action scripts were still very large, the kind of itch was stopped. At that time, there was no other way to create this level of interactive content and support so many platforms – — If you do something with Flash, what you do can be run on every computer, almost every web browser supports it.”

In that year, he created Teletubby Funland. But in some people’s opinion, this antenna baby paradise is not interesting at all (in the image of the antenna baby is subverted), the United KingdomThe broadcaster’s lawyer expressed dissatisfaction. He said: “They sent me a notice of revocation – how much a nightmare for a child to fight a lawsuit? But a British organization called Internet Freedom came forward and defended the site’s right to imitate the antenna baby.

Although Fulp has never received news from the BBC, the site’s notoriety has been confirmed and the Newgrounds community has grown. Fulp later added a chat room and message board to the site. Soon, he was overwhelmed by the art of Flash created by people who didn’t show it on their own websites. He put these works in an area of ​​the website and named it Portal, but the labor in the process is too much. To this end he took a revolutionary step.

“In April 2000, we basically built an automated publishing system,” he explained. (The first animation that was ported to the Portal was a series of Scrotum the Puppy, a puppy called Scrotum.) “Everyone can upload games or animations instantly, as a means of quality control and worry about hard drive space, users The work will be voted on. If the work score is too low, the system will automatically delete it – the community will slowly grow from then on.”

In order to better understand the meaning of what Fulp is saying here, we need to consider it from the perspective of “first.” Newgrounds is the first website to allow real-time publishing of movies and games. It provides the first video voting system. The Numa Numa dance, one of the first viral popular videos, comes from its web page. Its community members created the most famous games of the 2000s (such as Alien Hominid, N plus and Super Meat Boy super meat boys), and pop animations (Potter Puppet Pals, Charlie the Unicorn and Salad Fingers). Fulp said: “This is actually very frustrating, because some of the most popular content on YouTube actually appeared on Newgrounds first. YouTube has caused so much attention, which makes us feel a little embarrassed!”

Newgrounds also laid the foundation for a participatory culture that is now taken for granted on the web. Salter said: “Newgrounds is an ideal place for everyone to imagine creating something they can share and participate in right away. But we have been spoiled, and more viable platforms to choose from are everywhere.” p>

Fulp recalls: “Internet