The Rise and Fall of Flash

Oh flash is a name in the technology industry that grows more and more obscure with each passing year once the platform behind nearly every interactive application on the web you'd be hard-pressed now to find a recent browser that still supports the standard where did this key component of the web come from and what caused its demise our story begins like most do at a science fair in his high school years Jonathan Gaye had been a frequent programmer of his Apple 2 computer he were games like space invaders and basic and eventually went on to create a drawing program called super paint following Super paints award-winning success at his science fair Jonathan and his father bought a Macintosh back in those days software development for the Mac couldn't be done on the computer itself it required the Apple Weesa an obscured and prohibitively expensive machine that was more powerful than the Macintosh as luck should have it though Jonathan met Alicia owner at his local Mac users group by the name of Charlie Jackson Jackson sought to form his own Macintosh software company silicon beach software and invited Jonathan still in high school along with him some of the first programs Jonathan root for the Mac were games like airborne dark castle and beyond dark castle all of which proved to be successful enough to pay for his college education beyond games Jonathan returned to his super paint program porting it over to the Macintosh is super paint too and after being bought out by the outlet corporation in him for their pagemaker program he released in teledrama that program was special because it allowed for intelligent links between objects instead of having to adjust a drawing by hand the files were interactive adjust one object and the rest would follow suit with the success he saw with IntelliJ onething decided it was time for him to form his own company one of the new technologies that caught his eyes was the stylus now not that stylus the stylus on the pen computers by a company called go back in 1993 go ruled the day for pen based computers and they were even in development of their own pen based operating system after Jonathan convinced Charlie Jackson to spend the money the pair founded their next company futurewave software and started work on a pen based version of intelligent they called smart sketch it's too bad though that once they finished the program in 1994 AT&T had just bought out go and frustrated with the company's lack of progress pulled the plug on the project futurewave was left without a market and it seemed the only way to make anything back on the software they had developed was to port it over to Windows and Macintosh computers this didn't pan out too well though since their program was just one of many in the PC market alongside more established programs like Adobe Illustrator and Aldus freehand if there was any way smart sketch was going to survive it would have to be by being salvaged into something else after some experimentation in 1995 with animation features in the program feature we've decided to combine their product with another new technology they experimented with an embedded java animation player but after abysmal performance moved on to creating a netscape navigator plugin originally the program was going to be called smart sketch animator but since smart sketch was mostly unknown other names were tossed around like cel animator and eventually futuresplash animator futurewave was nervous though about their relative obscurity and attempted twice to sell off futuresplash to a larger and more influential company first they tried Adobe and were rejected because of the softwares at the time limited performance they tried again with fractal design who they rejected because they proved to be uninterested in future waves animation software left with no other options the company relented and released futuresplash animator by themselves in 1996 to moderate success thanks to interest from Microsoft and Disney online the animation tool began to gain more mainstream popularity by the end of the year micro media had contacted future wave about acquiring their animation tool renaming into its more familiar name Macromedia flash what made flush ideal for online video was its ease of use in small file sizes even macro media's own director produced files in the megabytes of size well flash files were about 1/10 of that being said small meant loading times were much shorter and in the days of slow dial-up speeds and limited internet usage and this played to flash his advantage along with micro media's decision to release the Flash Player browser plugin for free making flash the most popular format for interactive online content over its contemporaries Java QuickTime RealNetworks and Windows Media Player after being bundled in with the popular web browsers of the day as well as Windows XP 92% of Internet users had Flash Player installed at first flush was a pretty basic animation tool it had a few options for vector graphics bitmapped images and limited sound both each annual released the program became more capable along with smaller changes like the introduction of mp3 audio micro media began toying with the idea of interactive content and flash ActionScript somewhere to JavaScript enabled flash to do far more than just animations the level of interactivity it offered gave way for a slew of rich Internet applications and more importantly games that could be played right in your web browser the list of multimedia features flash offer just continued to grow after taking a hiatus from the program Jonathan Gaye experimented with something he called tin can online video conferencing through flash which meant that flash could now handle video streaming of course this feature didn't go unnoticed eventually acting as the backbone for an obscure little website called YouTube the same year YouTube was born Adobe was finally convinced of the flash project they had turned down the years before and bought out all of Macromedia under Adobe Flash brought support for more multimedia formats introduced more animation tools and even some fancy new features like 3d support it seemed that nothing could even hope to dismantle the Adobe Flash Kingdom and yet all it took was one pocket-sized problem the year 2007 brought the introduction of a new must-have product the iPhone of course one of the major selling points of the iPhone was that has supported fully featured web browsing on a portable device when most other smartphones vide simplified versions of webpages fully featured web browsing on the iPhone is somewhat of a stretch though in Apple's most notable omission was Flash Player despite criticisms for not supporting flash on Apple's mobile devices Steve Jobs published an open letter stating my Apple would continue excluding flash jobs accused flash of being controlled by Adobe unlike the more open html5 CSS and JavaScript standards he also mentioned Flash's trebled security record as well as stating that flash was inefficient for low-power mobile processors some arguments were returned that Apple's App Store was just as closed as flash was in response Apple did allow for flash programs to be exported into apps through Adobe's iOS packager but they never did give five support for their web browser even Adobe itself the year after the jobs letter sees development on flash support for mobile browsers altogether in the interest of supporting as many users as possible most web developers moved toward newer standards like html5 and WebGL which not only could do what flash could do but we're also open standards and could be used by mobile devices and desktops alike thanks to these changing standards flash support dropped fairly quickly with even Adobe in 2015 urging developers to move away Chrome as of 2016 blogs flash content an earlier this year Adobe announced that its support of Flash would cease by 2020 some petitions have gone around in attempts to have Adobe Flash made open sourced but even those petitions are realistic about Flash and are interested mostly in legacy support for older flash based websites flash for all intents and purposes and the modern web is dead something pretty odd to hear when just ten years before almost every web application was flash based websites like Club Penguin new grounds and YouTube growl built on flash and while some evolve to newer standards in order to stay relevant others still use flash and in most browsers are as good as dead the named flash couldn't be more accurate in describing the platform whose popularity grew and fell so quickly essentially a flash of the pan even though it's fallen into disuse flash has played a major role in creating the web as we know it today not bad for something that started out as a science fair project [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Science Elf

Views: 631,838

Keywords: computers, technology, software, computer history, macintosh, apple lisa, mac, apple 2, flash, adobe, adobe flash, shockwave flash, flash games

Id: AznYSnJEjSU

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2017