Good morning. Hello. How are you? I don’t feel like writing this morning. Maybe today is the day I throw it all in, abandon the single greatest creative endeavor of my sad life. Is this the thrilling part of being subscribed to a daily journaling newsletter? That at any moment you might witness the implosion of it all? Do you all secretly wish for this whole enterprise to blow up? I hope not, I hope not. My head hurts, but Jane says she’s going to go to Camp today. We have forty minutes. She is sitting behind me drawing something into the notes app of her computer. We are listening to an original vinyl pressing of Love and Rockets’ fourth album, Love and Rockets. Jane likes Love and Rockets.
I am going to get out of writing today by writing an essay that’s been tumbling around in my head for oh, a decade. I took some notes a month or so ago and then forgot to finish that up. So here you go.
Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash.
Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs wrote his famous essay “Thoughts on Flash.” It is widely regarded to have killed Flash off. Flash was a cross-platform multimedia authoring system from Adobe. Well, that was part of the problem. Adobe did not create flash. Adobe bought Flash. It started out as FutureWave SmartSketch in 1993. In 1995, it bacame FutureSplash, which is when I discovered it: 1996 in the graphics department at Ernst & Young. Later that year, it was sold to Macromedia and rebranded Flash 1.0. It had an authoring suite, an IDE, as we’d call them these days, and a player version, that lived on the computer of the user viewing the Flash App: either a standalone player or a plug-in that lived in a browser.
Flash at that time was awesome: it was a way for animators and designers to deliver things over the internet to users that… looked good. We all wanted the Star Trek LCARS interface, and the WWW consortium gave us nothing but text and a blink tag. Flash was the way. Flash was the future. By 2005, says Wikipedia: “more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including Java, QuickTime, RealNetworks, and Windows Media Player.” By this time, Flash had a full-featured, amazing, JavaScript based coding language called ActionScript (god I loved ActionScript). It had full-featured (secure!) video distribution that was the basis of technologies such as Brightcove and Hulu. Flash ruled the internet, and the internet loved Flash.
But then, at the end of 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia, the then-owners of Flash, and everything went to shit. Within five years, it would be all but dead (though its ubiquity ensured that it stumbled along for years longer).
Why?
Flash’s demise mirrors the near-death experience of Apple. When FutureSplash was developed, it was built with a Mac focus, as much software for designers was, because the Mac ruled the design space. As Apple slowly descended into irrelevance, companies such as Adobe, who were focused on software for creators back then and not, like, adtech, had to pivot to the PC along with the design departments of America.
This lead Flash on the Mac to become a second-class citizen. And, perversely, Adobe got it exactly backwards on the way it made the Mac a second-class citizen: the development environment, the Flash IDE, was actually super good on the mac all the way till the end of days.
But the player software sucked.
Which meant that every user of Flash on a Mac got a lesser experience.
I ran a dev shop primarily focused on Flash content at this time, and let me tell you: it was a fucking nightmare. You could make your Flash app in the IDE, and export it out fort the players, into the .swf format. You could open that player file on the PC and you could get 30, 40 fps on middle-cost hardware. Open the same .swf App on the highest-end of Macs, and you would be lucky to get 10 fps.
This sucked.
And it was not immediately apparent to the layperson whether it was Adobe’s fault or the Mac Hardware’s. Which, if you made the Mac hardware, also sucked. And it sucked even more if it was not your fault.
Spoiler alert: it was not the hardware’s fault.
Adobe completely ignored this problem for years. We developers would complain. Apple would complain. Everyone would complain.
The CEO of Apple did not like this one bit.
Which, who cares, right? “Pooh pooh, writing’s on the wall,” thought Adobe. “Sure, you got your cool founder back as CEO and he put out this nifty iMac that’s taking over the world, but designers are still moving to PCs, the Mac is done.” Never mind the iMac was sweeping the world as a new, beloved consumer machine. Never mind Adobe got it backwards and made a great IDE for the Mac but a crap player and that strategy was exactly inverse to the nominal logic at play.
Adobe’s move was rational. But it sucked, and it was contributory to the Mac’s decline. Flash was so ubiquitous, running the video (via Brightcove, Hulu or more) for almost every network online, and touching the consumer’s web experience perhaps dozens of times a day.
Adobe singlehandedly made the mac slow. This is my theory, my thesis. Others will disagree. At the time, there were endless debates about it, about the processor choices Apple made, about the hardware choices, about how fast a Mac was compared to a comparably-spec’d PC, about how fast it was. The Mac was a bit overpriced compared to a similarly-spec’d PC, as it is now. But unlike now, the Mac was also a ton slower than an identically-spec’d PC. There may have been a bunch of different reasons for this, but I will posit that one of the biggest was Adobe’s haughty attitude toward the Mac.
And, if you’re the CEO of Apple, that’s one reason you can’t fix.
This was all entirely rational for Adobe, but unfortunately, a sea-change was about to take place, and that company you were pooh poohing as a has-been suddenly changed the world with the iPhone.
From there, things fell apart quickly. The iPhone’s ascent was (relatively) swift (no pun intended), the demand for cross-platform authoring tools grew and grew, and Flash was just sitting there as the ideal cross-platform tool. I wanted Flash on the iPhone so bad. I did not want to send all my developers to the Big Nerd Ranch to learn Objective-C. This cost me tens of thousands of dollars. Would have preferred to avoid that.
The thing I’m struck with, reading the text of Steve’s thoughts, all these years later, is how many of the supposed “issues” with Flash are issues today — issues with developing in Objective C or Swift, issues with using the third-party, Flash like authoring systems that are allowed today like Unity or ReactNative — how many of the issues Steve cited were red herrings.
Unity and ReactNative are not “open.” Neither, really, is the iPhone. And a Flash successor, Epic Games with their Unreal Engine, has proven to be a far more formidible and tenacious foe than Adobe ever was. Steve basically invented this foe by killing Flash.
The cross-platform “concerns” Steve had have been made moot. Unity is cross platform. It is widely deployed. It works fine. Apple still has a bug ups butt about this, as evidenced by their endless dream of game developers coding only in their tech, and somehow winning. But Apple still sucks at games, fifteen years later, and they’re still parroting the hilarious lies that Steve puts forth in this essay: that they don’t suck.
“Full Web” is still something the iPhone (and the iPad, especially) still suck at, fifteen years later. Most people have gotten over this, but this doesn’t mean there’s still tons of shit you can’t do on iOS. Apple killed off Flash, wiped its content from the internet completely, pretending they care about “full web” but still can’t be arsed to make an OS for the iPad that shows a browser screen the way it does on a desktop. It was a lie, Steve never cared.
It was also a lie that Flash couldn’t handle touch, that whole paragraph was classic Steve dissembling. Flash and its big brother, Director, had been being used in kiosks in Museums and Airports for over a decade at that point. Just flat-out, made-up, bullshitting.
Security. Flash was supposedly this horrible security risk. It wasn’t. You just had to code it well. And in any case, we have an AB test with Flash, since it was on Macs, and I guess an AC test as well, since it was on Android. Hard to claim the security issue was “all that.” It is worth noting that at the same time Steve was putting forth this argument about being a terrible security risk, he was going on about how secure Macs — Flash and all — were more secure than windows.
Video got worse on the web, for a long time, before it got better again, after Flash died.
It seems clear Steve killed Flash out of pettiness. Or maybe the same lunatic ambition that got him into hot water with the book publishers. He clearly didn’t want any third-party development environments.
But also, Steve was right. Flash sucked on the Mac, Adobe ignored Apple, Apple turned into the world’s most powerful company, and they got their comeuppance.
But Apple only crushed Flash because it could, with the iPhone.
But it feels like, to me, that Adobe would have, by the time “Thoughts on Flash” was written, moved hell or high water to make Flash perform on the iPhone.
But, then, iOS is a stripped-down MacOS and Apple didn’t have faith in this, and wasn’t going to have Adobe making their phone slow. This is reasonable.
But also, on the other hand, Flash is awesome. It did amazing interfaces that cannot be done anywhere else. It’s absence would be felt for a long time.
Not coincidentally, with much fanfare and Apple rah-rahing, Unity was launched in 2005. It came to the iPhone with the app store in 2008.
(This is a key point, by the way: when we are talking about the launch of the iPhone, we’re talking about those 2-3 years before the app store. Flash was the only way iPhone users had any chance of consuming the multimedia content that dominated the web. For three years, iPhone users just… couldn’t.)
So, now, here we are. We have Unity and Unreal Engine instead of Flash. Only one works on the iPhone at the moment because, quelle surprise, Apple is fighting with a cross-platform app dev engine again... Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
We have CSS and DHTML in the browser, they still can’t do what Flash could do, but they do it… faster. On Macs. Not especially faster on iPhones, as Safari mobile still kinda sucks for AJAX.
Flash was awesome. Flash banners were better. Flash video was better. Flash was better than DHTML. Flash had a great GUI that we STILL don't really have for DHTML. Or do we? I don't know. I left the industry.
Steve was right about Flash but also he was wrong.
But it really was Adobe's fault. Who would have ever expected Steve to have some, you know, grace. Not his forte.
Adobe’s market cap, today, dwarf’s Unity’s and Epic Games combined. They are probably over it.
But I’m not.
Today’s Media of the Day is my Vimeo page, with 100 or so of Barbarian’s best Flash projects. I meticulously captured each and every one of these using screen capture software, and converted them to video form before the very last Flash Player for Mac was deprecated into oblivion.
Also, ironically, a chunk of that work was for Apple, who hired us originally because Steve liked a Flash site we had made.
If you are a Barbarian fan, you will also enjoy my Barbarian nostagia site, Itsgonnabeawesome.squarespace.com. Because apparently I let itsgonnabeawesome.com lapse. Gotta get on that.
oh man, the squarespace site is awesome... I will say I was sad to see my favorite shoot missing from the Texas office. It happily lives on my paid Flickr account. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryeclifton/albums/72157624407552967/with/4828726093