Safari Technology Preview Release Notes – Release 109:

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It was a good run, Flash. See ya.

Last week Vice posted an article on Rob Ford’s newly published book, Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today.

The 640-page book, full of pictures of interactive websites from prior eras, benefits from taking a wide view of the visual culture of the past: Starting at the embryonic stages of the World Wide Web, it follows the art of web design through periods of extreme experimentation on the way to the convention-driven scaffolding we have today. The book makes a compelling case through its general structure that the sweet spot of creative web design came during the late 1990s through the mid-2000s—periods in which major brands were willing to invest a whole lot of money in a website intended for show, not just tell.

Ford’s main perspective is that Flash is responsible for the Internet’s most creative era.

I started my career as a designer in the “sweet spot” Ford highlights in his book, so I am both biased and knowledgeable about the breakthroughs in web/interactive design of the period. I remember Joshua Davis and his website Praystation, where he posted his digital art experiments in Flash on an almost daily basis. Davis also provided his pre-compiled source files for anyone to take and run with. There was also Eric Natzke, James Paterson (Presstube), Robert Hodgin (flight 404) and dozens of other digital artists and experimentors pushing the envelope with what was possible with Flash on the Web.

Then there were all the nascent digital agencies blazing a trail in web design like Huge, Big Spaceship, grupoW, hi-res, RG/A, Kioken, group94, and Firstborn to name a few.

It was also during this period that I was a contributing editor to one of the larger web design portals, Moluv (it’s actually still up). As a young designer I’d sift through hundreds of website submissions every day to find just a small handful that were actually great — great interactivity, great typography, great animation, and great content.

Sure, you could say Ford and I are looking back at the Web through a rose-colored, 72dpi monitor, but it’s a fact that every immersive website – powered by HTML, Javascript, and CSS – you see today on design portals like Awwwards, siteinspire, and Designer News has it’s roots in the experimental Flash sites of the early 2000s.

Parallax scrolling, custom typefaces, scripted motion, dynamic masking, video backgrounds, interactive 3-D objects — these all began life on the Web as Flash websites.

There are also interesting comments on this Vice article over at Slashdot.org. Many of the comments are negative, shitting on Flash as a buggy plug-in, plagued by endless security holes. While the security concerns around Flash are very real (Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash in 2020), this discounts all creative work created in Flash.

Flash’s greatest contribution to the world of digital design is it lowered the barrier to entry for creating experimental, immersive, digital experiences. Designers and artists were no longer stuck with static HTML and images. They could now express themselves though motion, sound, and interactivity. If he or she was unable to figure out how to achieve a particular effect, they could go one of the many vibrant forums and find the answer – and source files – from someone else.

The GOP Just Killed Consumer Broadband Privacy Protections:

As most had expected, the House of Representatives today voted 215 to 205 to kill privacy rules protecting US broadband subscribers. If you’re interested in a little thing called public accountability, you can find a breakdown of which Representatives voted for the measure here. The rules, approved by the FCC last fall, were slated to take effect this month.

But thanks to relentless lobbying by the broadband and marketing industries, the GOP quickly rushed to dismantle the rules at ISP request. The effort involved using the Congressional Review Act, which only lets Congress kill recently passed regulations, but prevents the regulator in question from implementing the same regulations down the road.

The rules would have required that ISPs transparently disclose private data collection and sales, while requiring ISPs have consumers opt in to the collection of more private financial or browsing history data.

Today’s vote came after the Senate voted 50-48 last week to kille the rules. The vote to dismantle the rules is seen as one of the more brazen examples of pay-to-play politics in recent memory. It’s a massive win for giant ISPs; especially those like AT&T and Verizon that are pushing hard into the Millennial advertising business.

Alright, this is really bad, but I try to be an optimist. One of my design professors used to say, “The solution to the problem lies within the problem itself.”

So privacy rules are going away. Fine. This means we have to be vigilant and take matters into our own hands.

Although it was a very different situation, this reminds me of a lawsuit that occurred in the pre-iPhone 2006-07 period, banning the use of plugin technologies, like Flash, on the Internet. Eolas had brought forth the lawsuit against Microsoft and their Explorer web browser in relation to one of their patents. It sounded really bad for those of us who designed websites for a living but didn’t understand much about the technologies of the Web.

Then a developer I worked with named Geoff Stearns figured out a clever workaround to deploy Flash objects with Javascript. He wasn’t the only developer to figure this out. Like the light bulb, multiple people had figured out very similar solutions all around the same time. It actually made Flash sites more usable since it allowed for the HTML-only version of a page to display if the user didn’t have Flash. This meant that even after the lawsuit was dropped/settled, the web development community continued to use the Javascript workaround to build Flash sites.

I bring this story up to only to wonder if out of all the developers and software engineers responsible for helping create the Internet and keep it running, there are at least a few of them who have ideas on countering this privacy legislation.

Incredible desktop experience on 200miles.com for The Revenant.

It reminds me of the golden age of Flash websites from 10 years ago. Truly immersive experiences that pushed the boundaries of ‘what is a website?’.

We’re finally at the point where we no longer need ‘plug-in’ technologies (i.e., Flash) to fill the holes in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Update: I just viewed it on my iPhone 6 Plus and they’ve adjusted the experience to work on mobile. Incredible.

Techcrunch: Adobe Launches Animate CC, Previously Known As Flash Professional:

Adobe tells me that about a third of the content product in Flash Professional was actually HTML5 content — so the old name really didn’t make sense anymore. “HTML5 has become the standard and this reflects the tool’s role,” Adobe evangelist Paul Trani told me. “We don’t care what you want to do. Want to do Flash? Fantastic.”

Trani noted that, with some very minor exceptions, HTML5 can now replace Flash for almost all standard use cases that Animate CC’s users were looking for.

I used Macromedia Adobe Flash for many years to make immersive, interactive experiences long before it was even close to possible to do it with HTML and JavaScript.

It’s great to see Adobe get with the times and adjust course with it’s products. I haven’t used Animate CC yet, but I’m hoping it’s good. The need to create interactive experiences and animations is more important than ever in today’s websites and mobile applications.

Facebook’s new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash:

Alex Stamos, the recently appointed chief security officer at Facebook, has called on software company Adobe to announce an “end-of-life date for Flash.” In a pair of tweets sent over the weekend, Stamos echoed a number of recent complaints from the security community that the software has become the vector for just too many hacking vulnerabilities.

Adobe Flash has become the grandpa you cant leave home alone. It’s best days are behind it (as far as the Web is concerned) and it’s just too much of a liability.

“Holy shit, Grandpa tried to make tea, but he burnt down the house!!!”

I’ll remember the good days, though, Flash. Flash was one of the primary applications I had open every day from 2000 until around 2008. It gave us designers the ability to use any typeface we wanted on websites, create video backgrounds, and make truly immersive experiences—like the ones you can do today in HTML/CSS/JS.

Once the iPhone came out, though, its days were numbered. Flash was never designed to run (efficiently) on a mobile phone.

It’s time to retire, Flash. You’re done.

It’s great to see Joshua Davis is not only still creating great designs, but also using Flash, a technology we keep hearing is no longer relevant in today’s mobile world.

As you can see from the Voice Visualizer application Davis created, Flash is an extremely powerful instrument in the right hands, capable of outputting immersive work that HTML5 and Javascript (still) can’t even come close to.

(Hat tip Analogue)