Digital Publishing
1 min read

An Ode to Adobe Flash

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Most of you have probably seen the news from Adobe, but I still want to throw in my two cents.

Adobe has finally put a date on the ‘Death of Flash’ that we’ve all heard so much about over the last couple of years.

They will be supporting and providing updates for Flash through the end of 2020. After that, Flash will beautifully drift off like a summer sunset, most likely using a sweet quadratic easing equation, becoming an ever more distant blip in Internet history.  A history that encompasses everything from enabling the online video revolution, to a short, awkward, phase in my career where my #1 client request was to “make a cool intro animation for my website!!”. Most importantly for us, it enabled Nxtbook to create a product that others were only dreaming about in the early days of digital publishing.

Seeing an official end of life date from Adobe, I can’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia for the technology that I built my career on so many years ago, but its time has passed. I have long moved on, and I must strive to remember how Flash brought beauty and order to the chaos of the browser wars and allowed me to build full rich web based applications at a time when HTML designers were still experimenting with the blink tag, rather than just as “those annoying ads that killed my mom’s computer that one time”.

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