Oh em gee – Adobe kills Flash Professional (it's called Animate now) Adobe has released updates to its Creative Cloud application suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Premiere Pro. Crucially, it has announced a change of direction for its Flash Professional design tool, which will be called Adobe Animate in the next version, due in early 2016. Ten years ago, Adobe's Flash plug …
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Indeed, other than a few added features, the Windows APIs have remained virtually untouched. Other than the new "App" subsystems, nothing really changed that between 7 and 8 (architecturally speaking). Signed drivers compiled for 7 will run just fine under 8, 8.1 or even 10 (and their associated server versions). And with the security improvements made, its far more likely that a product would run under 7 but not anything later...
I suspect that Adobe is really just dependent on undocumented and unsupported API calls that are intended only for internal OS components.
>I suspect that Adobe is really just dependent on undocumented and unsupported API calls that are intended only for internal OS components.
If that's true (seeming to validate Dan Paul's suggestion above), have they always had the privileged access to these APIs that this would require? (Unless they are actually shit-hot reverse-engineers of binary code, which ... nah.)
And if *that's* true, then how come practically all their software runs like complete turd after the first 10 minutes (max)?
> have they always had the privileged access to these APIs that this would require?
I'm thinking that its more of the reverse, that they have always used the undocumented stuff, then find out that it doesn't work anymore, then whine and complain to Microsoft until they put the old calls back in. Adobe does have a massive install base (Wouldn't want to alienate several million potential users), so they have quite a lot of leverage with Microsoft and Apple as far as software is concerned and would thus be able to pry the secrets of fast (and insecure) performance from them. Mostly to keep out the competitors who only have access to the publicly documented stuff, I would assume.
This is starting to change with HTML5 becoming more and more popular, but they'll still have everyone by the dangly bits until we completely move away from Flash and PDFs (As well as finding a good replacement for their photo and video editing suites, but since its a niche, its not quite as important as Flash and Reader)
> And if *that's* true, then how come practically all their software runs like complete turd after the first 10 minutes (max)?
Because a lot of the OS's garbage collecting and caching systems work much better with the standard, documented calls using data structures that they understand, with the undocumented calls, the GC and optimization stuff gets confused and stuff goes wrong
Thanks for the insight!
I'd say that "privileged access in advance" vs. "throwing toys oot the pram and getting their way after the fact" is pretty moot, but actually the latter does sound more plausible :)
I do however dislike the idea of PDF being tarred with the same brush as Flash. The "standard" does have its dropped bollocks no doubt, but most of the security headaches are surely implementation-based. I find it a hugely useful format if used sanely, and there's nothing to touch it in the business of digitally specifying a print job. I'd hate to see the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
That said, a really top-flight tool for editing existing PDFs still sadly eludes the FOSS community. LibreOffice Draw and to a limited extent Scribus are the best I've come across; anyone have any other faves?
> I suspect that Adobe is really just dependent on undocumented and unsupported API calls that are intended only for internal OS components.
It may be even worse than that.
From my experiences with trying to get software working with Wine, the majority of software that works tends to be the well-written, well-behaved software. The software that has issues are the ones that rely on undocumented glitches and API calls that work accidentally, that nobody realised was wrong, particularly with side-effects of DirectX calls.
Yet IOS Safari looks semi mothballed, refusing to roll forwards towards the HTML standards!
Double standards?
Nah, Jobsian bullshit. It is what he was famous for, but who really cares if it gets the billions rolling in from the punters.
Most people use both. They are the ordinary punters who just want thinks to work, and have no deep feelings for the security breaches Flash and Java assist. Turning them off makes a lot of popular sites cease to work well, or at all. What do you want them to do? The intertubes are for everyone, not just us super brainiac types.
flash has only recently been overtaken as the best (read: widest support,lowest resource impact) way to design interactive web apps and animation.
in fact it was dominating the web 7yrs before this author thinks it had promise... at least that was the first time i authored a flash file.
i'll bash flash with the rest of em... but fucking hell, it was bliss compared to RealMedia anything.
I suspect that is rather the point of the rebrand - to remind the Flash Professional users that there is an alternative - the "perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future." part of the Jobsian quote.
The easiest way to get rid of flash is to make it easier to convert old projects to HTML5
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