The Adobe Flash Farewell Tour 2020: LibreOffice to axe export support for .SWF in version 7 LibreOffice has joined the rest of the industry to hammer another nail in the coffin of Adobe's Flash technology with the removal of an export filter from the suite. Noted by Phoronix, the death knell of the tech that, frankly, most had forgotten was even there in the first place was noted not with fireworks but with a terse …
Exactly, I agree. Flash haters are only viewing this through the lens of business outcomes; over the past 20 years there have been hundreds of THOUSANDS of artists, both paid and fan/independent, who have created Flash-based art. Now I've backed up an older version of the Flash installer to allow me to continue to access my legacy art trove, but future potential viewers may have a lot of difficulty accessing this equivalent of an online art museum.
there was an old shockwave game I downloaded years ago that I thought was pretty fun. Obviously won't run NOW. Has anyone considered an application to EXPORT THESE INTO A BETTER FORMAT?
last I checked certain movie players could play flash videos. so maybe use ffmpeg to convert them? I think it'll work...
Flash *video* is a piece of piss to access. flv and swf are just containers in this context, and carry standard video types (including h264).
In these cases, ffmpeg doesn't even need to recode, just extract the video from the containter, and stick it into a more common container.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video#Media_type_support
Usefully extracting other flash media from .swf files is a different kettle of fish, though I have in the past used opensource tools (I forget which) to pull apart swf files, and (e,g.) extract static images that may exist.
There are still large companies *cough*Vanguard*cough* who try to convince clients to conduct sales chats with a Flash client, and get all confused when you tell them you'd rather eat vomit. They see it as a failing of the stupid customer who won't cooperate rather than as a massive techincal fail from their employer.
Disney's partner site requires flash to be able to do anything - the only way they will accept designs etc. for approval. Knowing how badly their IT is behind (EDI project we were told would be live Q4 2017 has still to materialise to even beta stage) they'll probably insist we carry on using it beyond the end of the year as well.
Anon for obvious reasons.
They* say you should learn something new every day! Well, LibreOffice having Flash/SWF support was something I'd never realised until reading this article and nor was it anything I'd ever wanted.
* No, I don't know who "they" are, either. Sometimes I wish they'd just shut up!
I don't know about All 4, but I come across sites that absolutely insist you have Flash installed UNLESS it detects you are using an iDevice, at which point it suddenly all works without Flash. I wasn't bothered enough to spend too much time testing what the site was looking for, but simple browser identification strings didn't seem to be the answer.
The site does work, but C4 have made some poor choices. (Nearly?) Everything from Derry Girls to Spaced works On Demand, and live broadcast works as well, without flash. Android and IOS devices do get told to download the app(and seemingly are blocked from normal web player usage), simply pretending you're using a desktop will bypass it. The mobile block looks even more self serving when the site is already using a responsive layout.
Separately, Channel 4 has good IOS and Android apps, and a primitive Windows Store app which iirc lets you bypass the login requirement.
If Channel 4 had half the money the money the BBC spends on their website this clearly wouldn't be an issue. Ideally, the Beeb would let the other broadcasters use their platform for a nominal cost, so that we wouldn't have to deal with this.
But I bet my Excel 2019 outperforms your Excel 2010 in terms number of crashes per day, strange decisions around how undo works, and how long bugs are still around that got reported when Windows 3.11 was the new kid on the block.
I admit, all of those are bad things, but hey...
It was a neat feature, and one, along with PDF export, that showed that you didn't need expensive closed-source software to get results.
Admittedly, I think I actually only used it once, to convert a presentation for display on the web (since, at that time, almost everyone had the Flash plug-in, which was more than you could say for either Impress itself or a certain other presentation application that you would have to pay for, with limited platform availability), but I was glad it was there.
But, yes, Flash is now a liability, and it would be great if there was an HTML 5 exporter instead.
I did like the Xiao Xiao Stick Figure Fighting SWFs back in the day.
Fortunately, they are preserved, E.G. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y
In fact the style still seems to be somewhat of an apprentice piece -
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stick+figure+fights
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