{"id":1621,"date":"2022-04-03T13:26:50","date_gmt":"2022-04-03T20:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/?p=1621"},"modified":"2022-04-03T13:26:50","modified_gmt":"2022-04-03T20:26:50","slug":"the-return-of-flash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/the-return-of-flash\/","title":{"rendered":"The return of Flash?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>December 31, 2020 marked the official demise of Adobe (<em>nee<\/em> MacroMedia) Flash. On that day, a number of web-native interactive artworks (<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/grafarc.org\" target=\"_blank\">Graffiti Archaeology<\/a> among them) disappeared from public view, seemingly forever. This felt like a classic case of &#8220;why we can&#8217;t have nice things&#8221;, and it made me sad, but of course we all have had much bigger things to worry about the past couple of years, so I tried to just let it go and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Imagine my delight, then, when I learned about <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/ruffle.rs\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ruffle<\/a>, a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. I&#8217;ve been tinkering with it the past couple of days, and while it isn&#8217;t perfect, it&#8217;s really quite impressive!  Super easy to install, and when it works, it works everywhere, no fuss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The grafarc UI reveals a number of ways in which Ruffle seems to differ from the original Flash Player, which makes the user experience a lot jankier than we originally intended. (You can install the Ruffle <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/ruffle.rs\/#usage\" target=\"_blank\">browser extension<\/a> if you want to see for yourself.)  So, I won&#8217;t be switching that on by default just yet&#8211; I&#8217;ll see if I can work with the developers to fix those glitches first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I also tried it on my old <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/otherthings.com\/uw\/syn\/flash\/syn.html\" target=\"_blank\">synaesthesia visualization applet<\/a>, and there it works perfectly! (On desktop, at least&#8211; because the applet requires you to type words on a keyboard, it won&#8217;t work on mobile devices just yet.) So I&#8217;m happy to report that with one line of code, an old interactive artwork that I believed long gone has returned, unscathed, from the abyss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Long live Flash! And three cheers to the devs of Ruffle!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>December 31, 2020 marked the official demise of Adobe (nee MacroMedia) Flash. On that day, a number of web-native interactive artworks (Graffiti Archaeology among them) disappeared from public view, seemingly forever. This felt like a classic case of &#8220;why we can&#8217;t have nice things&#8221;, and it made me sad, but of course we all have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/the-return-of-flash\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The return of Flash?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,83,24,27],"tags":[212,213],"class_list":["post-1621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-interactive","category-synesthesia","category-visualization","tag-flash","tag-ruffle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1621"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1625,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621\/revisions\/1625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}