It makes me laugh whenever there's a post about anticheat on the frontpage and without missing a beat there's always a comment there - "why don't they just run the entire game logic server side and stream the updates to the client??? are they stupid?"
If the dev team had a nickel for every time someone complained about the name, there would have enough money by now to fund the development of a UI revamp.
Now if they had a nickel for everytime someone complained about the bad UI...
But do they want to do a full UI revamp? My impression is that a lot of people in the gimp ecosystem are happy to be aggressively unwelcoming to a broader audience. They don't see the name or the poor ux as a bug, but as a feature, and actively attack people who want to fix these issue. They call then "snowflakes" and "SJWs" and are gleeful when they fail to make any kinds of improvements.
Some of these people can be found in this very thread.
The problem with gimp is not one of budgets, it's that many of the people involved in gimp see its current state as how things should be.
I can't speak for everyone, but as developers we are trying to emphasis UX/UI work more. We have a dedicated repo now for user feedback, designs, and proposed solutions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues
We implement from there as we can, once consensus has been reached.
We also highlight UX/UI improvements in each new release post. Just like with coding, we rely on volunteers to help with this (you definitely don't want someone like me deciding on interfaces!)
We have a couple active designers assisting us, but we're always looking for more feedback!
Perfect illustration of why it's really easy to see the parallels between the immaturity of not wanting to change the UI and the immaturity of not wanting to change the name. "Glimpse" was a fantastic idea and resistance to it is pure childishness.
Were computers common in schools in India in the early 90s? I was born in 1993, so this is a bit early from my time, but when I was in a (government) school computers started appearing in the early 2000s. They became common in households way later, probably around the late 2000s.
Also funny that your name clicked something in my head to check your profile, and yep you're indeed the Flash guy!
Back in the 2005-2010 era I was making Flash games as a hobby and used to browse a bunch of related forums/sites (flashkit, gotoAndPlay) for tutorials. Your name always stuck out since you're one of the few Indians who were well known for their expertise :)
Yes, Computers in the 90s were rare in India and even rarer in the North-Eastern region. I took every opportunity to be around computers during school and college days, mostly helping out pro bono. I might have visited and helped almost every commercial establishment with computers in my town. Fortunately, I also had a weird cousin, much older than me, who reads and talks about some of the weirdest things in the world. He had a computer in his study room in the early 90s. I was, I think, the only person allowed to touch his computer. Around the time when the Internet was launched in India (Aug 15, 1995), he told me that the world would soon become all connected with computers, “Imagine working for a company in the USA, while sitting in your home in India. Learn the Internet.” My ultimate goal during college was to leave that town as soon as I could. I started to understand all of his ramblings and weirdness as truths way later in life. btw, the Internet reached that town only around the mid-2000s and was an ultimate luxury.
Ah! Flash. Yes, I was lucky to be there. Invited inside Macromedia (first from India, and I think only one too for that thingy), listened to Gary Grossman talking about ActionScript, and worked with the whoswho of Flash at that time. Got my name listed in the Flash IDE’s credits roll, and all that Jazz. ;-)
Ah that tracks with my experience later too. Even in the mainland, computers were pretty rare for us regular folk. Early in the 2000's, my father for whatever reason assumed computers would be hugely influential in the future and borrowed money to buy one for us. Mostly meant for my older sibling who was in high school, it didn't take his interest but worked its charm on me hah.
And thanks for the pictures! I was a kid during this time, so had no contact with any professionals. Just other kids on various places like Newgrounds and other forums. I remember emailing Armor Games and Miniclip for sponsorship for my shoddy games and understandably not receiving a reply ;)
Nostalgic see to those giant beige CRT computers, that damn copy of Flash MX and people just goofing off haha.
If you were into Flash, you would realize that the people you see in the pictures are Colin Mook, Branden Hall (you’d have definitely read their books), Aral Balkan, Flashguru (aka Guy Watson), Jesse Warden, and (forgotten the names of the few others).
There's honestly a ton more, you can download the archive and go through the various community lists in there. I've spent a few evenings just having a few drinks and playing some old games! :D
I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.
Related that r/selfhosted has banned AI built projects except on Fridays[1] to keep up with the increased deluge of garbage, which are mostly built for CV padding rather than making anything useful for the community.
> There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security
That's only one side of it. Flash was the precursor to the indie/mobile gamedev industry we have today (Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games), before smartphones become ubiquitous. Not to mention some rather creative websites, albeit at the cost of accessibility .
Flash's only fault was it's creators were gobbled up by Adobe, who left it in the shitter and ignored the complaints people had about it's security issues.
Arguably, so is the web. A long series of extremely complicated and constantly changing data formats that are nightmarishly difficult to parse, which has to be done in C++ for speed reasons, combined with a full scripting language, which has to be JIT compiled for speed reasons, combined with 30 years of legacy and a security model that was completely ad hoc and more discovered than designed (e.g. the different variants of the same origin policy). Take that and add on top a browser community that doesn't philosophically recognize any limits on what the web is meant to do, so it just keeps getting more and more APIs until one day both Mozilla and the Chrome team decided to just stop pretending and build full blown operating systems on top of them.
I don't think Flash was harder to secure than HTML itself. People just gave up trying because browser vendors used security to purge the web of anything they didn't control.
Right, so that was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that. All three of Flash, PDF, and the browser DOM are expansive, ambitious metaformats, containers for every piece of technology that has ever had a bug.
Your take on why Flash didn't survive is more cynical than mine. I genuinely think Apple threw up their hands at the prospect of attempting to solve a security problem on the same scale as the browser itself (something it took them a long time to get a handle on --- along with everyone else --- even after they put the kibosh on Flash).
My memory of this time is getting a bit fuzzy tbh, but from what I remember Google in the first part of the 2010s put Flash inside their renderer sandbox and Safari/Firefox were still lagging on browser sandboxing at that time. I think Adobe had shared the plugin code with Google to make this possible.
There are certainly obvious issues with securing a third party codebase you don't control, and it's likely that the browser makers had more budget to spend on security than Adobe. But there was no technical reason Flash couldn't have been treated as an alternative rendering engine from a sandboxing perspective, and I think Chrome did it. Pepper was an initiative to generalize that. Blink is full of holes as other comments point out and it's only the kernel sandboxing that makes adding new features viable at all.
I'm cynical because when the browser makers talked about phasing out plugins it wasn't primarily security they talked about. This blog post talks about speed and energy usage first:
"While Flash historically has been critical for rich media on the web, today in many cases HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption."
Security isn't mentioned, perhaps because trying to argue that their own pile of C++ was somehow meaningfully more robust than Adobe's big pile of C++ wasn't going to be convincing.
Their writings about this were also very heavy on "open web" ideology, although the SWF format was documented by that point and openness doesn't go well with deliberately wiping out a tech that was voluntarily deployed by 80%+ of websites. If openness means anything it means open to extension, which plugins provided and forcing everyone to use HTML5 did not. When they deprecated NPAPI they even sort of admitted to this:
"The Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) ushered in an early era of web innovation by offering the first standard mechanism to extend the browser. In fact, many modern web platform features—including video and audio support—first saw mainstream deployment through NPAPI-based plug-ins. But the web has evolved. Today’s browsers are speedier, safer, and more capable than their ancestors."
I always found this blog post curiously worded. It has a Fukuyama-style "end of history" vibe to it. Yes plugins boosted innovation because the web platform always lagged years behind, but now the web has "evolved" and the innovation era isn't needed anymore.
This deserves a better response than I can give. All of this makes sense! I'm just aware of the contemporaneous takes on how hard the Flash security problem was.
This actually looks nice! I'd prefer a slide out horizontal keyboard like the X10 Mini Pro[1], but beggars can't be choosers.
I've never gotten used to the touch keyboard, since writing anything while code-switching multiple languages doesn't really work well with the predictive input. Especially if the other language has to be transliterated from a non Latin script.
Though the update policy doesn't sound too promising, 2 years of OS updates + 5 years of security updates is too short :/
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
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