I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. — and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out.
And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
A bit earlier... when Adobe had taken over Macromedia, my hopes were really that Flash would become something like a .zip file with assets as SVG, audio, etc. and ActionScript/JavaScript as the glue... I think it could still be a good package format for browsers. Given Adobe's work prior to that on advancing/enhancing SVG support for browsers etc. Making Flash just the best of breed tool for creators.
That's not what happened though. Adobe is just a massive rental scheme at this point, and I think the time may be up sooner than later... I honestly think at this point, the first well-placed competing product with solid Linux support will unseat them. I know a lot of people are using Davinci Resolve and Photopea, and if those work well enough for you, that's great. Not sure the effort it would take to get some of the open alternatives into a better position overall.
Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only.
/dates me
JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse.
I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and Adobe for being such awful stewards of one of the most amazing web technologies.
Kids growing up today have no idea how magical Flash was. It was like Roblox or Minecraft for web.
Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease.
Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.
Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.
I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie.
What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol
1) macromedia ->
2) adobe ->
3) steve jobs
I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.
But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.
It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all.
I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation.
Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
gold
https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/
More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached.
[EDIT]
Great experience blogs on the PineNote
https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/
https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...
The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.
Basically if you want a "product" to use right now and still want to tinker, RM gives you ssh access to a system you can tinker with. RM2 has the best community support for now though.
PineNote works... but yes you will have to be ready to tinker. It's heavy and think but powerful, all the way to having a browser, audio, microSD, etc.
Meanwhile the PocketBook Verse Pro just works, no tinkering, but also tiny and not get for sketches IMHO.
I tried to turn a kobo into an eink terminal, and basically failed at getting it to the state I wanted it to be in, so the pine note is nice, but as a plug and play ereader it would be a hard sell for me.
This note was in the original comment, did you read it? The fact that it is $400 (more expensive) and has less out of the box software is literally mentioned to alert people to that.
> The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.
This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175
So much so that QuillOS which used to be Kobo focused rewrote to support the PineNote
https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill
The point is to buy hardware that is built for you to freely modify and fully own, from the start.
My post was to make sure everyone knew the PineNote was an option, because I certainly did not know it until someone on HN made me aware.
Could you maybe make your point more concrete? Are you attempting to completely dissuade people from using the PineNote because it may not be easy to side load apps to it on hacker news?. Obviously different people have different propensities to do hacking, and some may not be able to afford the PineNote due to how expensive it is, but it's not clear what the goal of your comment was.
If your goal was "invest in Kobo instead of PineNote", I disagree with that. I'm not interested in investing (whether money or time) in an ecosystem that is just going to rug pull me eventually, over nickels and dimes.
BTW for those who agree, another great option is XTeink -- very hackable, and I've bought one myself:
And there's a Linux phone out there which looks pretty encouraging too:
https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1splus/
Graphene is likely still the easier more polished option, but it's great to have options these days.
After getting that Kobo I realized that my hyper specific reading needs require a web browser with extension support (in particular support for Yomitan or similar dictionaries; the built-in dictionary functions on e-readers are awful for most non-English languages even with custom dictionaries, and KOReader isn't any better in that regard)
The Pine projects are necessary and well-motivated, but the PineNote doesn’t strike me as a reader’s device, maybe a hacker’s or someone that wants an e-ink tablet.
I'm very grateful for this information and it explains why I've avoided epub opting for pdf over epub as my reader software is old.
I'm am very much on the side of supporting backwards compatibility. It reminds me of the times the M$ used to upgrade their doc standards ... where if one hadn't upgraded, well bad luck.
PDF is not somehow immune to this either — a non-conforming implementation could similarly break what are meant to be forward-compatible extension points by raising an error on an unknown stream or object instead of (as required by the standard) ignoring it.
PDFs certainly can suck, more often those that will only work with abode's software and other viewers I've tried can not.
PDF is not nearly as pleasant under the hood. It's down right lovecraftian.
Straight HTML, edit anything everywhere. Super slick.
PDFs can be painful as well, more often it's then using abode's pdf viewer, but it's far less common for me. There was a time many years ago when I understood PDF structures better, back when I chose to manually edit and fix a couple of malformed PDFs.
As such, whenever I get my hands on an .epub file, I go to an online converter, convert it to a .pdf file and nuke it from my system. Then the .pdf gets opened in my FoxIt.
It‘s working great on Windows, as well.
There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well.
There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not even so much as a "Thanks for your interest" or a "We will get back to you".
I messaged a former colleague who worked there to try to see what the process is to get access to rmsdk. He said he tried to find internal docs about it and couldn't find anything.
I tried to find people on linkedin who might be associated with rmsdk and ask them and similarly found nothing.
Meanwhile publishers only distribute most of their titles with one of their known drm vendors ie Apple, Amazon, or Adobe. The other two are entirely closed off.
If this isn't anticompetitive trust behavior, I don't know what is.
It would be really fun to have a progress-aware AI that can give me a quick definition of entities like people and places. The other thing that would help is details about fictional mechanics. How exactly does FTL work in this universe? What were all the cultivation stages? I don’t need help with reading comprehension, I need a better way to flip back through everything and surface the key detail that was mentioned one time 500 pages ago.
Also, unfortunately my library lives in Kindle. Help me get it out, at least the DRM free stuff. I also use Royal Road extensively and pay for that. Would be great to have those live serials supported somehow.
The epub standard doesn't say what version of CSS must be supported. There were no guarantees modern CSS would work so I wouldn't call the renderer broken.
> illegal values, or values with illegal parts, are treated as if the declaration weren't there at all
So a conforming implementation would ignore that max-width property declaration, not raise an error.
And those earlier versions of ePub which defined a required subset of given CSS standards? The forwards-compatible parsing rules were part of their subset.
Ignore != Fatal error
[1] https://www.kobo.com/kobo-writing-life/blog/our-commitment-t...
The case mentioned where the CSS min() function is rejected is another place where bulk import of the extremely complex CSS spec is just not helpful. Ebook readers aren't evergreen browsers after all.
With EPUB compatibility issues CSS should always be suspect number 1. Using "modern" CSS features and complaining about missing flex boxz grid, etc is a web developer's mindset.
Just because EPUB shares some of the stack with the web doesn't mean they perfectly overlap (or even should).
Hardly any e-ink embedded e-reader devices use a browser for rendering, they all use purpose built HTML/CSS parsing and rendering toolchains, are baked into firmware and updated once in a blue moon. (If you're interested look at koreader's crengine or Crosspoint reader which runs on an ESP32!)
The blog post reeks of overly confident AI prose. But don't be fooled.
I love my Kobo (clara colour) and really, if they just removed the Adobe reader, it'd be perfect. And yes, I've tried KOreader, but never switched to it because I like my Overdrive library books and Kobo Store.
You may have already tried this, but they all work fine together. You can just exit the KOReader app and use the default Kobo stuff, then open KOReader again when you want to read something via that.
TBH i've being using an ePub reader that i occasionally had to edit ePub files so i get rid of the superfluous styling that made it either not work or show things weirdly/wrong and i've heard comments from others that a bunch of files i had no issues with personally were unreadable for them, which makes me think that unless you really and absolutely need any fancy formatting (i.e. math stuff that can't just be made images - and you really tried to!) then you should stick with the most basic HTML imaginable - things that not even IE4 would render (too) wrong.
And in turn, since i doubt this will ever happen, i sometimes ponder making an "epub reconstruct" tool that attempts to reconstruct epubs so that they use the simplest HTML/CSS :-P (ideally configurable for maximum compatibility).
I've often thought about figuring out a subset that operates fast on any computer and sticking to that for any web pages I make. If someone figured that out for epub, it would make it much, much more useful.
Got a refurbished pocketbook in the end and very happy with it, it reads all imaginable file formats and I can just send books to it via email or cable.
https://informatecdigital.com/en/Send-to-Kindle%3A-all-ways-...
"This service is free and works with both Kindle devices such as with the Kindle appIt also automatically converts many files to Amazon's internal format (such as AZW3 or KFX), as long as you respect its supported file types and size limits."
Read: requires internet connectivity to put documents on your Kindle. Depends on Amazons 'blessing'. Ends when Amazon ends support for your device. Is limited to whatever document formats (and sizes) Amazon decides to support. Internal formats on your Kindle may be DRM locked. Amazon could snoop any document transferred through that service. Could be turned into a paid service @ some point. Amazon could effectively brick your device if so desired.
(please correct if I misunderstand any of the above)
Sure, this may work for many users & they may be happy with that arrangement. But it's quite a few drawbacks. And the "planned obsolesence" smell is strong here. Me... I'll pass.
Ebook producers really should be forced to either drop drm or adopt a cross-platform standard.
KoReader also gave me a lot of freedom to manage the bad battery life of my Kobo Sage before it died of other causes. Definitely worth the extra cognitive load of dealing with the two experiences.
The publishing industry never got its head out of... some dark place. We've been able to buy mp3s without drm for ages, but somehow books are different.
Everything else is better with koreader and it’s super easy to install alongside nickel. And it works very well with calibre + the kobo plugin.
The best ebook format I have ever experienced is .txt and just let the software figure out where the text needs to go.
(Others point out that Calibre automatically will rename epub files to .kepub.epub for you if you use it to manage a Kobo library. It's just manually copying files to Kobo where you need to remember to do it yourself if you have a Kobo.)
I remembered one particular master student on the verge of tears trying to compile his LaTeX thesis draft, he took the “write and think about formatting later” too literally and was trying to compile it for the first time very close to the deadline.
Whether a looming deadline changed the perception about that, we don't know ;-P
But isn't that kind of the point of epubcheck? It's surely not intended to validate all of CSS, it's intended to validate that an epub will work... and not working on Kobo devices (probably #2 manufacturer of ebook readers?) is a major issue.
I used a Kindle for ages, always in airplane mode and only sideloading content. Honestly, it was a pretty good setup.[1] But it seemed like it would be harder to setup this way on newer devices, so when mine finally failed, I got a Kobo Clara BW. I was thrilled I could boot it up in "sideloader mode" and not even register it or enable wifi.
I noticed poor typography on my epubs, learned about converting to kepub so I did that (which helped). It was a familiar flow to what I was used to converting to azw3 for the Kindle. My remaining typography gripe with kepubs is that it treats a word+em-dash as a word for inserting space in full justification. Em-dashes generally don't have spaces on either side, this often looks like a space has been inserted only to the right of the em-dash.
I went down the rabbit hole of NickelMenu and other readers including KOReader and Plato, and even tried (and mostly failed) to vibecode my own opds client app. (because KOReader which has one built-in felt overwhelming)
My current sense is the device feels so much more like it is mine. I have much more flexibility to tinker with it. It is not as polished as the Kindle and the Adobe rendering feels stupid, but that's also a sharp edge that only the side-loading community will hit, most of whom use Calibre which can auto convert to kepub for them. Everyone else is buying books from the Kobo store and getting them delivered as kepubs.
So in the end, I'm a big fan of the Kobo devices.
[1]: Except you cannot remove a wifi password if you aren't in range of that wifi signal. I had a rude experience when my two-year-old was fiddling with my Kindle at my in-laws' house and turned on the wifi where there was still a saved credential. An update triggered immediately and I was frustrated for days that everything in the UI changed.
You tried to forget that you don't own anything.
I have never seen someone explain the adobe software so perfectly. Using any adobe software is exactly this.
According to the author, Kobo uses CSS from 2013. A quick check with an AI says RMSDK supports CSS 2.1 and parts of 3.
So it's not that the renderer is broken, it's that he believed that epubcheck actually checks against devices and the versions of CSS that those devices support.
This is exactly the issue with test tools: the test tool tests to a spec, but the platform is the gold standard. If you don't like it tough shit.
I’ve switched to kobos (Clara HD) and I’ve had to for years. It’s chugging along (had to 3d print a replacement power button a couple months ago), I can run koreader no problem and use calibre with the kobo plugin. And the default rendering engine in kobo’s firmware does actually typeset the text: no ragged edges!
This is blatantly wrong.
In a perfect world, RMSDK wouldn't exist in the first place and Adobe would have gone bankrupt and become history at least 10 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
(FWIW, ADE will probably die when Rosetta support goes away with MacOS 28, but one of the de-DRM plugins will read acsm files directly and bring in the books.)
I used EPublish for my first novel, Means and Motive, just published here, DRM-free: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX
So far I haven't heard of compatibility issues, so I think EPublish has hit the sweet spot of EPUB targeting. I agree, however, that it feels like the old days of targeting IE6 on the web. Old readers still exist out there, so we have to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Kobo's added features on top of ePUBs are nice, and their renderer is much better than Adobe's standard pipeline.
So, it's a free upgrade with a terrific local library added on top.
These days I usually get 90% of the way on google docs, then do the final editing on LibreOffice which can add things like tables of contents and cover image, if it opens on Kindle, Kobo and Calibre I consider it job done.
Surely it would be easier for someone like kobo to just use Koreader, implement their ui changes and demand as plugins or patches, and forget ade
Easy to be dismissive, but IP violations can cost a large company hundreds of millions.
IP lawyers are more important to many companies than their software developers.
If you doubt that, check to see who gets paid more...
I can't tell what the writing or design are like, because the article renders as a blank page on my old iPad.
Also on my 2026 Kindle Paperwhite.
It's futile to be old man yelling at cloud on HN, but I'm still irritated by web pages that are essentially text, yet can't be bothered to actually display anything. A blank page.
Presumably ePub publications are easier to QA than web pages. They must conform to a subset of web standards.
It's getting very tiresome.
It looks like not a whole lot has changed in that space -- the readers are still the gate for what you can do with the format. Who's available to make a CanIUse for epub readers, to shame them into compliance? (only partly /s)
