Flash: Building the Interactive Web

by Anastasia Salter, John Murray

How Flash rose and fell as the world's most ubiquitous yet divisive software platform, enabling the development and distribution of a world of creative content. Adobe Flash began as a simple animation tool and grew into a multimedia platform that offered a generation of creators and innovators an astonishing range of opportunities to develop and distribute new kinds of digital content. For the better part of a decade, Flash was the de facto standard for dynamic online media, empowering amateur and professional developers to shape the future of the interactive Web. In this book, Anastasia Salter and John Murray trace the evolution of Flash into one of the engines of participatory culture.

Salter and Murray investigate Flash as both a fundamental force that shaped perceptions of the web and a key technology that enabled innovative interactive experiences and new forms of gaming. They examine a series of works that exemplify Flash's role in shaping the experience and expectations of web multimedia. Topics include Flash as a platform for developing animation (and the "Flashimation" aesthetic); its capacities for scripting and interactive design; games and genres enabled by the reconstruction of the browser as a games portal; forms and genres of media art that use Flash; and Flash's stance on openness and standards--including its platform-defining battle over the ability to participate in Apple's own proprietary platforms.

Flash's exit from the mobile environment in 2011 led some to declare that Flash was dead. But, as Salter and Murray show, not only does Flash live, but its role as a definitive cross-platform tool continues to influence web experience.

Genres: Games, Computers, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 2 out of 5]

The latest entry in the Platform Studies series. I didn't have high hopes for this one; I know too many Flash developers. It lived down to my expectations: as usual, people from inside the Flash echo chamber overestimate the size of their pond, the originality of their platform, and the influence it has had on the Web and programming in general. Salter and Murray don't really make a convincing case regarding how Flash's ``affordances'' are responsible for significant aspects of the Flash games they put on parade,† and while they're very eager to credit everything they see as a good thing specifically to Flash's unique je-ne-sais-quoi, the bad things (like Jakob Nielsen's claim that Flash is 99% bad; his reasons for saying it aren't given real attention, of course) become the fault of ``design decisions that can be made on any platform for web development''.
Add to that a whole bunch of name-dropping (Bogost and Montfort's names, weirdly, being particularly frequent) and a bizarre attempt to hitch Flash's wagon to the free software and open standards movements (Apple rejected Flash support for iPhones and they're a closed platform, therefore Flash must be an ally of freedom because something something), and the whole just ends up being a sad mess of a book.

I don't know that other authors could have done a much better job. Flash is just a deeply uninteresting disaster, and I'm glad it's going away. I removed it from my systems a few years ago (not deliberately, initially; their plugin just broke again) and I genuinely haven't missed it.

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† Almost all of the book is about games, though they do also hold up the fact that Youtube used to rely on Flash as a point in Flash's favour. The fact that they subsequently abandoned it, and their reasons for doing so, are swept under the rug.

[KMT · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for an overview of the history of Flash as a software package and of the businesses behind it, but sadly there's little of this in the book. Too academic, too focused on the social aspects of the platform and whether or not it was part of the open source movement. Very few illustrations as well, even though the authors keep banging on about "flashimation" and its aesthetics.
Maybe a book isn't the right format to look back at the legacy of Flash. A documentary or even something more interactive might be a better fit.

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very accessible yet comprehensive look at flash as a platform delving into its limitations and affordances, but most into its cultural impact. Very much targeted toward millenials and the homestarrunner generation.

[Josep · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book puts back Flash in its place in history. But it is not very informative, nor funny to read. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to Newgrounds and to describe the content, and not so much is dedicated to explaining the platform itself. The last two chapters, 6 and 7, start to dig - too late - in that history. The best part is the interview with Jonathan Gay, at the end of the book, that expands on chapters 6 and 7 explanation with a more human approach. Not a bad book, but not memorable in any way.