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Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Good!
Adobe has ruined all they touch since way back. Most notoriously with Macromedia Flash acquisition and enshittification.
Flash was great for a lot of reasons, but had to die because of insecurities and performance issues. Apple crushed it for a good reason. It did take us a few years to catch back up.
But also, the market died. There's nothing flash does that 2018 vanilla JavaScript can't do. Yet nobody is really building tools like that anymore, and the hobby coders moved to other platforms like game makers or multimedia makers.
End of an era for sure. I agree, Adobe Flash had to go. Macromedia Flash was brilliant tho.
I miss seeing the "Macromedia Shockwave" loading screen when firing up online games on Win 98 back in the day 😢
I miss the UI of the early 2000s era. It felt so slick back then.
RIP Fireworks. I used it for shitty design rather than websites or whatever but it was so easy to use.
Fireworks is a great example of why Adobe should keep its hands off figma.
Macromedia built a product IN 1998 that had a lot of the features we take for granted in sketch, figma etc. today. Reusable symbols, a pixel accurate approach to UI design, “states” which were basically like how invision and figma handle hotspots and rudimentary prototyping…
Then adobe bought it and sat on it, never really taking the product any further. All while the industry progressed and other people developed products like sketch and figma. Then adobe tried to copy that with XD, but never developed xd either compared to figma.
Had the acquisition gone through I wouldn’t be surprised if figma then just withered on the vine just like fireworks. It’s clear the innovation is coming from outside of the house. _
I remember the guy Adobe put in charge of the Flash plugin on Linux whining in official public facing communication about how difficult it was to work with "minority browsers," which he clarified to mean everything but Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows.
Is anyone really missing flash? as much as I hate Adobe like the next guy, the internet is a better place without that proprietary crap infesting most websites for no good reason other than a cheap animation
I don't miss Flash, but it's hard to deny that back in the day, it was nice to have a tool that rendered content universally for web browsers. It was also fun to make shit in. 100% obviously we're better off without relying on some proprietary software to render interactive components etc, but it did serve a purpose and give us a blueprint for what the web should, and often times should NOT be.
But, Fireworks(also part of macromedia) was a fucking fantastic program and was lightyears ahead of its time. Adobe murdering it spawned Sketch, which spawned Figma. So the irony and dread of Adobe buying Figma was never once lost on me.
I rely on these tools every workign day of my life, and fuck adobe for fucking with my workflow
Wasn't Apple the main force behind killing Flash?
Adobe killed Flash by buying it up and making it complete shite. It was really decent before Adobe fudged it up, I.e.,slow and dangerous.
Macromedia had done a great job with Flash. That’s why it became so popular in the first place.