1 (edited by unwiredben 2020-10-14 11:00:29)

Topic: What to do about Flash's death?

I just went to try to configure some widgets for a new channel, and ran into the problem of Flash no longer being supported in browsers.  While it's supposed to be completely unsupported at the end of the year (2020), it's already really hard to activate it, at least in current Firefox releases, and I expect Chrome is also problematic.

I was looking for some system to run Flash content using a safer technology, and one that popped up is CheerpX: https://medium.com/leaningtech/announci … d35483ee35  I wonder if this might be viable... the cost may be too high, but it looks like it could work.

It also looks like Harman is doing licensing, https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe, and that could lead to a "Chumby config" app that would use the Chumby site with Flash content.

Re: What to do about Flash's death?

My line of work (broadcast engineering) has a lot of hardware with Flash-based GUIs which are very slow to convert to HTML5.  One transmitter manufacturer has come up with an Adobe Air wrapper for the Adobe Flash player which works fine.  I suspect we'll see more of this sort of thing, maybe as browser plug-ins.

3 (edited by unwiredben 2020-11-19 13:07:30)

Re: What to do about Flash's death?

So, it looks like the Flash emulator Ruffles, https://ruffle.rs/, has come a long way.  The Internet Archive has started using a WebAssembly-compiled version of it to show old Flash 1 and 2 content.  See https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash and https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datah … et_Archive has details on how to upload SWF files.

I'm hoping this provides a path to supporting configuration of Chumby widgets via the web.  I think most everything is FlashLite 1 and 2, although I seem to remember ActionScript 3 getting deployed later.

Re: What to do about Flash's death?

I'm pretty sure there aren't any AS3/AVM2 widgets in the catalog.