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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to 'Adobe Animate CC', killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe's release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product.
A Rose by any other name still smells as sweet.
Adobe Flash by any other name still reeks of shit.
I think I remember that from one of my computer-security classes. Sanitize all your inputs, do length checks to avoid buffer overflows, and if those don't work, change your product's name.
they are not killing the flash name; the new version of their *creation* package is renamed to Animate from Flash Professional since it outputs HTML5 in addition to SWF; this is not related to the client side SWF ecosystem
They're renaming the authoring tool, which is currently known as Flash Professional CC. It appears that the Flash Player will remain just that.
This makes perfect sense, as Flash Professional CC is increasingly being used to generate media that targets HTML5, not Flash, as output. Renaming Flash Professional CC to Animate CC eliminates the whole need to do the song and dance of "we're talking about Flash the authoring environment, not Flash the plugin" to non-technical audiences.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
For a brief moment I was worried they might have killed Flash. Then I noticed they only retired the name 'cause it was already pretty much synonymous of "malware installer".
For a moment I was worried about my job security. Please, Adobe, don't scare us IT security guys like that!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What I'm reading from this is that Edge Animate, Adobe's HTML 5 tool, will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, and will gain some (probably funky) backwards compatibility to Flash.
But it's not as sexy when you put it that way.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't care what they name it, within reason. It's a product / tool / whatever. Does it work? Good.
In particular, will they PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE update the Reader application under Linux to support some kind of contemporary animation that's supported on other platforms as well? I don't care if it's Flash, HTML5, AVI, MOV ... I just don't care. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I can display animations within a PDF, and be certain that they will play for others on Windows or iOS as well. Right now, as a Linux user, I don't have that ability, really.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
And yeah, there's NoScript... but that tends to limit the web's basic functionality.
NoScript is a HUGE improvement, in my experience. However, it's also a big pain in the ass to use, so I wouldn't foist it on my wife's computer for instance. What works well is to set the selection to whitelist scripts coming from the site's own domain, but after that you have to get good at manually enabling other domains, usually ones with "cdn" in them since most big sites deliver videos and such from affiliated CDN domains. If that doesn't work, however, then you're resorting to guessing; there's been a few times I've just started up an alternate browser that doesn't have NoScript installed just to look at one site, but this is rare. For the most part, NoScript is really helpful and speeds things up a lot, but it's really not that easy to use because the situation with JavaScript is such an utter mess, with dozens of scripts on every page it seems.
The FBI attacked Tor users this way last year; that attack is only known to the public because it was revealed in court proceedings. I don't know about you, but I'm going to assume there are still other JS exploits out there being used (by good and bad guys) that haven't yet become public.
If you allow everything by default, you're not going to get any benefit from it whatsoever. You might as well just use uBlock Origin so you avoid all the ads, but it also allows a lot of other BS (tracking scripts and such) which NoScript blocks.
It'd be nice to see something more like uBlock, or maybe have uBlock extended to do this, where it also blocks all the tracking crap, autoplaying videos, etc., using a curated blacklist. There are some things out there like Ghostery, but they're not trustworthy since they're run or funded by the ad companies.
Screen Door was already copyrighted.
Well, let's see. They used to have simple version numbers (Photoshop 5, Premiere 6.1, etc.). This got them into a bit of trouble because, for example, the upgrade from Premiere 6.1 to Premiere 6.5 was a paid upgrade, but since it wasn't a major change in the actual back end code, that was a bit messy. Additionally, Adobe wanted to focus more on the program bundles rather than the individual applications, and thus the "Creative Suite" moniker was born. Incidentally, this also helped deal with the psychological "high version numbers" issue (anyone want WinZip version 20?).
Now, Adobe is betting the farm on everyone being okay with renting their software. Resultantly, they're trumpeting "All teh Updates!!!111", which they're hoping will make version numbers irrelevant - it's just "the most recent build we've rolled out the door". This ends up being a bit of a challenge because they also like doing Apple style keynotes, where they show all the CC subscribers how it's now possible to start editing videos on one's iPad and then continue on the editing bay. So, they thus distinguish the new feature sets that get introduced at the keynotes by the year of release of those features.
Finally, Adobe's core applications aren't going anywhere - Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects - none of them are going anywhere. In trying to make Adobe products more accessible to folks who don't have formal training in graphic/media design, things like Muse come into play...and since they're new products that don't have the long history, it makes sense to pick a name and branding that aligns with current trends. I'm sure that given the option, Adobe would rather have a list of edge case applications like Muse than to end up becoming known as a company like Oracle that continues to exist because support contracts. Adobe's also starting to see a handful of up-and-coming applications start to gain a certain amount of popularity. I don't care how much people like seeing the Photoshop splash screen, when Affinity Photo has 95% of the sophisticated functions of Photoshop, a similar UI, reads PSDs, and costs $50 one time, Adobe is going to take notice.
Besides, software naming has seldom followed a true convention.
Privacy Badger is the closest that I have found to what you are asking. And it's curated by the EFF.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...