With the turn of the year we say goodbye to Adobe Flash. It was not a surprise, it was actually a death announced for years, and in June there was the final confirmation that this technology would eat the nougat from last Christmas, but that I would not get to toast after twelve grapes. And in the last weeks of 2020 we could see, at the same time, how the browsers finalized their preparations for the farewell, and how some projects struggled to try to preserve, in some way, many elements of that website from the first decade of this century, in which Adobe Flash was the undisputed protagonist.
Since the first of January we have lived in a post Adobe Flash world and, unsurprisingly, little or nothing has changed in our lives. Perhaps we have added a little more weight to the backpack of nostalgia, surely we have remembered (and continue to do so) many content and services that we used at the time and that were based on this technology (remember that, for example, YouTube used it until 2015 ) and, well, we get on with our lives. They cannot say the same in Dalian, a city in northern China, since there the disappearance of Adobe Flash has had a major impact on their lives.
And it is that, as we can read on AppleDaily, the railway network that serves the city and its surroundings uses Adobe Flash to manage its systems. Yes, you read that correctly, and no, it is not a mistake: the systems used to manage the Dalian railway network were developed at the time with Adobe Flash.
Most users don’t know, but behind the animations and interactive elements of the content in Flash there is a language called ActionScript, which inherits many of the elements from Lingo, the employee at Macromedia Director (who the writer made his first steps with in the late 1990s). Neither Lingo nor ActionScript were general-purpose solutions, but the truth is that they allowed you to do much more than what people thought at the time. For example? Well, manage a rail network.
So things, Come January 1st, 2021 Dalian Railways stopped running for 20 hours. It’s a bit flashy, actually, because anyone would say that the Adobe Flash blackout took them by surprise. And, of course, it had only been announced three years before, too little margin to take action on it …
What did they do in Dalian after the end of Adobe Flash?
During those 20 hours, What did the technicians responsible for the infrastructure do? Common sense tells us that they would have already started designing an alternative not based on Adobe Flash, right? Or, even, that on the run and giving the best of themselves in a race against time, they were able to create the basic elements to manage the network, and that since then they will be working on completing the development. This is what common sense tells us. Of course, remember, sometimes it turns out to be the least common of the senses.
If you have thought wrong, congratulations, you have not been wrong. Those responsible for the rail network took one more solution, let’s say walking around the house: now the network is managed with a pirated version of Flash that allows us to continue using this technology arrived (and passed) on January 1, 2021. The same solution that nostalgic people who want to access again (even for the last time, as a farewell) can choose those unforgettable web pages created with Adobe Flash.
And either out of nostalgia, if you lived it at the time, or out of curiosity if your eyes don’t suffered enjoyed those designs, be sure to visit sites like Web Design Museum, its section dedicated to pages designed with Adobe Flash is a delicacy of gods. And if you were really a very, very fan of Flash, and you think that his departure is premature, do not stop traveling to Dalian and testing its railway network, thinking that every train you see operating on it, will be doing it thanks to the same technology They used those online games that stole so many hours from our lives. Long live Adobe Flash! (if only at Dalian and Archive.org).
