Adobe FlashPaper

~ the eulogy ~

flashpaper's peak years overlap exactly with my early adsl window on ttnet, but i never installed it on either of the windows machines i was using then. it was a virtual printer for a niche workflow and i never had the workflow. people who needed to put printable documents on a webpage and wanted them to render inside the browser without launching acrobat reader, that was the audience. macromedia made the pitch with conviction in 2003, and for about three years it had a real case.

flashpaper began at a small shop called blue pacific software. macromedia bought the technology and shipped it inside contribute 2, the html editor for casual web authors, in october '03. the workflow was simple. you went to file, print, and chose flashpaper as the printer. instead of paper, the program produced a swf or a pdf. you uploaded the swf to your web server. anyone with the flash plugin opened the document in their browser at native resolution, with zoom controls and a search bar, no acrobat install required. the standalone product appeared in macromedia studio 8 in september '05 and version 2.02 followed on october 19 of the same year. that was the last release.

the argument flashpaper made was real for a moment. in 2005 the flash plugin sat on around 98 percent of browsers and acrobat reader sat somewhat lower, especially on home machines where users had not bothered to install it. a swf opened instantly inside the page with no download dialog and no separate viewer. for a couple of years that was an actual win. then adobe bought macromedia in december '05 and inherited a product whose only reason to exist was that flash had broader installed reach than acrobat, while now also owning the acrobat business that flashpaper had been positioned to undercut.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

flashpaper inside adobe was awkward from day one. you had a company whose flagship document format was pdf, that had just acquired a tool whose pitch was that pdf was too heavy and required too many installs. adobe kept selling the existing copies but did no further development. macromedia studio 8 was the last suite to bundle it. by 2007 the product was already a museum piece inside adobe's catalog, kept on the price sheet for the developers who had built deployments around it but unsupported in any meaningful sense.

~ the actual end ~

the discontinuation notice landed on september 4, 2008 in a brief adobe statement, with one sentence doing the work. "the demand has continually declined to where it is no longer economically viable for adobe to continue development support." existing customers could keep using what they had. there would be no version 3 and no formal replacement, no migration path other than rebuilding the same document as a pdf. the timing was telling. apple had been refusing flash on the iphone since the iphone launched in '07, and the html5 conversation was beginning in earnest. the long arc that ended with adobe pulling the flash plugin in december '20 was already under way. flashpaper just got there first.

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