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Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#81

Post by manscrober »

KaiserPro wrote: post #63

Look the same on all platforms. Allow artists to create simple animation quickly. run fast. The key selling point of flash was that it was an author once, run anywhere tool. I could use keyframe animation along with a simple scripting language to make almost anything. Not only that it was fast to build and deploy. Nothing I've seen recently allows an artist to do the same. I've tried a couple of times over the years…

>Worse still all of those libraries are deprecated now, so if I want to do it again, I'll need to start again from scratch and select a new animation library.

This is why I stopped being interested in modern web anymore. Everything is deprecated at unbelievable pace, you can't keep track of it unless you work full time in the field. If it was all for great efficiency and performance, I'd get it, but it seems to just follow the newest fad every 2 years. Maybe with wasm that could change, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#82

Post by ChrisRR »

skytreader wrote: post #29

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency. Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet…

As an embedded developer it always surprises me that simple programs are still barely any faster, take 100s of MB of RAM, require a decent CPU despite the fact we're all using supercomputers compared to the Windows 95 days.

How is it that physicists and engineers are pushing the limits of physics to bring us ever faster processors and we still can't smoothly scroll a webpage, where as I can design an embedded product with a GUI on a 40MHz CPU

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#83

Post by ChrisRR »

piceas wrote: post #54
amelius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these people doing now?

Video killed the flash vector star and games moved to steam. A good example of the former is a e-card service that eventually chose to move to video. Video is worse for their product but there was/is a more robust path to move to video than modern vector options. https://www.jacquielawson.com/

I think games moved to mobile. Churning out a mobile game and slapping ads all over it is very easy to do

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#84

Post by teh_klev »

skytreader wrote: post #29

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency. Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet…

> only a database server needs an SSD

Where did you acquire that (somewhat flawed) opinion?

I've been using SSD's since ~2009 and those early devices were transformational even on already elderly equipment. You can pick up a modern 1TB SSD with a SATA interface for ~GBP77.00. A price well worth paying for the increase in productivity and quality of life not waiting for spinning rust disks to do their thing.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#85

Post by ChrisRR »

rcarmo wrote: post #62
Cloudef wrote: post #33

There's rive that's very similar to flash https://rive.app/

It is also a cloud-based service that artificially limits what you can do for pricing, not a standalone desktop app. No thanks, I will resist buying into those for as long as I can.

Flash was also proprietary

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#86

Post by ChrisRR »

noduerme wrote: post #20

I'm surprised no one has mentioned vector-based animation, which was a primary tool in Flash. AFAIK there's no SVG solution that comes close in performance or flexibility to keyframe- or programmatically animating complex vector graphics (with user interaction!) the way you could in Flash.

The stickman fighting animations were a classic of the flash days.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#87

Post by drewcoo »

jhoelzel wrote: post #80

It was not flash that we were fighting. it was adobe and their proriarity and thought process in keeping flash to themselfs. If adobe would have not been the way they were, they would now dominate the animation scene too. Instead, inadvertetly because of patents, we dont have anything cool to show for. All this minimalism everywhere is disgusting. And they never get it right anyway because you have to put hightower a…

> It was not flash that we were fighting. it was adobe

And I thought it was Steve Jobs' wielding of monopoly power in the name of "taste." Or was it "security?" Or the fact that Apple couldn't keep Flash from crashing Macs?

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#88

Post by fimdomeio »

I don't think the problem is the the web, the problem is screen sizes. Things where a lot simpler when all you had to think about was 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. As soon as you got mobile and all kinds of resolutions it became a lot more technically complex which hinderes creativity.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#89

Post by Cloudef »

rcarmo wrote: post #78
Cloudef wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be it web or offline, does not really change as both flash and rive are proprietary software. I think rive is still better as its runtimes are open source and the export format is documented https://help.rive.app/runtimes/advanced_topics/format so technically you could make your own editor.

That’s what I call the “infinite monkeys” argument. I could theoretically do _anything_, but it is actually impractical.

At least your produced rive content could be kept online / shown in your software as the runtimes are open source. Meanwhile flash has been reversed for ages and ruffle still isn't 100% compatible. Adobe being adobe, they are even worse as they aren't web app, but still contain heavy online DRM making the software useless if you don't have subscription, in addition to their cancelation terms being very shady.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#90

Post by dspillett »

irrational wrote: post #25

Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…

> All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos.

This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design.

As there are less people wanting to make the animations the tools that would have replaced the tooling for flash (but outputting SVG+JS instead), of which there were a fair few in active development at one point, have languished unloved and incomplete – so not only do fewer people want to make such animations but those that do want to don't have easy tooling to do so.

There are a couple of e-learning sites out there using interactive animations to illustrate their points, one often has sponsor spots on a couple of podcasts & video series I follow though I forget its name ATM. I wonder what tooling they use, if any (though I doubt it is all manually coded).

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