whoa this is seriously impressive!
Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
161–170 of 257 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People ge…
No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway. Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CS…
I remember reading something about how difficult it was to get flash to render correctly on iphone hardware at the time because it had no hardware support and software emulation was slow and terrible at best.
But this is only a vague memory of some article in a magazine or something similar, so take it as anecdotal at best.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
The replacement is CSS + JS. Thank God Apple helped kill Flash.
And 10 years later I just don't see the level of amateur uptake that flash had. For 10 years flash minted thousands of young animators and content creators. Since flashes death there are far fewer upstarts and communities despite Internet adoption being magnitudes higher
Yep. The tech may be more mature and less prone to breakage, but the fun of creating, the joy of stupid games went with it for a lot of folks.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway. Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CS…
I remember reading something about how difficult it was to get flash to render correctly on iphone hardware at the time because it had no hardware support and software emulation was slow and terrible at best. But this is only a vague memory of some article in a magazine or something similar, so take it as anecdotal at best.
Apple specifically refused to support Flash in mobile Safari and the original sandbox model for apps prevented any kind of perfomant virtual machine for something as sophisticated as SWF (or Java or .NET). That's improved some in the 15 years since, although the sandbox is still fairly conservative and tight.
But at the time, I don't believe Adobe engineeing publically bothered to swim upstream against this, and while there were third-party attempts to run SWF files or AIR applications on iOS they were indeed janky and slow (as you would expect).
So I'd give your memory like a B+ on this one!
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#165Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying. There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002. Great j…
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People ge…
> CSS does everything Flash once did
Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash.
Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People ge…
There's a correlation between the death of Flash and the rise of mobile devices browsing. Flash was pixel-based and the whole paradigm doesn't really work for responsiveness.
Flash was just as responsive as HTML+CSS: As much as the developer makes it responsive.
Also, flash was most certainly not pixel based. It was vector based and a common workflow was to create your graphics in the more powerful Adobe Illustrator, then import into flash for animation.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#167Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying. There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002. Great j…
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People ge…
Apple killed flash by not allowing it to run on their mobile devices. It's really as simple as that.
I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device.
I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The replacement is CSS + JS. Thank God Apple helped kill Flash.
And 10 years later I just don't see the level of amateur uptake that flash had. For 10 years flash minted thousands of young animators and content creators. Since flashes death there are far fewer upstarts and communities despite Internet adoption being magnitudes higher
The heyday of Newgrounds was truly a golden age for stupid amateur cartoons and games.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exactly... I would represent myself, it would be fun.... and let Meta spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers. If I lost I would drag it out as long as possible and then if by some strange twist of fate I lost, I would declare bankruptcy and write a book about the whole thing.
I know your comment is just internet puffery, but please know that the old adage is true: "A man who represents himself has a fool for a client." There is a reason that judges will ask defendents multiple times if they're really, really, truely sure they want to represent themselves before allowing it. As much as you wish it, a dictionary or common sense does little to nothing in a court of law. Mostly, you'll just a…
Maybe if it's that obnoxious to the state when people represent themselves, the state should provide advocates for civil cases where people can't afford a lawyer.
Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation
#170Back in the day I used to do quite a lot of Macromedia Flash work. It’s uncannily similar but a modern take. I’ve often wondered why no one has come up with a new product in this space. I think the long term demise of Flash has put off anyone even trying. There are so many great uses for animations on the web, even if we don’t need full blown user interfaces of them and intro screens like we did back in 2002. Great j…
IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People ge…
Add to the list that when we resized the window or went fullscreen the typical Flash app would keep its original size. A Flash app born for 800x600 screens wouldn't look well in a 1366x768 screen or 1080p ones. It became tiny as resolution increased and diagonals more or less didn't. Then Steve Jobs and battery life or removing a competing ecosystem.