Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

trangram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 257 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#181

Post by bigfudge »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #175
tempoponet wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

Lots of enterprise apps like ERP and that type of shit may STILL require Silverlight for older versions. It was huge in that market.

Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, although this still stands!

I still miss macromedia Director though. I learned to program with HyperCard and then director, and I always thought it was a shame it got canned when adobe bought it.. it was much nicer in lots of ways, although the player was more heavyweight. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really found a proper replacement for HyperCard!

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#183

Post by pests »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #113
junto wrote: post #13

Back 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…

They did solve the search issue before it's demise.

"Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files" (2008)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#184

Post by gs17 »

tempoponet wrote: post #147
swatcoder wrote: post #122

Earlier 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'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

The only time I ever interacted with it knowingly was the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 software.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#185

Post by gs17 »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #158
yreg wrote: post #126

Earlier 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

I really think the all-in-one-ness of Flash is what made it so easy to use. Not only that you can make almost everything for a game/cartoon in one interface (IIRC audio wasn't included), but also that the output was a single file you could share easily.

The rampant piracy of old Flash versions probably helped a lot too.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#186

Post by gibbitz »

detritus wrote: post #177
tempoponet wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

Yeah, coming from back at that time, to consider Silverlight at all is to give it too much credit. Jobs and his unwillingness to support it on iPhone killed Flash, and that's that.

Internally Adobe hated Flash. It strode right past Live Motion which used the UI paradigm of After Effects to produce animations which didn't cater to the traditional key framing model Flash was built on. I feel pretty strongly that there were forces inside Adobe that wanted to take advantage of the merger to bury the Macromedia IPs. Adobe had a great relationship with Apple. Photoshop was finely tuned to work on Macs and the majority of the creatives using it were working on Macs. Adobe could have threatened to put Apple's computers in the ground by limiting Photoshop support for OSX in 2009 in order to gain support for Flash on iOS. They didn't. They just never thought of Flash as an Adobe product. If Apple stopped supporting Photoshop things would have gone nuclear.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#187

Post by gs17 »

Aerroon wrote: post #136
dncornholio wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc. It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.

I remember that a lot of people were sure that we were going to get an even better replacement. "HTML5 is going to be the replacement." So much for that. Goodbye web games.

There are still a lot of "web games", but it's nothing like it used to be.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#188

Post by gs17 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #134
jaysonelliot wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

It's crazy to me they didn't see the value in porting actionscript to something that compiles to JS/HTML5, though adobe couldn't be trusted to see this potential obviously. If they had something like that ready in ~2011 it could have completely replaced HTML 5 canvas adoption

I blame Adobe for Flash dying much more than Apple. There's a lot of features that would have been hard to port (maybe Flash Player could have evolved into providing support for those and being optional for simpler content), but an HTML5 output that worked for 90% of 2D games and animations would have kept it relevant. Or at least funding Shumway while it was around if no one at Adobe was able to do it.

Instead they made a converter where you lost audio, video, scripting, effects, etc. It should have at least been able to convert a Homestar Runner cartoon.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#189

Post by gs17 »

gibbitz wrote: post #186
detritus wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, coming from back at that time, to consider Silverlight at all is to give it too much credit. Jobs and his unwillingness to support it on iPhone killed Flash, and that's that.

Internally Adobe hated Flash. It strode right past Live Motion which used the UI paradigm of After Effects to produce animations which didn't cater to the traditional key framing model Flash was built on. I feel pretty strongly that there were forces inside Adobe that wanted to take advantage of the merger to bury the Macromedia IPs. Adobe had a great relationship with Apple. Photoshop was finely tuned to work on Mac…

That would definitely explain why they were so half-assed in their attempts to adapt to HTML5.

Re: Show HN: I made a free animator. Think Adobe Illustrator but for animation

#190

Post by gs17 »

pmontra wrote: post #170
jaysonelliot wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

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.

Not my experience outside of aspect ratio mis-matches. Flash content used a lot of vector art which scales fantastically. It not resizing is the developer's fault, not the technology's (which is common with Flash, it got blamed a lot for its misuse).
Post reply on HN