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

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

#221

Post by kmeisthax »

swatcoder wrote: post #164
BizarroLand wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whil…

The current sandbox model for apps still does not allow any sort of performant VM; by design. Hell, one of the biggest announcements of Apple's DMA compliance is just that they had to provide entitlements to access some kind of JIT support on iOS. They are extremely pissed that they had to do that, only they are supposed to be allowed to JIT code.

That being said the only people who complain about not having JIT on iOS are Mozilla and people who want to run game console emulators, which Apple doesn't want their users having because they despise the Church-Turing thesis. Game developers that use engines with VMs in them just develop around the execution of those VMs being very slow.

Apple wasn't refusing to support Flash on mobile Safari. The actual story is more complicated: Apple tried to collaborate with Adobe four times on mobile Flash but, depending on who you ask, Adobe either shipped code that just plain didn't work on phones, or Apple couldn't be bothered to even get Flash to compile. Probably both are true. The very public open letter from Jobs regarding Flash is after Adobe said "fuck it" and decided to ship what they had as a packaging solution for developing iOS apps. While most of the open letter is written to say "this is why we're not shipping Flash as a browser plug-in", the real reason it was published was to justify rule changes in their developer agreement intended to prohibit porting Flash apps to iOS.

Said rule changes were overturned in 3 months, thanks Obama.

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

#224

Post by soperj »

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…

> 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.

Don't SPAs do exactly this?

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

#225

Post by ajkjk »

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…

There is a ton that flash did that CSS does not do, but it is more about the toolchain / dev environment for flash apps than the actual technical capabilities. It is very strange to me that no one has built "Flash but on Html5" yet.

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

#227

Post by rikroots »

meekaaku wrote: post #40

Looks very nice. Is this on webgl? Speaking as a non-professional JS programmer, where can I read about how to architect a program like this where you select a tool, then that tool lets you draw (or do something) on canvas. Another tool, has a different behavior to mouse click/movement while initial placement and later editing of the nodes. Architect it in such a way that its not a long list of if statements for stat…

Quickly checking through the JS being served to the site, it looks like the project is using Paper.js[1] for its foundational canvas library. As PaperJS is a 2D canvas library, I doubt the project is using any WebGL magic for its functionality. I could, of course, be very wrong!

> Speaking as a non-professional JS programmer, where can I read about how to architect a program like this where you select a tool, then that tool lets you draw (or do something) on canvas.

I've not got any sources for you, but I think the EJ chapter makes the key point that however you architect the project, you really, really need to keep as much of your user interface as possible in HTML/CSS, if only for accessibility. When it comes to manipulating graphical objects already added to the canvas, I'm not a great fan of the "box controls" approach (for controlling width, height, scaling, rotation) - which a lot of canvas libraries seem to include - because I can't think of an efficient/elegant way to make those controls accessible.[2]

The other big issue is keeping track of state, and possibly state history if you want undo/redo functionality. For this you really need to think of building on top of an existing canvas library - many will make state management a lot easier to handle, leaving you more time to build out the interesting stuff. There's a lot of excellent libraries out in the wild for you to choose from[3].

Or you could build your own canvas library. I've had lots of (at times frustrating) fun over the past 10 years doing just that. Highly recommended!

[1] - http://paperjs.org/

[2] - My proof-of-concept attempt for an alternative approach to controls. Sadly not very pretty: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/modules-005.html

[3] - https://benchmarks.slaylines.io/

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

#228

Post by jaysonelliot »

beAbU wrote: post #165
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…

> 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 s…

I was developing Flash since before it was called Flash, back when it was called FutureSplash Animator. I'm not talking about the IDE, I'm talking about the user experience that could be created with Flash.

As a UX professional, the death of Flash was one of the most satisfying moments of my career. It's hard to overstate how much better the web is today than it was when it was overrun by sealed-off Flash sites.

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

#229

Post by jaysonelliot »

Varriount wrote: post #193
beAbU wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

I still mourn the disappearance of the game development and distribution scene that Flash made possible. It seems like all we have these days are walled-garden app stores filled with pay-to-win, ad-filled games.

From a gaming perspective, I agree that Flash was excellent. The current era of ad-filled pay to win games does suck.
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