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Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

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Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#41

Post by onion2k »

thewebcount wrote: post #27

The visuals were a lot of fun, but I don’t understand why I, as a viewer/consumer/whatever of this sort of thing, would ever want these things: > Unknown runtime I like to know whether I’m going to have time to view all of something or not. I might want to set aside some time to watch something if it’s too long for the break I’m taking right now. > No rewinding, no skipping ahead Ugh. Just … no. If I saw something co…

I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all. Flash Player was awful.

But...

The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.

I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.

Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#42

Post by CoolestBeans »

A thought I’ve had for a few years now is that the loss of the Flash runtime (and the rise of mobile) might have been the proximate cause for the end of fun small web based videos and games but what is really missing is an authoring tool as good as Flash was for HTML5. Virtually everything the flash plugin could do, a browser can do with canvas and whatnot. But the magic was really that the Flash authoring tool opened up to a canvas you could draw on with tools most kids knew from Paint. With a little experimenting you could figure out the timeline and start animating things. If you wanted to go even further and add interactivity, you could edit ActionScript again right in the interface. It wasn’t easy but the visuals-first, almost but not quite WYSISYG aspect made it pickuppable instead of like learning to wrangle a text editor or whatever. The closest thing now is Unity but to me it misses that immediacy and simplicity.

Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#43

Post by Asooka »

You weren't kidding about it chugging on mobile. I'm on a Google Pixel 6 and it crashed my browser :'D. Perhaps it can be used as a nice stres test for Ruffle. Also, I would appreciate some screenshots showing where and how Ruffle differs from Flash, it's not like I can install Flash plugin on a current browser and check for myself.

Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#44

Post by nextlevelwizard »

Most comments seem to be just praising this, but in my opinions the visuals are just headache inducing non-sense. I remember watching flash animations and briefly dabbling in making some, but I don't remember this kind of flashing hyper stuff.

All in all this was confusing thing to try to suffer through since I couldn't decide if this was suppose to be just a podcast where I dont look at the visuals or if there was going to be something actually worth looking at. So I just kept looking away and back at the flashing lights while retaining absolutely nothing from the audio portion.

Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#48

Post by exodust »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #44

Most comments seem to be just praising this, but in my opinions the visuals are just headache inducing non-sense. I remember watching flash animations and briefly dabbling in making some, but I don't remember this kind of flashing hyper stuff. All in all this was confusing thing to try to suffer through since I couldn't decide if this was suppose to be just a podcast where I dont look at the visuals or if there was g…

It's aiming for a "demoscene; psychedelic; trippy" aesthetic, as hinted at by the tags listed on page.

> "flashing hyper stuff"

You're getting it! That kind of vector animation isn't easy in HTML5.

Flash did have big arcs flying around the screen, at least in subtler background style. Even today there's not much "TV broadcast graphics" around on web, maybe for good reason, or because poor little mobile screens would choke, and need simple elements. Big screens can't have nice things.

Re: Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023

#49

Post by Closi »

onion2k wrote: post #41
thewebcount wrote: post #27

The visuals were a lot of fun, but I don’t understand why I, as a viewer/consumer/whatever of this sort of thing, would ever want these things: > Unknown runtime I like to know whether I’m going to have time to view all of something or not. I might want to set aside some time to watch something if it’s too long for the break I’m taking right now. > No rewinding, no skipping ahead Ugh. Just … no. If I saw something co…

I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all . Flash Player was awful. But... The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough . Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, a…

Agree - the success of flash was that it was designer-first rather than developer-first (and I miss that!).

Things like theatre.js look great, but very quickly their documentation make it clear that you are expected to use javascript.

Flash expected you to just draw stuff, animate stuff, and if you like there is an optional scripting environment. The first few iterations of flash didn't really even have much of a scripting environment at all (AS1 was incredibly limited!).

I think that is part of the nostalgia of that period - things were so easy to make that you got some really creative and crazy stuff.

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