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

Spent the past few days making this - something halfway between a demoscene program and an experimental film. I wanted to celebrate the unique computer-y aesthetics of flash, while showing off some weird and obscure tricks I've picked up over the years since it's been deprecated. (Also, some maybe-not-subtle commentary about AI-art and the tools of the future)

Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
newgrounds.com

Is the concept of authoring with Flash actually dead/deprecated? I've been trying to understand--and maybe you're willing to help answer this--whether Adobe Animate is just a newer version of Adobe Flash that can target things other than the deprecated Flash web player/plugin.

TIL I have Ruffle installed, a Flash player emulator made in Rust of course.

Years ago, when I used Adobe Animate to make HTML5 animation (ahem, banner ads), it wasn't quite the same as Flash. I think it would compress and uncompress the SVG, which was cool and something I haven't seen too often post-Flash. Adobe Animate would even make sprite sheets, which are still rare (some sites use it for their icons libraries), but again, very useful in Flash-like HTML5 compression. I think the SVG compression was an internal Adobe function, though, I didn't see it in EaselJS.

Then there was vector keyframe animation, which was very clunky in HTML5.

https://createjs.com/docs/easeljs/modules/EaselJS.html

Very cool to see new content being made as in the OP's demo. I would say they're creating for Ruffle now, as Flash is old and deprecated.

Ultimately, someone needs to make a Ruffle editor. Adobe Flash succeeded because the authoring tool was great. Something like Synfig exporting to Ruffle:

https://www.synfig.org/

Bravo, dude.

The analogy I go to is that of a living versus a dead language, which I got from my dad. He was a professional cellist for years before he said screw it, got an MBA, and went into finance, and I always thought this was some tragic compromise on his part—but when I finally asked him about it (well into my twenties and figuring out my own career) he said it was nothing of the sort: finance back then (~late eighties, trading latin american sovereign debt) had much more innovation, competition, and energy around it then classical music had (or will ever have again: it was dead). We should treasure the art movements we have while we have them.

(proceeds to rewatch several Xiao Xiaos)

(proceeds to generate dog photos with Stable Diffusion)

(proceeds to futz with midis, slouching towards counterpoint)