151–160 of 201 posts
If Visual Basic (and Delphi, and others) had this basically solved twenty years ago, why is it still something that's so hard to do for HTML?
I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…
This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…
The trend of restaurants around me is to just have a single png scan of their menu and nothing else. I was talking to one owner and they were wondering why their SEO was so bad
I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…
Indexing was fixable by some additional effort and it's the same with these days SPAs.
Basically most of those complains apply to a lot of modern web sites.
What boggles me is that it's still hard to put together a UI by dragging/dropping some fields together. If Visual Basic (and Delphi, and others) had this basically solved twenty years ago, why is it still something that's so hard to do for HTML?
This is exactly the problem we're solving with Anvil (https://anvil.works). It's explicitly VB-like - one language, drag and drop design, and object oriented components. But it is only possible because we took the deliberate choice to do it all with one language (Python) with an appropriately simplified display model.
Flash, specifically Flex, won the battle and then promptly lost the war as other companies remade the internet in Flex's image. Adobe's sudden and not at all inevitable betrayal of Flex devs was a huge shock and absolutely killed Adobe in the field of Rich Internet Apps which at that point they were dominating. If they'd pivoted Flex to compile to Javascript then the world as we know it would be a very different plac…
Also checkout the last FlexJS Summit at ApacheCon Miami 2017 [1]
[0]: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLEX/FlexJS
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4EsaSA9xpnnraJX7NzpX...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…
Sidenote: But I don't understand why restaurant websites that I have seen are so bad. Is there a specific, prolific company that does these? The trend of restaurants around me is to just have a single png scan of their menu and nothing else. I was talking to one owner and they were wondering why their SEO was so bad
I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…
Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterargument, look at the state of the web today without Flash. Many websites are still bloated, still slow to load, still hijack the back button, still mess with copy and paste, still force same-window-only opening. So was Flash really the issue?
With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead. Sure…