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Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#2
You can set up a video chat lecture with text chat and pretty good video with the free red5 java server and something like Avchat.com . That's 20 year old tech and works today, but will be removed from the net in a year. There is no HTML5 alternative. Why?

I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber. Dev tools are more about saving programmers from themselves rather than pushing things to the limit. Flash is probably an example of it

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#4
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly.

It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply release the swf spec.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#5
post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#6
post #2

You can set up a video chat lecture with text chat and pretty good video with the free red5 java server and something like Avchat.com . That's 20 year old tech and works today, but will be removed from the net in a year. There is no HTML5 alternative. Why? I think Tech took a weird turn somewhere around 2010. Things became more homogeneous, designes became bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Op…

Unity WebGL is definitely close to where Flash was. If anything WASM adoption is growing, it’s a respected standard. Once there is multi threading, heap expansion and streaming instanciation in iOS ... I’m going to guess 15, or 4 years from now, it’ll be the true spirit of Flash.

I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#7
post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

I feel like you can do pretty much everything with HTML5 and JavaScript that you could with Flash and ActionScript. The IDE for Flash had some nice UI abstractions but there's no reason that couldn't happen in a web IDE in 2019. Distributing your website like a flash file/app as a binary is one missing feature I suppose?

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#8
post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

IMO, nothing. What HTML 5 (and more specifically, canvas+js) are lacking is a complete timeframe-based IDE.

I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#9
post #4

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 (https://www.construct.net) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it!

Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has nice things to say about Construct, and we’re getting very positive numbers from other portals and platforms (some very big) that a lot of volume of games and good quality ones at that are being published with them using Construct 3.

I’d like to hear from more experienced Flash users if there’s anything Construct 3 can’t do that Flash could as it would likely be an important feature we’d be keen to add!

Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

#10
I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s.

It's easy to imagine the various security vulnerabilities could have been fixed by a more responsible/responsive company, and the abuse by advertisement companies should've been solvable with an ad blocker.

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML have come a long way in capability, but the mashup is much more distasteful to me. Flash was elegant despite its frequent misuse.

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