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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

#21

Post by Retric »

The_rationalist wrote: post #5
pippy wrote: 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?

Low barrier to entry, cross browser compatible, multimedia websites.

Someone with artistic talent could quickly learn flash and get something bizarre working very quickly. Drop the minimally skilled into a modern development environment and novelty is much harder. 95% of the time that’s probably a good thing, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the internet.

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

#23

Post by vertex-four »

buboard wrote: 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…

I threw up a livestreaming setup + chat with nginx-rtmp-module, Prosody, Converse.JS and a few lines of javascript in a weekend. I'm not really sure what you're talking about tbh.

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

#24

Post by metafunctor »

Flash sites were creative, in that they were occasionally built by people with amazing talent and great skill.

Most of the time, though, Flash was the multimedia CD-ROM of the web. Flash was an extension shoehorned in, didn't feel like the rest of the web, and didn't deeply integrate with the browsing experience.

Flash content was an alien rectangle, a wormhole into a strange dimension, where a mouse click would often not behave anything like a mouse click usually would.

Flash pretended to be on the web, but Flash was not of the web. That's why it's now gone.

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

#25

Post by evrydayhustling »

excessive wrote: post #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 appl…

Something that's not easy to appreciate about Flash if you weren't there is that it is the first tool that really put multimedia interactivity within reach of non-devs -- and, almost gratuitously, made it dirt simple to distribute your creation at the same time.

A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly build and send something around the world in a week. No wonder it uncovered so many creative projects waiting to happen!!

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

#27

Post by buboard »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #19
buboard wrote: 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…

I'm not familiar with red5 but it seems that webRTC does a decent job on video and text chat with the browser doing the heavy lifting in terms of encryption and permissions. Am I missing something?

You can set up red5 in a few minutes, at most hours. Replicating a similar setup with something like Janus is a lot more complicated, and there is no HTML5 equivalent

Plus webrtc is proving to be a resource hog every time, and a lot more complicated to set up in an app (separate media / data stream etc). flash/red5 works literally out of the package.

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

#28

Post by grawprog »

zamadatix wrote: post #13
pippy wrote: 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…

Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the bro…

>It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction.

I really feel like flash's heyday was before adobe bought it up. Most of the best flash sites, newgrounds and stuff were more active and had tons of content while Macromedia still owned flash.

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

#29

Post by MayeulC »

zamadatix wrote: post #13
pippy wrote: 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…

Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the bro…

Do you think we really need DRM, though? I've been using the web without it for a while, and I just boycott sites or services that require it.

More to the point, I think that the current DRM scheme is inherently and completely broken. I could use it and let websites pretend it's useful, but it's not worth the increased quantity of proprietary code to me.

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