Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

Post by dillonmckay » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

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?

Post by Mirioron » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #25

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 buil…

Post by dillonmckay » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

Post by dillonmckay » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

hunta2097 wrote: post #49

l_t wrote: post #16

I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back…

Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for frame…

Post by zozbot234 » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #48

ehsankia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is pretty misleading. The parts you complain about have little to do with what made Flash a creative sandbox. The parts that do matter have long been replaced with Canvas/WebGL. But the web as a whole has changed. Just like we don't have as many fun quirky geocities-like websites. The issue isn't the lack of Flash, it's that the web as a whole has grown up and changed.

Canvas/WebGL may replace Flash to end users. I'm not aware of creator tools that allow people to put things together as easily as they could using Flash.