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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

#101

Post by WatchDog »

zamadatix wrote: post #42
MayeulC wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't like DRM myself but there are a very large number of users that like to use services which wouldn't stream content otherwise. Just like any protection mechanism it doesn't have to be perfectly impossible to break to provide value to someone. The nice thing about the way EME was implemented is if you aren't one of those users you can simply disable Widevine or (if you prefer to not even have proprietary code o…

Is there actually any widevine distributed content that isn't available otherwise at the same or better quality?

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

#102

Post by dTal »

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…

Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to create a 'hello world' mobile app - it seems awesomely, perversely difficult compared to the intrinsic simplicity of the task. I would argue that this is deliberate gatekeeping - if ordinary people could create content, this would threaten an awful lot of business models, including and especially the business models of people who run app stores and take a cut of the profits. Can't have the techno-serfs programming, can we?

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

#103

Post by ktpsns »

mattkevan wrote: post #83

As far as I’m concerned, the whole field of web design peaked in 1999 when this website was made: http://superior-web-solutions.com/ Enable Flash, turn up the sound and whatever you do, do NOT skip the intro.

Wow, clicking this link I just realized my Firefox/Linux installation still has the Flash player plugin. So I could view this gem of 90s Flash-only website.

It shows all the problem the web had back then: It took me four clicks to see actual text about what the authors are trying to say/sell. Everything before was crying "wow look at the amazing technology we can build".

For many web developers at that time (including me), this was a reason why we hated Flash (and intro pages, in general). At some level, the web got more professional after the Flash times, when content was written in HTML again, and SEO was a thing. Unfortunately, today, Javascript takes over the role of Flash and at many sites, without JS there is no text appearing/embedded in HTML only.

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

#104

Post by l_t »

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…

I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why:

I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing that. Not only that, but it was a specific low-effort style of animation. The path from consumer -> producer was short.

So really, I think you have to look at what people are consuming, and then try and make it easy for them to "participate." I'm not sure if people are consuming Flash-style animations anymore. (Maybe they are, and I just aged out of the demographic.)

It seems like a lot of that creative energy has moved to sandbox games like Minecraft for now, where that community of creators and would-be creators still exists, and away from animation and Web design.

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

#105

Post by jaequery »

aikah wrote: post #84
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #47

I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash. When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools. Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would l…

What Adobe destroyed is the community existing around Macromedia products. It was just unprecedented to my knowledge. Most Macromedia solutions were extremely easy to use AND improve via plugins. You could use Javascript to easily create add-ons for Flash, or Fireworks, or Dreamweaver and there was that "community" aspect that did not exist with Adobe product. And then Macromedia got "Eloped"... It's crazy how Adobe…

Yeah, 2advanced.com was a mind-blowing experience the first time I saw it.

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

#107

Post by est31 »

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?

animated vector graphics? Browsers only have data-intensive pixel graphics codecs. Also, the vector graphics support that they do have is pretty limited and slow. Anyways, I'm glad that flash is dead, because it was proprietary software and constant source for security bugs.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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