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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

#111

Post by KhoomeiK »

l_t wrote: post #104
hunta2097 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's an interesting way to look at it. I know the Minecraft era definitely had its equivalent code-related fanbase who'd make plugins and mods in Java. The age of Minecraft has also faded away though (besides the most recent Pewdiepie revival) and I'm not sure Fortnite or the other shooter games of today have a programmatic side.

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

#113

Post by blueboo »

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…

The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software.

I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame.

Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!

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

#115

Post by j2bax »

FooHentai wrote: post #99
djsumdog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?

Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.

Yes it’s still very commonly used by animators. They actually changed the name of the application to Animate but not too much has changed over the last 10 years. We still use it heavily at our studio for 2D game animation and short form animation for TV/web.

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

#116

Post by phaseshifter »

jayd16 wrote: post #77

People are looking back with rose tinted glasses, I think. This was an era where you could build rich media with absolute canvas values and it would look great and it was easy for an artist to take that canvas and do things. The iPhone killed flash but not just in the obvious way. These days everything needs to be reactive and run on well on mobile hardware. Even if iOS supported flash it would need to be a different…

I remember sideloading the Flash Player APK on my Android phone around 2013 (they stopped official support in 4.1) and most of the Flash content was effectively unusable even then.

Pecking on a tiny video player with your finger to change volume, quality, or playback position was a terrible experience and the battery drain wasn't great either. Watching videos outside of YouTube was a terrible time for phone users before sites transitioned to HTML5.

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

#117

Post by mesh »

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…

You can find the SWF spec at: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html

Macromedia / Adobe released it quite a bit ago (while Flash was still popular).

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

#118

Post by blueboo »

dTal wrote: post #102
hunta2097 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device...

...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.

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

#119

Post by erklik »

KhoomeiK wrote: post #111
l_t wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's an interesting way to look at it. I know the Minecraft era definitely had its equivalent code-related fanbase who'd make plugins and mods in Java. The age of Minecraft has also faded away though (besides the most recent Pewdiepie revival) and I'm not sure Fortnite or the other shooter games of today have a programmatic side.

Fortnite defintely doesn't AFAIK, and their nature as a multiplayer game invites competition, and therefore, cheating making it important for the developer to actually de incentivize modding. I am very disappointed that modding of famous games is going down honestly.

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

#120

Post by bsanr2 »

FooHentai wrote: post #99
djsumdog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of early Adult Swing shows were made with Flash (I think Aqua Teen?). What are studios using today? Is there anything equivalent today that matches the power of Flash for young animators?

Isn't Flash still viable for animation studios? I thought Flash Player is what's going away, effectively killing Flash playback on the Web, but Flash itself as an animation platform continues to be a supported, actively-developed and commercially available tool.

Adobe Animate is the successor to Flash's animation toolset. Animators use a number of different tools today, many that implement tweening, depending on studio needs.

Also, low or no-cost applications that are accessible to newcomers include Blender and the upcoming Procreate 5.

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