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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

#121

Post by soup10 »

ken wrote: post #96
soup10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for…

> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly t…

Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now.

Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.""

""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"

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

#122

Post by wavefunction »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #37
wavefunction wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Distributing your website like a flash file/app as a binary is one missing feature I suppose? Lots of solutions to this: * SickBeard ran a local web server and the UI ran in your browser. * Electron / Nwjs * Whatever Microsoft has planned for Electron (Electron Runtime?) * That Microsoft compiled HTML format thats defunct mostly (chtml). As much as everyone hates on the web. Its a consistent UI platform. Not 100% c…

Naw I mean you could burn a Flash project to a CD ROM and it would auto-play when your grandma stuck it in the "coffee holder."

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

#123

Post by wavefunction »

Filligree wrote: post #15
wavefunction wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can just about do it, but it takes far more CPU time. What happened to efficiency?

I'd need to see some performance metrics to come to that conclusion. "Bloated Flash site loading with a progress indicator for a few seconds" was pretty common and a huge complaint about Flash and its use on the web.

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

#124

Post by wavefunction »

excessive wrote: post #14
wavefunction wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As consumers, most people probably only care about what modern browsers can do. As a developer, the mechanisms become front and center. Modern web development is a Rube Goldberg kluge of things glued together with duct tape. Flash was much more coherent and imposed less cognitive burden of tying it altogether.

Are you intending to reply to me? I agree with you to a certain extent regarding NPM madness.

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

#125

Post by aidenn0 »

blueboo wrote: post #113
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…

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…

MS Excel also lets you put any kind of code anywhere. IMO, nNot forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.

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

#126

Post by Mathnerd314 »

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…

Everything young people do now outside of schooling and dedicated hobbies seems to be mobile-based, so Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days.

This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, like Blender, Unity, Python, etc. have been developing.

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

#127

Post by quadrangle »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #65
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.

It doesn't even help, the Pirate bay is filled with Netflix rips despite the DRM.

DRM does exactly what it was meant to do: remove rights from the folks who play by the rules.

The public premise that DRM is about stopping "piracy" was always a lie. Obviously, it can't do that. In fact, DRM encourages piracy by reducing the value of non-pirated versions of things.

DRM exists to control and manipulate regular, honest customers, such as making them watch ads or to pay over and over for different copies of the same thing even when they actually have the legal right to make copies for their own use.

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

#128

Post by buboard »

blueboo wrote: post #118
dTal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play

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

#129

Post by l_t »

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.

With Minecraft, even just watching a Youtube video and copying their build-style to make something cool is enough for a kid to learn that they can be a creator.

They realize that there's no magic; all it takes to make something nice is a little knowledge, and a lot of work.

From what I've seen of Fortnite, it promotes a different kind of creativity, which is more like creative problem solving (boxing people in, riding rockets, etc.) But it does have a sandbox mode that I've seen some interesting creations from.

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

#130

Post by hackerc »

TomGullen wrote: post #9
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…

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 ni…

Is it a good platform to make animated movies? Can output be distributed as a single shareable file, like .swf?
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