Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 441 posts

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

#131

Post by superkuh »

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…

> 2010. ... homogeneous ... bland without rough edges, literally with rounded corners. Options were removed, defaults became simpler and dumber.

This is the result of web devs targeting smart phones. They've made the web suck bending over backwards for the limited abilities of phones to act as computers in both the UI and network sense.

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

#132

Post by buboard »

ehsankia wrote: post #32
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…

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.

> web as a whole has grown up and changed

eh, no it hasnt, and even if it did it would have nothing to do with flash. Flash was a great domain-specific tool for somthing that is significantly more cumbersome to write (and difficult to debug, and less wysiwyg) in canvas. Plus technology is supposed to move forward and 20 years is a geologic timespan in internet years. We expected to have much, much better tools by now, not a barely equivalent

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

#133

Post by detaro »

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…

I think the place of animations might also been taken by video now. Back then, there were no ubiquitous video cameras and apps around them. Now, everyone can start making and sharing video clips with overlays/music/...

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

#134

Post by sophiebits »

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…

Adobe Animate is a successor to Flash and is exactly this.

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

#135

Post by sircastor »

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…

This reminds me of my discovery and learning Hypercard probably 15 years before you learned Flash. To me it was the same kind of creative spark. I was encouraged by Cosmic Osmo, and later Myst and the like. I never did learn to program with it.

I don't know where the modern equivalent is. Maybe they only pop up every couple of decades...

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

#136

Post by zamadatix »

WatchDog wrote: post #101
zamadatix wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I doubt there is. Just like any protection mechanism it doesn't have to be impossible to sidestep to provide value to someone.

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

#137

Post by Angostura »

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…

Except, except ... having watched my teenage daughter play some games recently, there seems to be a trend for pixel art going on, half the things she is playing have the graphical sophistication of the stuff I was playing on my ZX Spectrum (only a modicum of exaggeration).

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

#138

Post by Paperweight »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79
larsiusprime wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called OpenFL[1] and it is exactly that! Supports canvas and WebGL, as well as a whole bunch of native targets too. This is a reimplementation of the Flash API in the Haxe programming language. And ruffle-rs[2] is a reimplemenation of the flash player itself in Rust. (So you'd still be using ActionScript for authoring) [1] https://www.openfl.org/ [2] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

> It's called OpenFL and it is exactly that The first beginner tutorial is about displaying a bitmap and starts with a terminal [1]. This is not as discoverable as Flash’s tools, which felt more like MS Paint when first opened. [1] https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/displaying-a-...

...yeah there's no way the creatives we're talking about are gonna use that. There must _not_ be any command line or scripting involved for most of the population to be able to use it.

But why reinvent the wheel? I think that the key to Flash's success is in its roots as an excellent, intuitive vector graphics editor called SmartSketch. (Way easier to use than Inkscape, IMO) They added animation to compete with Macromedia Shockwave in 1995, and the rest is the well known history of corporate greed and a victim of its own success.

The Flash IDE is still around, however (https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html), but Adobe's giving it up at the end of 2020 :( I can only hope that they open source it.

A light, friendly version is Flash 5. It's available online (http://www.oldversion.com/windows/macromedia-flash-5-0), weighs in at a whopping 18 MB, and still works on Windows 10!

Anyway, Flash 5 Player .swf files can be exported as standalone .exe "Projectors". For example, the IDE tutorial one (https://www.sharhon.com/files/flash5test.exe) stands at 405 KB and still runs on Windows 10 as well. Surely it would be possible to wrap _real_ Flash projectors in a WebAssembly Windows NT emulator using a drag-and-drop webpage...and let the games begin.

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

#139

Post by kaolti »

Lots of good points made, I'll add mine.

Flash got me started in web design as a kid and put me on a path to earning a good living. Lots of things changed since then but I want to hear your thoughts on one specifically.

It used to be cool to try things and put something together that in the grand scheme of things is kind of bad. I get the feeling that's not the case anymore.

Seems like there's so much pressure to sell the image of you being an expert, there is no room to try wild things and see what happens - which is the basis for learning and development btw. What we get then is everyone copying the "expert" patterns, but hardly anyone doing anything original or truly creative, because it feels risky.

This is probably true for a lot of other creative endeavours that have big $ behind them - the movie industry comes to mind. Sure, there are more movies being made now than ever, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like we're in the most creative era and you know it's got nothing to do with the tools.

Someone please tell me otherwise.

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

#140

Post by archie2 »

My wife and I both grew up in the era of Flash on the web. We were both inspired by it, I became a developer because I wanted to make games like the ones I played that were built on Flash, my wife became an animator and designer because of the cool animations she could find and create using it.

The death of Flash meant the death of her childhood and while I still make my living developing for and on the web - my wife has basically been locked out of it because she hasn't been able to find anything "modern" that really takes Flashes place. She can write HTML and simple CSS, and even tweak tiny bits of Javascript or even PHP here and there but nothing at the level of expressivity that she could do with Flash.

Ultimately, the death of Flash was the death of our childhood.

Post reply on HN