Flash may have had its merits, but it was massively overused to build crappy non-searchable, non-accessible web sites.
Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
141–150 of 441 posts
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#142Earlier 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-...
It's a fair criticism.
There is a workflow you can use with a custom Adobe Animate plugin that lets you use Adobe Animate as your authoring tool.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.
What? Everyone these days has a browser. How is it more difficult to share a web game than sharing a flash game? IF anything, back then you often had to install macromedia and other plugins since they didn't always come by default on every computer.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#144I 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…
I didn't know anyone else knew albino black sheep. Browing miniclip and playing flash games was the peak of middle school for me
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#145Earlier 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.
> 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…
Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games.
Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube videos, Netflix originals, memes, and so on. If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#146Earlier 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.
Embedded device? It's a handheld unix computer.
Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Embedded device? It's a handheld unix computer. Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.
It's not the default, but you can have that kind of experience with various toolkits for mobile devices too. I've seen workshops which kids left after an afternoon with their own simple "game" deployed to their phones.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#148In my personal opinion, Flash was ruined by Adobe when they tried to 'fix' it (improve it?) with ActionScript 3, which followed the ECMA script standard. AS3 changed everything about how flash worked, and if you weren't a software engineer, the learning curve was steep. I actually went and took some basic programming classes (literally in visual basic lol) and learned how to write proper code.
Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun.
And besides that, plenty of real coding tools already existed, and HTML/CSS/JS was improving really quickly as well. So I ended up learning those instead.
All of that was actually great for my design career, but Flash just didn't have a place anymore. And I'm still sad about that.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 platf…
My company has been using expo for mobile development because you can build a React app and expo does all the work to make it work on Android and iOS. It's not perfect but since we're doing React for the web app, it's allowed web devs to become mobile devs with almost no additional training.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#150Not strictly on topic, but I still have clients stuck on Flash. Which tools do you advise to extract text content from swf?
I tried swftools with not much success. A few commercial apps weren’t much help either. And Google’s tool (forgot its name) was taken down.