Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by sp332 » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #29

zamadatix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the bro…

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.

Yes, because enough content hosts absolutely refuse to make their content available without DRM, and enough users are willing to switch browsers to one that will show that content, that even Mozilla finally gave in after years of fighting against it. In the end they were afraid that they'd lose enough users that they wouldn't be able to continue the project any more. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...

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

#162

Post by bpye » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

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…

In my experience Flutter does make getting a simple mobile app running quickly easy. It's not a drag and drop experience but the programming model is such that it doesn't take much code to get something interesting.

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

#163

Post by ScottFree » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

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…

> Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made.

Adobe Flex did data-driven responsive design just fine. It was the popular framework before es5 and html5 made it obsolete.

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

#164

Post by acdha » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

jrwoodruff wrote: post #148

In 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 on…

> 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.

I don’t disagree with that but I think it needs to be in the larger context of Adobe being bad at almost everything related to platform support. Their APIs were not well-considered; consistency happened at other companies; the tools were expensive, poorly designed, buggy, and basically unsupported (“The Flash IDE crashes when I do X”. 10 months pass. “Pay $800 for the upgrade and let us know if that fixes it ”), and performance/battery impacts always lagged behind the native alternatives — all of which sucked the fun out of the creative process as you had to take time away for pure drudgery working around Adobe’s slacking.

If at any time they’d invested 10% more on quality and basic software engineering they wouldn’t have had all of their customers looking for alternatives. As we saw, that can be more profitable for a short period but catches up hard.

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

#165

Post by seanalltogether » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

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…

Adobe bungled everything about Macromedia. My livelihood was pretty much built around Macromedia during the entire 2000s and I remember how uneasy I was about the Adobe buyout back then. Macromedia conferences were seriously creative and fun and educational and developer friendly, the first year after Adobe took over they turned it into a big marketing event and within a short time span the entire community was killed off. I think back then (and maybe even now) Adobe just saw the web as a publishing platform, whereas Macromedia saw it as a playground.

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

#166

Post by pault » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

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…

What you describe as miserable was my introduction to software development. I never had any technically minded friends or family, and growing up I looked at programming the same way I looked at professional sports; out of my reach and not worth attempting. I started my career as a graphic designer and flash became popular a few years after I started working. The ability to "put code anywhere" allowed me to experiment without having to learn an entire language or ecosystem just to get started. The fact that the IDE was all you need to design, script, and publish content made "hello world" as easy as installing a single app. When I consider the landscape of programming tools in 2019 I can't imagine that kid from a poor family with no training or support being able to make the transition from novice to professional. It's true that browser dev tools and online tutorials have drastically lowered to barrier of entry for application development, but the leap from browser dev tools to being able to actually author and deploy a fully functioning app is enormous. In the flash days there was no difference between the hello world and the professional development environment. It's sad, because becoming a software developer completely transformed my life and provided me with an income over 4x greater than my parents' combined salaries when I was a teenager. When I read comments deriding the old flash IDE for its simplicity it makes me sad for today's generation of underprivileged kids. I hope there is still a path for them to lift themselves out of a life of few opportunities through the joy of programming.

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

#167

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:19 AM UTC

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…

Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have picked.

Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator.

There are so many resources for people of any age and background to learn practical skills in this field. There are summer camps where 7 year old kids learn to program.

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

#168

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:22 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #146

blueboo wrote: post #118

Earlier 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.

There is a lot of legacy from the age of "the hardware can barely run it, but we're sticking a Unix with a graphics system on it anyway"

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

#169

Post by thrower123 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

buboard wrote: post #128

blueboo wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

Why designing most mobile apps should be harder than slamming together VB6 form applications is something that is not entirely clear to me.

Although when people start arguing that programming a web page is easy, it really brings home how awful modern programming is, and how long it has been since there was widespread usage of really decent and simple RAD tooling.

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

#170

Post by joshtynjala » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

Paperweight wrote: post #138

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Macro…

Adobe Flash Player, the web browser plugin, will no longer be updated in 2020.

The Flash IDE, now called Animate, continues to be developed by Adobe. They have not announced an end of life for this tool. It will still be updated after 2020. In fact, it can now export a variety of new formats other than SWF files for Flash Player, and they've been expanding the animation features quite a bit in recent years.

It's unfortunate that many people are confused about what exactly Adobe has discontinued. So many people in this thread are lamenting that this user friendly animation tool no longer exists as a starting point for new users, when in fact, it does and will still be in active development beyond 2020.