Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
171–180 of 441 posts
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#172I 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…
Programmers have a huge disdain for end user programming. Visual Basic, spreadsheets, even HyperCard.
The vast majority of coding should be end user programming. The collective we just wants to own the tools and the jobs.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#173I 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 barrier to entry kinda needs to be high. The attention economy combined hordes of capable creative content producers means there is just not room for people who are not willing to
work really hard at something.
If you go back and watch some of the old flash stuff or play old flash games they are not good, they would be completely unnoticed today.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#174Earlier 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…
Programmers have a huge disdain for end user programming. Visual Basic, spreadsheets, even HyperCard. The vast majority of coding should be end user programming. The collective we just wants to own the tools and the jobs.
I am sympathetic to your sentiment, but the reason for the disdain is Professionalization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professionalization
It's natural to want your job not to be turned over to the CEO's 14 year old son.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#175I 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…
There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news.
For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling):
- For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile).
- For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar)
Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform.
On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens.
[1] https://codea.io/ [2] http://continuous.codes/ [3] https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ [4] https://playdotjs.com/ [5] https://www.android-ide.com/ [6] https://tic.computer/ [7] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ [8] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ [9] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker [10] https://gdevelop-app.com/ [11] https://godotengine.org/
Note: Yes, obvious game-making bias here :)
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#176I 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…
What Adobe destroyed is the community existing around Macromedia products. It was just unprecedented to my knowledge. Most Macromedia solutions were extremely easy to use AND improve via plugins. You could use Javascript to easily create add-ons for Flash, or Fireworks, or Dreamweaver and there was that "community" aspect that did not exist with Adobe product. And then Macromedia got "Eloped"... It's crazy how Adobe…
I was in 9th grade when I first came across 2advanced, a time in my life when I was was figuring out what my interests were. Torn between continuing to learn programming and changing course to something that seemed more “creative”, suddenly here was this thing that clearly blended both in a way I hadn’t known was possible. I consider 2a to have been a big influence on me, and to this day I remember the music, sounds, and animations from their v2 and v3 sites crystal-clear.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#177Earlier 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…
There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news. For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling): - For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native)…
Also Unity's HTML export, and most notably Adobe Flash (which is "Flash but on a canvas" in the most literal way, even though the main demographic are now animators)
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#178Thank god someone is saying it. ActionScript 3 was my first programming language! Without flash (and I know the many reasons for its extinction), there's nothing that truly "bundles" an interactive experience altogether into one little file, which plays in just one little box. To be honest, "responsive" concerns shouldn't be the job of the creative. That's an external concern. Video games generally simply scale graphics to fit the screen using a simple algorithm and that's that. But when you design, for example, games on the web, you have the luxury of fine-grained adjustment based on browser, resolution, DPI, etc. But that freedom is exactly what creates an ambiguous "boundary" for internet games. They aren't guaranteed to fit in this 800x600 div that *'s games portal site requires.
In short, I think that the open & open-ended, non-strict support-all-the-technologies nature of the web is too free for creative production. There's too much. There's a known principle that limitations are crucial to creative expression to the same degree the "tools" and "medium" are. We need an open-source spiritual successor to flash which utilizes the wonder web ecosystem but exposes a more constrained API so that games/interactive experiences are portable and to an extent LIMITED again.
Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#179Earlier 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.
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.
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Re: Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era
#180BTW, for all the elderly ;) HNers, the mid-twenties came of age during the golden age of Flash, which almost defined the internet at that point in time. Dammit, I'm getting teary-eyed. It was elementary, junior, and high-school for me. Many memories of consuming content through Flash, AND also PRODUCING content with flash. Learning how to program with pirated versions of then-Macromedia's flagship product - now working at... the company that proved old dogs can (sort of) learn new tricks ;). Perhaps it's analogous to a Commodore 64 or something for the older guys, hahaha.