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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

#181

Post by Sendotsh »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #175
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…

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)…

Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name.

It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles.

It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with it.

Then it has GML mode which is their programming language with excellent documentation and a decent community cranking out tutorials and guides, which has put out some seriously legit indie games such as Red Strings Club, Hyperlight Drifter, and Hotline Miami.

It’s also not just for games. It’s great for making interactive stories (I’ve made interactive kids books with it), HTML5 demos and interfaces, 2D physics demos, and even does basic 3D stuff.

(Not affiliated just a big fan and use it extensively).

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

#182

Post by wongarsu »

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…

Flash as an authoring tool is very much alive; Hasbro's infamous My Little Pony tv series is animated in Flash, to give a random example.

It's a great animation tool with a great learning curve, I'm surprised Adobe isn't doing more to get it in the hands of teenagers^w young creators.

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

#183

Post by nabakin »

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…

I was introduced to programming in middle school with Batch. A friend of mine was making a script to chat between computers and being able to make something interactive on a computer was so cool to me that I had him explain it. I learned Batch, then I learned Lua, Python, Java, and kept going. Minecraft which was really big at the time, drew me into making servers for my friends, which introduced me to plugins and programming them.

I think there will always be easy ways to break into tech, they just might change from year to year.

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

#186

Post by JohnBooty »

We're.... misattributing some things here, I think.

Flash was a bundle of good things and bad things, as we all more or less agree. Good for creativity, bad for usability and accessibility and security, etc.

You could, obviously, do so many things in Flash that were impossible with web standards.

But, why was there such a gap between what you could do in Flash and what you could do with web standards? Why was Flash even necessary?

This was due in large part to how Microsoft acquired a stranglehold on the web right as it was beginning to really take off -- IE4, IE5, and IE6 were the defacto standards, and Microsoft used them to quash innovation on the web as they (successfully) tried to hold on to their desktop software business for another decade or so.

Perhaps we haven't lived through the worst possible timeline, but there was certainly a better outcome possible - where Microsoft didn't stifle innovation on the web for close to a decade.

(And now, of course, we're approaching another dark age as Google heads toward IE6-like market share....)

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

#187

Post by strken »

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…

I don't think it's gatekeeping. I think it's because experts need different tools to beginners, and have louder voices when a tool doesn't meet their needs.

Consider Ruby on Rails. It was the most beginner-friendly way to create a web app when it was popular, but the very things that made it that way - opinionated design, sacrificing speed/correctness/scale by using Ruby, "batteries included", and a cultish fanbase that drew new users to it - made it the target of justified criticism from experts who wanted flexibility, type safety, speed, lightweight design, fewer CVEs, and fewer annoying fanboys. Flash came under fire for similar things: performance issues, poor UX when used in the wrong place, constant security vulnerabilities, being a proprietary standard.

These are actually good criticisms! There's no shadowy cabal who arranged feigned outrage over flash vulnerabilities, people were genuinely upset that a proprietary piece of software was turning their browser security into a sieve and stopping screenreaders from working. The criticisms just failed to ask why it was so popular with beginners anyway.

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

#189

Post by egypturnash »

joshtynjala wrote: post #170
Paperweight wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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 unfo…

It’s worth noting that it’s no longer a user-friendly tool for making interactive experiences, though. The current version of Actionscript is working hard to be a Real Programming Language, with a lot more code to write to make anything happen. It feels like Java to AS2’s Basic, and you just can’t write stuff in AS2 any more.

(AS1 is gone too, it was something you had to write by selecting verbs in a massive dropdown, and good riddance to that.)

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

#190

Post by mntmoss »

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…

I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.

There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.

And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them.

An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball:

* Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog

* Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing

* Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique

* Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly

* Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle

Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books.

Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten.

And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.

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