201–210 of 441 posts
In general, the Web is more commercialized now, so creative content doesn't always rise to the top, and there are incentives to be a low-quality content factory.
But there are thousands or millions of online videos (some, like Flash, are animated) and indie games on major platforms that are just as creative as the most experimental, interesting stuff on Newgrounds.
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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.
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…
Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
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 univ…
If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported hardware, make media using it, and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
The difference between the pinball machine and video game is not so wide a chasm. The vogue of pinball came and went, and now it is a small community hobby. Hobbies come and go - just look at the resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons the last 10 years adjacent to a huge decline in "AAA" PC game RPGs.
In the same light, while the Fortnite gamer might never be able to re-experience the event that just passed, there are thousands playing Doom maps written in the mid 90s today on engines refined through decades of hobbyist volunteer work to provide features not even often seen in modern titles. And simultaneously there are new Doom maps being made all the time, entire games (look up the Adventures of Square) made with its engine, etc. That technology is now over 25 years "obsolete" but lives on through its community.
You touch on it - but it really does matter if you own it. All these transient experiences being offered as a moment of engagement by corporations all of which are held under lock and key and never see a bidirectional creative process between maker and consumer are all vapid and empty. The digital experiences that endure are those that go both ways, and that everyone involved can lay claim to and participate in.
Modern video games are themeparks, but the tooling available through projects like GZDoom, OpenMW, Godot, etc are sandboxes for creativity that no corporation can take away. This is why the free software movement even began, and why it has only gained relevance as technology has permeated society and culture.
But that concept extends beyond just video games - Blender makes its open movies, there are repositories and communities around free music, art, etc. Communities built around shared worlds all licensed permissively to encourage participation and collaboration in opposition to the common proprietary reality of creative products being weaponized against their own fans through copyright to reject participation. You just have to look for them - they don't have the billions in advertising to permeate your every waking second of consumptive behavior.
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…
Some were, the bad ones, but most were not.
I did a lot Flash back in that time and it was all responsive.
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> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly t…
Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now. Here is the Jobs quote from when this happe…
And to consumers, what they lose by supporting the BP of tech.
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Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
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 sel…
You don't really get that visceral moment of magic reaction from web technologies or super polished game engines which is where that happens now.
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Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
Youtube has no interactivity either.