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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

#231

Post by mr_toad »

aidenn0 wrote: post #125
blueboo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MS Excel also lets you put any kind of code anywhere. IMO, nNot forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.

> Not forcing any organization lowers the barrier to entry.

And raises the barrier to maintenance.

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

#232

Post by jonfw »

bigiain wrote: post #198
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 feel this too. As a kid, I could kinda understand how to go from programming in Basic to Pong or Space Invaders. A kid these days has _so_ many more expectations if they're wondering how Fortnite works... I had enough hubris as a 12/13 year old to write Space Invaders in ascii in Basic on an Osbourne2, and later to get a quite creditable imitation using sprites on an AppleII. I wonder if kids these days look at com…

These days though- kids have access to much higher level languages and libraries and frameworks that can make some of these processes much easier. While it is much harder to understand the tech stack from the ground up- you can do a whole lot with the high level tools closer to the surface.

Kids may not no how to go from BASIC to a video-game- but they don't have to write their games in BASIC. There are point and click game studios, there are really great physics engines available, there are libraries that attempt to make it simple.

I remember learning how to build mods in minecraft ~10 years ago- there were tools out there that allowed you to make creatures or blocks that inherited behaviors programmed in other parts of the game- and you could do a lot with that!

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

#233

Post by nashashmi »

est wrote: post #211
JohnBooty wrote: post #186

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 e…

> Microsoft used them to quash innovation on the web Microsoft didn't "quash" any innovation, the ActiveX framework allows more innovation than any other browser on the market, Flash was invented as an ActiveX plugin, so does AJAX and it started the whole Web 2.0 era. IE had so much incredible feature that it makes modern looks like a dull corporate utility. We had VRML and vector graphics. We can playback videos wit…

Do not forget vml. The more superior version of SVG. Sigh.

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

#234

Post by jugg1es »

I couldn't possibly agree more with this article. It is still possible to do the kinds of things that Flash did now-a-days with HTML5 canvas, but it requires a lot more programming abilities than Flash required.

Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms have beautiful, yet predictable, websites.

The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical stack of buttons, no top nav bar. Designers back then encouraged exploration. You just don't see that anymore.

Overall, websites are way better now. But we have certainly lost something as the entire web has become commoditized and homogenized. No one is willing to take risks anymore. The late 90s and 2000's was a different kind of internet than it is now, for sure.

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

#235

Post by nashashmi »

redisman wrote: post #191
JohnBooty wrote: post #186

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 e…

Flash had a VM that truly was "write once, run on anything" and a great (software) pixel and vector renderer. Cross-browser compatibility with HTML standards was completely bonkers and HTML had none of the features Flash Games and Animations needed. Try to move or rotate a picture at 30 fps with old HTML.

Had Adobe bought Goowy Desktop, Adobe could have launched their own iPad or iPhone of sorts. Maybe even a desktop.

Instead AOL bought them and realized that was a mistake.

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

#236

Post by bredren »

jugg1es wrote: post #234

I couldn't possibly agree more with this article. It is still possible to do the kinds of things that Flash did now-a-days with HTML5 canvas, but it requires a lot more programming abilities than Flash required. Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms have beautiful, yet predictable, websites. The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical stack of butto…

But there is far more competition than there was before. People have devices allowing them shorter attention span to get to value than before.

This change is not only because of the loss of flash.

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

#237

Post by rezmason »

I might have missed a few names, but I'd like to contribute a list of folks and sites from the old Flash community who seemed like rock stars (in order of how much I idolized them).

Once I typed it up, I realized it was all dudes, so let me first link to https://flashgoddess.com/spotlight/ , who shone a spotlight on the women who worked in the same space. (Shoutout to Lisa Larson-Kelley, fellow alumnus of FlashCodersNY, and Stacey Mulcahy, whose hilarious AS2-to-AS3 migration talk was fucking awesome!)

If you wish to view any of these links, I recommend pasting them into web.archive.org and setting the Wayback to the mid-to-late 2000's.

mrdoob.com (Mr. doob, later created three.js) audiotool.com, lab.andre-michelle.com (Andre Michelle) wefail.com (Jordan Stone, Martin Hughes) gskinner.com (Grant Skinner, later created EaselJS, etc) quasimondo.com (Mario Klingemann) bytearray.org (Thibault Imbert) bit-101.com (Keith Peters) vectorpark.com (Patrick Smith) hoogerbrugge.com (Han Hoogerbrugge) levitated.net (Jared Tarbell) blog.joa-ebert.com (Joa Ebert (also audiotool)) orisinal.com (Ferry Halim) hospital.apoka.com (Edouard Artus) kirupa.com (Kirupa Chinnathambi) mosessupposes.com (Moses Gunesch) gotoandlearn.com, theflashblog.com (Lee Brimelow)

Most of these folks also spoke at tech events, sharing techniques and hard-learned lessons. Like that time when Wefail gave a talk that took a memorably heavy shit on Jakob Nielsen. Hell yes.

Also worth noting the HBO Voyeur promotional site made by Big Spaceship: archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur

The Flash community was creative and groundbreaking as hell. Most of the folks who criticized it for being proprietary and insecure are lifelong users of proprietary, insecure platforms; the worst aspects of the Flash-equipped web linger still, namely ads, inaccessibility and site bloat; and let's face it, as capable as the modern web client stack is, it's lost so much ground to the walled garden platforms, that Steve Jobs's 2010 agenda can no longer be seen as anything but duplicitous.

Godspeed, FutureSplash! You were to good for this web.

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

#238

Post by jugg1es »

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…

AS3 was literally the best thing that ever happened to Flash. The problems with Flash had nothing to do with the actual tech (aside from security) and everything to do with product management. It's just a shame that AS3 came so late in the Flash lifecycle.

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

#239

Post by sitkack »

ojbyrne wrote: post #174
sitkack wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has not occurred and is not occurring in programming.

The CEOs 14 year old son is a straw boy.

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

#240

Post by hunterloftis »

woutr_be wrote: post #224
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…

I actually quite liked the changes in AS3, and it being more programatic, I think it paved the way for what I do now. After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I think it was for the better.

I was a front-end developer during the AS2 -> AS3 -> Flex era. These days, I've been messing with Web Components (via LitElement) and the similarities with Flex/MXML are uncanny.
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