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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

#251

Post by taneem »

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.

Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.

However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.

Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.

Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.

So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.

In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.

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

#252

Post by koreth1 »

mntmoss wrote: post #190
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 univ…

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.

Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

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

#253

Post by zanny »

kaolti wrote: post #139

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…

I think it has to do with the commoditization of image. In the early Internet we didn't have centralized social media so going to a new place and experimenting didn't have ramifications across your social circles via platforms attached to your real name. You could make "bad" stick figure cartoons by night while working a "respectable" career by day and nobody would know who you are either way.

I feel terrible for kids today - they grow up into social media not knowing what it is, and by the time they can comprehend it their creativity has been stifled for years by the implied pressures of conformity and a cultural disapproval of failure.

But theres some nostalgia in that too - its not like every 80s and 90s kid was sitting in a computer lab inventing the next tower defense game. It has always been a tiny minority of kids that get creative from a young age, and if anything the continued availability and quantity of entertainment can serve to keep kids occupied with consumption rather than creation more today than ever before.

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

#254

Post by bbanyc »

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.

I remember Flash being slow and buggy on Mac and Linux at the time, and updates lagged far behind the Windows version (on Linux in particular). And then I saw an article from a Macromedia/Adobe dev saying that it was heavily optimized x86 assembly code targeted towards Windows and very difficult to port to other platforms... given the IE6 monoculture at the time, it made sense, but I felt like a redheaded stepchild for daring to use a minority OS.

I don't think it was 64-bit clean, either, so now no modern device runs Flash "natively."

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

#255

Post by ScottFree »

Matthias247 wrote: post #228
ScottFree wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. I was doing flash game development when flash "died." One of the guys I worked with created the Flex compiler. He told me Adobe had a seriously bad combination of brain drain and code ossification. The motto on the flash team was "don't break the internet." For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anythin…

> For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle. That's an interesting comment. I actually wonder whether this eventually…

It happens to a lot of successful products over time, but it's not inevitable by any means. It's possible to make software that is viable long term. But, there are many ugly realities regarding the current state of Corporate America that encourages this cycle.

For example, the fact that most engineers need to job hop in order to get promotions and raises. That makes it nearly impossible to build up long term institutional knowledge at any one company.

Another example: everyone in a publicly held company, from the rank and file programmers to the CEO, are rewarded for short term sales at the expense of long term stability. We had a thread here not too long ago[0] about how being a "maintenance engineer" was career suicide.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224188

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

#256

Post by disqard »

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)…

Shameless plug for BlockStudio [0], a programming environment for beginners, without textual code. It's free, and runs on any modern browser.

[0] https://www.blockstudio.app

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

#257

Post by vobios »

excessive wrote: post #10

I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java appl…

> It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java applets from the mid 90s.

People often forget about those.

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

#258

Post by on_and_off »

taneem wrote: post #251

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho. Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars. However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine…

It was so special.

It was just the right mix of relative simplicity and power.

No wonder that all the creatives flocked to flash.

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

#259

Post by nrb »

koreth1 wrote: post #252
mntmoss wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

Also, all of these gaming events are recorded for later viewing. I can experience Fortnite EXACTLY as it was when the event took place.

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

#260

Post by com2kid »

koreth1 wrote: post #252
mntmoss wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever. Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.

The entire map of Fortnite was removed, literally sucked into a virtual black hole. The game world is being rebooted/remade.
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