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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

#281

Post by hoelle »

The premise of this article is just weirdly wrong and out of touch. There are monstrously huge creative spaces on the modern internet, powered by better and better tools. YouTube. Unity. Scratch. Roblox. Twitch. Itch.io. Blender. Minecraft. And so on.

It is noteworthy that professional/corporate creators haven't followed the hobbyists and kids into some of these spaces to represent their brands as much as they did into the land of Web+Flash. I don't see how that matters when measuring the "Internet's Most creative Era."

Consumers are more savvy, and brands are have gained some wisdom to not step on territory that makes them appear inauthentic and creepy. Second Life was an interesting experiment, but I'm happy that big brands haven't made ads in Roblox yet.

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

#282

Post by pjmlp »

thrower123 wrote: post #169
buboard wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device. 90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platf…

Why designing most mobile apps should be harder than slamming together VB6 form applications is something that is not entirely clear to me. Although when people start arguing that programming a web page is easy, it really brings home how awful modern programming is, and how long it has been since there was widespread usage of really decent and simple RAD tooling.

It gets close enough if one just focus on one platform.

Or if one shells out to Delphi, RemObjects, Xamarin, Qt.

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

#283

Post by pjmlp »

sitkack wrote: post #172
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…

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.

On the contrary, I loved VB and Delphi, and it is the reason why I mostly focused on Java and .NET as my daily tools.

Developers are users as well, and I think too many fail to understand this.

Whatever tooling makes it easier to develop for, means that I can focus on other parts of the problem.

I don't miss working like I did during the late 80, early 90s. Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.

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

#284

Post by pjmlp »

blueboo wrote: post #113
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…

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…

Take it one or two more years for WebAssembly to gain critical mass.

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

#285

Post by chii »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #126
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…

Everything young people do now outside of schooling and dedicated hobbies seems to be mobile-based, so Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days. This "novices" thing seems to me to be overblown though; Alan Kay has been beating the "programming for novices" drum for decades with Smalltalk and basically nothing happened. I would rather have professional-quality tools with decent Youtube tutorials, li…

> Tiktok is probably the equivalent to Newgrounds these days.

that's like comparing crack-cocaine den to LARP'ing groups. No way newgrounds is anything comparable to the lows that is tiktok (or vine).

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

#286

Post by bitwize »

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…

Um, it's possible to play simulated pinball games that work just like the real ones except the "table" is a huge-ass monitor. Recreations of classic tables, like Addams Family are available as well as entirely new tables like Portal that do things no physical pinball table can do.

Sure, it's not like playing the real thing. Neither, in most cases, are emulated video games.

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

#287

Post by chii »

hoelle wrote: post #281

The premise of this article is just weirdly wrong and out of touch. There are monstrously huge creative spaces on the modern internet, powered by better and better tools. YouTube. Unity. Scratch. Roblox. Twitch. Itch.io. Blender. Minecraft. And so on. It is noteworthy that professional/corporate creators haven't followed the hobbyists and kids into some of these spaces to represent their brands as much as they did in…

youtube is not a tool - it's a platform, and increasingly more hostile towards content creators (and increasingly biased towards commercial content or clickbait content). Twitch is same as youtube basically, but slightly more content creator friendly.

Unity, scratch, blender, these are all programming related. They are not beginner friendly at all.

itch.io isn't a tool either, but a website for distributing. The content you find on there are good, but most are not made with something easy like the flash animations would've been. Game maker comes close, but it isn't well suited for animation.

There isn't, and hasn't been, a replacement for flash animation suite, which is such a great, easy to use, integrated tool of drawing, animation and timing with a relatively simple scripting model. Even amateurs are able to make interesting animations with it. I bet you can't say the same for any of the tools named above.

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

#288

Post by juniorplenty »

I vividly remember following yugop.com (Yugo Nakamura’s Mono*crafts) in college around ~2000, waiting for more experiments to be posted. To me that was what the web was for, far reaching and experimental design. This article was a reminder of how absent that kind of design experimentation is now, even as businesses and applications have gotten more experimental.

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

#289

Post by mthoms »

soup10 wrote: post #121
ken wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here:

> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time

Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) :

>... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008

You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r...

Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed.

Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.

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

#290

Post by dpau »

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…

thanks for sharing this wonderful story. it would make for a lovely short film.
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