291–300 of 441 posts
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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.
You're right, and it feels very similar to what we have in Vue/React these days. How are you liking Web Components?
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…
The community from Flash 4 (late 90s) / AS2 to FlashDevelop + AS3 (2007/8) was very fun to be a part of. AS3 was big and was based off of ES4, it really kickstarted Javascript development as well into overdrive. Everything big early on the web was Flash, From Joe Cartoon to Stain Boy to Praystation to Papervision which inspired three.js to gaming sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate and more. Flash pushed WebGL in the browser and HTML5/Canvas/video. Flash made the web interactive and fun. Flash was apps before mobile apps. While there could be overuse of Flash intros, on the flipside some of the most amazing game, video and interactive experiences and platforms started with Flash. Promotional games and game sites in Flash were huge pre-mobile.
Flash revolutionized video and made Youtube possible. Video was a mess before it. Both Flash and eventually Silverlight pushed innovation in this area leading to H.264 and HTML5 video capabilities. Flash was during a time where developers with plugins were pushing trends in the browser, not large corp.
Still to this day it is hard to recreate all the features of Flash with web standards but Flash was the plugin that pushed us forward the most on the web. The self-contained platform nature of Flash allowed focus on the app/game/interactive content and less fighting with technology, it was almost like an early console. Flash could do web requests/services before AJAX, so for a time it was the way to do web apps. I'll miss plugin innovation that was always ahead of standards. I will miss innovation on the web from Flash and the access that plugins had to push forward.
Flash was very well run when Macromedia ran it. Adobe bought it mainly for the video platform and to take competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator off the market in Macromedia Fireworks/Freehand. Adobe let both Director and Flash wither and did not react to hardware/software rendering soon enough. If Macromedia had kept in the game it might have gone differently. The period where Silverlight and Flash were competing was also quite nice, just before the mammoth mobile arrived in 2007/8 that changed everything. Smartphones revolutionized apps/interactives and game development, leading to a new handheld gaming/app platform that attracted most if not all Flash developers.
I got started in interactive development and game development professionally with Flash in the mid to late 90s. The release of Flash 4 was the beginning of a decade plus of massive innovation, pushed mostly by Flash. I made my first professional game in 2000 and did Flash games/interactives for a decade+. Now I do Unity, Unreal, WebGL/three.js and others for apps/games/web. Flash allowed me to work at agencies and helped the leap to professional game development. Unity/Unreal and WebGL became the places that most people in Flash ended up who were focused on games/interactives.
Adobe should have moved faster with Adobe AIR and HTML5 support as well as native/hardware acceleration, ultimately the slowness on mobile let it slip, the browsers blocking plugins pushed Flash from the web. Amazing creative designers and developers ended up either doing Unity games/apps/interactives or WebGL/canvas/three.js games/apps/interactives.
OpenFL [1], Haxe[2] and Lime [3] with FlashDevelop [4] is still out there for Flash development. In terms of empowering people to learn technology and see immediate results it is still a great platform.
Adobe Animate CC (renamed from Flash) is still great for animation, most large animated shows use Animate/Flash [5] or ToonBoom. One of the earliest exciting things about Flash was the ability to create cartoons and shows online, it is still one of the best tools for that and most popular animated shows use it that are 2D based. Flash being vector based really helps out for animation and scaling. For animated shows, there isn't another tool that comes close yet, Flash is still king in 2D animation.
[4] https://www.flashdevelop.org/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
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…
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Unity is not a particularly lightweight thing, and flash wasn't just for games. Its main use was animations / banners and video . > If you were to give people the same flash games now, they'd find them ridiculously lame. Some of the most popular social games are like farmville, or some poker games. those are really equivalent of flash
Farmville and Candy Crush were literally flash games. Also many genres like physics games were born from flash. On Unity I agree. It's never going to have 50kb games that download and start instantly. It's also not particularly easy or good for working with 2D games. I've used both professionally.
thats exactly why i mention them . i meant to say their current html versions are equivalent of their previous flash
I only got into CS because of flash. It was simple to get started. Draw some shapes, add color and start tweening. Point and click got you very interesting animations. Deploying was a swf that worked in a ubiquitous manner. Then I learnt a bit of Actionscript on my own before even learning any sort of formal programming. It was a ton of fun to add event listeners and do basic interaction. I learnt what object oriente…
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Sounds about right. Modern technology: working hard to replicate what we had 20+ years ago.
What we had 20 years ago was an insecurable proprietary plugin for web browsers. It wasn't standard, nobody could audit it, it was just a corporate product. And where we are at now, where Macromedia got bought and Adobe slowly drained its lifeblood and killed its products, is what happens when you try to build systems on top of holistically proprietary foundations. Nobody owes you their enduring survival and you are…
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…
So what are you doing these days?
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Of all of the areas where there is legitimate gatekeeping, like with the AMA and residency limits, software is one of the worst examples you could have picked. Software is one of those spaces where there is an incredible amount of capital invested in making things easy for the lowest common denominator. There are so many resources for people of any age and background to learn practical skills in this field. There are…
Not exactly. Such camps certainly exist, but they're not for everyone. I was tinkering with Linux at 7, but only because I had a technical parent who put it on the family computer. I'd say the important part here was that I wasn't given a coding bootcamp course to go through, I just got to play. Eventually, I figured out how to use single-user to re-set the root password and play as much supertux as I wanted. This pr…
> The first is the sort who enjoys it for what it is. Shaves yaks configuring his system, tries out new languages for the heck of it, that sort. The second has a perfectly respectable career in software, and enjoys other things when he comes home at five p.m.
I have found out that these are not in opposition at all. In fact, workplace that holds you in 80 hours a week largely prevents trying out new tech. People dont stay long because trying out new toys. If they do, then they are being dishonest with employer, honestly. They stay long because of stress, pressure, disorganization, etc.
The conflation of the two really not logical, it does not even makes sense. Why cant you go home at 5 and "try out new languages for the heck of it" wherever you feel like? Should you even try out that new language production project? (you should not)
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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 cli…
Do you have any pointers to, or keywords I can google, for some of those point and click game studios? I've not tried to do anything like a game for decades, I'm kinda curious about that readily available tools kids could get their hands on these days... Closest I think I've come is launching Scratch from a RasPi's stock linux install...
I've heard great things about 001 Game Creator (free for 7 days, then $60) for more substantial use.