321–330 of 441 posts
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…
What can flash do that modern browsers can't?
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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…
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It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com". Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation. I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiaritie…
Flash was fundamentally just a file format. You made the format using the program in the same way you make a Photoshop file in Photoshop. It was a noun and a verb because you make thing and both the part that makes and the part made are called the same. Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something th…
Nowadays you've got no chance of working out what a site is doing or how it's working - view source is a litter of external resources which you've got to follow until hell freezes over. And apparently now you've got to brew-grunt-git-node-fuckknowswhatelse in order to get anything running at all.
I'm an old git and it's hackneyed to say it but I miss the simpler old days. I'm really hoping the Javascript trend dies quickly so beginners / amateurs can get back in the game.
Now: Flash: what's interesting to me is that what Flash offered genuinely doesn't seem to be a thing that can be done any more. We do a lot of rich content work and frequently get asked about making online experiences to help explain concepts or ideas as infographics or games. Flash was may bad things, but the universality and really easy to use building tools just don't seem to have been replaced by anything comparable. Or maybe I've missed it?
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…
Was there a "computing hotspot" where you were at the time? I think with all the school issues (and university issues) in South Africa it would be cool to have sort of (physical) computing libraries with Raspberry Pis or something like that–a sort of enabling environment where independent kids would at least have the resources necessary to build an eventual career for themselves (perhaps unwittingly at first).
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…
>culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.
Is this just a fancy way of saying "digital things that are very cheap/free to distribute"? If that's true, then I'd argue that digital things have an outsized impact in people's lives, even more than physical things sometimes. After all, whats more important to you, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the car you're currently driving?
And since that's the case, what's wrong with charging money for data that was expensive to make, even if it's super cheap to distribute? I feel like that's far more honest than giving away free entertainment data that's been marred by an ad stream.
I think the thing that's pressed up closest is a briefly filled container of code (the browser), that briefly redirects a server thread in front of your eyes. You have a chance to affect it's future course. But there is no ownership at all, not even of the blob that corresponds to the runtime image.
I think its funny that open-source software has created a world where software is even more proprietary than ever - not even the binaries every reach your machine! In that world, distributing binaries only doesn't really seam so bad!
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It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise. In this case, it’s the Fortnite world. If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers releas…
Angry birds was such a disappointment... I bought it, thought it was a neat game, and well worth the $2. A few years later I wanted to show it to my kids, and the game I bought had turned into an abomination of ads, in-app-purchases, and dark patterns, and there was no way to get back the charming little game that I originally bought...
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> 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.
It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise. In this case, it’s the Fortnite world. If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers releas…
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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…
This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5.
Afterthought or not, apps quickly became the biggest selling point of smartphones from the second gen onward and many technical architecture decisions had the intended effect of locking developers in. Ports to android were often delayed by months and years if they happened at all.