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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

#341

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Animats wrote: post #214
l_t wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. I'm not sure if there is a place for it in the middle-school market anymore, though. I'll explain why: I think an interesting part of my experience was that it started with watching. I just loved the videos and thought they were hilarious. I admired the people who made those videos and I wanted to join that circle of creators. And Flash didn't prevent me from doing…

I would love to see something with a Flash-like UI. The 2D GUIs of many 3D games were written in Flash. There are non-Adobe Flash players which can be embedded. The advantage was the authoring tools - the GUIs could be elaborate and graphical without much effort.

It's funny, I worked so intimately with Flash in my day job that I clocked this before I even knew the tech (Scaleform?) existed because badly made Flash content has a certain jankiness to it that I recognized instantly. The Borderlands 2 menu system comes to mind in particular.

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

#343

Post by robmoorman »

Looking back at 10 years AS 2/3 has brought us more than we have ever done within the Javascript era. The major lacking stabilities, compilers like TypeScript makes the modern toolset so incredible bad. Lovely to see as most of old AS programmers still approach these modern Javascript webapps way better than people started with Javascript without knowing the language behind it.

"R.i.p. Robotlegs" (lol @ https://github.com/robmoorman/as3-robotlegs-library)

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

#344

Post by lawlessone »

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…

you should write a book!

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

#345

Post by zyx321 »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #210
taurath wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube has no interactivity either.

Except that it can . Youtube lets producers (channels) post polls, let's consumers (viewers) post comments, and if channels want to, they can do something interactive- over a video series & etc.

Youtube has no interactivity within videos. There used to be a little bit of it with annotations, but those were killed off ages ago.

Compare that to Flash video series like Homestar Runner, every episode had little Easter eggs where you could click on background characters to unlock a bonus scene about them. It really helped you feel engaged with the medium in a way unmatched by anything but full-length video games.

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

#346

Post by makapuf »

xg15 wrote: post #309
nrb wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can experience a recording of it (and even those may be taken down) but you cannot experience the game itself.

I fully agree with you, but anyway an online game cannot be repeated once the community has moved on. For example my son says that fifa, a soccer game that gets a new version every year is not the same after one year: the whole community has moved on the next version and thus you'll be playing alone to the preceding version.

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

#347

Post by EamonnMR »

zanny wrote: post #204
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…

> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported h…

Godot, Doom, and Blender are all great but none have the level of approachability that Hypercard and Flash had for the amateur. They allow determined creators to soar, but they aren't enabling people who would not otherwise be creative to make interactive media in the same way. The 2d/3d gulf is a huge one to cross, and that may be the main issue. There was also something very wyswyg about both flash and hypercard-though Godot definitely approaches that. It's just hitting it's stride popularity-wise, so I guess where people take it remains to be seen.

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

#348

Post by EamonnMR »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #210
taurath wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube has no interactivity either.

Except that it can . Youtube lets producers (channels) post polls, let's consumers (viewers) post comments, and if channels want to, they can do something interactive- over a video series & etc.

I maintain that communication is not interactivity. Especially when everyone writes and nobody reads.

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

#349

Post by Crinus »

pjmlp wrote: post #283
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.

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…

> Our computers are so much better for them to be reduced to a green phosphor VT-100 terminal.

So much this. Every time someone harps about this or that great terminal application that looks worse than even MS-DOS applications from the late-80s (when most users had moved on from MDA cards) i die a little inside.

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

#350

Post by whywhywhywhy »

robflaherty wrote: post #112

Today’s internet is far more creative than the internet of the Flash era. Creativity has moved on to more consequential things than graphic design.

Flash wasn't "graphic design" it was a unique cross over of design and code in harmony and at the time most graphic designers I encountered used to say "web designers are not real designers" they only considered print work important.

Funny how things change.

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