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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

#361

Post by zyx321 »

CryoLogic wrote: post #45
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…

https://www.anim8.io might spark your imagination again. Lots of animators are still making indy animation, it's just been drowned out on the major platforms due to how time consuming it is to create and it's basically not possible to monetize well outside of Anim8 now (YouTube algorithm favors frequent uploads and high video duration - not compatible with animation).

Anim8 seems to be the closest thing to classic Flash animation, albeit without the interactive component.

However, I'm a little disappointed that it seems to output in MP4. Is there really no modern format for vector video?

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

#362

Post by tripzilch »

dTal wrote: post #102
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…

Not just young people. As in other creative arts, if the tooling is over-complex or high-friction it can simply kill the creative flow. We should aim to make things pleasant to use for experts as well as beginners. There is a great deal of philosophical resistance to this idea hiding just under the surface, driven perhaps by a sense that difficult interfaces are a test of worthiness. Consider the barrier to entry to…

Actually, if you use Processing with Android mode, it's pretty easy to create a simple app. I made something with circles falling down the screen that you have to tap and they explode in a nice satisfying particle explosion (it was mainly to test and demonstrate the surprising addictiveness of even such a simple game feature). This took about an hour, starting from a clean Processing install, including having to select and install (checkbox + button) the Android mode and writing about 50 lines of code. In all fairness, I'm already quite familiar with graphics programming with Processing, but even that is super easy, I teach it to kids starting from age 10-11 (if they're clever and curious enough).

But these kids, the clever and curious ones, they'll find this on their own too, and truly many more cool and free things to create stuff with online. A few years back, they were all over these free github student developer packs, especially the credits for a Digital Ocean droplet server, which they used to host sites, minecraft servers (IIRC) or Discord bots.

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

#363

Post by daleharvey »

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…

Curious and feel free to ignore, what was your screenname on the yahoo web design chat rooms? I also hung around there a lot around that time using one of those embarrassing screennames made by teens and their favourite songs (renegade_master)

I was one of the people constantly wishing flash would die. Although I am happy the open web won that battle, I was always hoping and am sad that nothing based on open standards came to replace it.

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

#364

Post by abrolhos »

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)…

There is http://www.stencyl.com/ also. Used it many years ago, so not sure how it stands now. But back then, it was a very cool product. Used at a couple of game jams.

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

#365

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

Not bad work for a closed-source platform, enabling all that ownership.

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

#366

Post by whatever_dude »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #148

In my personal opinion, Flash was ruined by Adobe when they tried to 'fix' it (improve it?) with ActionScript 3, which followed the ECMA script standard. AS3 changed everything about how flash worked, and if you weren't a software engineer, the learning curve was steep. I actually went and took some basic programming classes (literally in visual basic lol) and learned how to write proper code. Not a bad thing, but on…

AS3 was indeed a bad investiment given the direction ECMAScript ultimately went, but I do not believe for one second that it contributed to Flash's loss of popularity over time. Learning it after AS2 was easy and it was a much better language/platform to use, not to mention faster.

If anything I applaud Adobe by starting fresh instead of, say, accumulating warts in the language/VM the way Java did.

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

#367

Post by devsatish »

Flex was immensely powerful. Back in 2007 I was able to prototype a Flex app for a financial firm where I could load 20K complex records on UI super fast for various streaming views/Charts/trading views etc. All possible with AS3, BlazeDS/LCDS Java back-end; building trading/streaming applications was fast. Wish Adobe and rest of the guys supported Flash/Flex platform on Desktop at least. Moving to open-source/apache didnt help either; Apache Flex is pretty much written off. Sigh !

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

#368

Post by buboard »

bredren wrote: post #236
jugg1es wrote: post #234

I couldn't possibly agree more with this article. It is still possible to do the kinds of things that Flash did now-a-days with HTML5 canvas, but it requires a lot more programming abilities than Flash required. Websites for design firms were literal masterpieces. Now, those same firms have beautiful, yet predictable, websites. The user experience was entirely unique from site to site. No side vertical stack of butto…

But there is far more competition than there was before. People have devices allowing them shorter attention span to get to value than before. This change is not only because of the loss of flash.

The people competing are the top 3 companies who won the race. The rest have quit trying and are just copying them. There is far less competition, the internet became an oligopoly

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

#369

Post by whatever_dude »

neop1x wrote: post #352

What prevents someone to replicate the Flash experience with modern web tech like JS, HTML5, CSS or Canvas/WebGL? I mean something with similar editor functionality, producing result drawable in modern web browsers. EDIT: There actually is Adobe Animate so what prevents people from being as creative as in the Flash era?! https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

My theory is that the web has overall matured. A lot of what Flash did is now possible and even better/faster/easier, but the reason for those aren't there. In many ways Flash websites featured novel navigation and interaction experiences, the likes of people never had seen before, but that's a gimmick that gets old fast. No insurance company wants or needs an animated 3d intro in their website; they want and need good SEO, and information that's easy to reach. If they want to impress with something visual, they'll go to YouTube or Instagram.

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

#370

Post by buboard »

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…

It sounds like you don't know what flash was.
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