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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

#371

Post by TomGullen »

hackerc wrote: post #130
TomGullen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 ( https://www.construct.net ) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it! Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has ni…

Is it a good platform to make animated movies? Can output be distributed as a single shareable file, like .swf?

With the timelines editor theoretically yes, although there's no good easy way to export in a single shareable file (some technical hurdles). Definitely something it's lacking right now.

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

#372

Post by soylentcola »

daleharvey wrote: post #363
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 standard…

You could've used the screen name "dale_4_damager" instead ;)

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

#373

Post by shaunofthedev »

jcelerier wrote: post #303
The_rationalist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

> What can flash do that modern browsers can't? ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ? Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc... with flash, t…

(Former Flash dev)

A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement.

I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or layout)

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

#374

Post by code_duck »

code_duck wrote: post #158
quickthrower2 wrote: post #63

The bad thing about being "creative" on the web is it not being obvious how to use your site. I remember back in the day a lot of website using Flash only that were like this.

Flash developers were responsible for a lot of heinous interface experiences that informed every rule of good UI and resource efficiency.

(I meant 'ignored')

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

#376

Post by jcelerier »

shaunofthedev wrote: post #373
jcelerier wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What can flash do that modern browsers can't? ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ? Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc... with flash, t…

(Former Flash dev) A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement. I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or lay…

> However for general web layout

well, that was not the point of flash, was it ?

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

#377

Post by hoelle »

buboard wrote: post #370
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.

I've published a few games in Flash. Did you read the article?

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

#378

Post by hoelle »

chii wrote: post #287
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 cont…

My 9 year old is comfortable messing around in Unity, Scratch, and Blender. They're super beginner friendly and the amount of free tutorials available today is staggering.

Flash was also a platform, though you were still reliant on a host like Newgrounds to upload to. All of this is relevant to today's ecosystems. YouTube, Itchio and others have grown beyond anything in the Flash era.

> 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.

I agree that the learning curve for Blender, Unity, etc, is probably a bit steeper than Flash. That wasn't the point of the article linked, nor is it what I'm arguing.

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

#379

Post by hoelle »

omegote wrote: post #292
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…

Wat. Those you're mentioning have nothing to do with the creativity that Flash provided. How are you comparing Flash with Blender?

Did you read the article?

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

#380

Post by apineda »

Sendotsh wrote: post #181
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Game Maker is hugely underrated and often dismissed because of its name. It’s an incredibly powerful and easy to use game/interactive-app maker that can export packaged programs to Windows, OSX, Linux, and HTML5, then with additional licensing/fees to game consoles. It has a drag-and-drop mode for absolute beginners that can let someone with zero experience be creating simple games in their first weekend playing with…

Did you publish those stories? Would love to have a look!
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