Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by krtkush » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #386

krtkush wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers. That era of discovery and expression was something special.

I had a similar experience. I learned ActionScript pretty early on (around age age 16 or so) because it was easier to get something visual built than any other thing I had used, while still feeling like "real" programming. AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to get something built when I was just bored…

Agreed! The visual feedback was spot on in flash.

Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal folder for later dissection.

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

#402

Post by brylie » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #387

brylie wrote: post #382

Is there any open source tool/community trying to create a simple HTML5 animation studio similar to Flash? That would really open up doors for widespread creativity and the adoption of web standards.

I've been asking the same question for years. Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash to me. But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript. https://greensock.com/

Same here, been wanting this for a long time. I even started a project called Hypermedia Canvas, but didn't have the skills or collaborators to get it started.

I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web standard technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG) directly in a web browser. We would build on existing efforts and prior art where possible.

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

#403

Post by brylie » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

brylie wrote: post #402

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been asking the same question for years. Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash to me. But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript. https://greensock.com/

Same here, been wanting this for a long time. I even started a project called Hypermedia Canvas, but didn't have the skills or collaborators to get it started. I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web standard technologies (HTML,…

E.g. the CreateJS toolkit might be a good basis:

https://createjs.com/

I'm not clear how to build a keyframe timeline or bezier graph for property tweening, nor am I sure whether shape tweening is possible with CSS or SVG.

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

#404

Post by kevinwang » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

krtkush wrote: post #301

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…

Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers. That era of discovery and expression was something special.

Flash is also what got me into programming. I started by making incredibly shitty knockoffs of stick figure videos on YouTube in flash mx 2004, then realized it also had the power to make games, and it went from there

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

#405

Post by brylie » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

brylie wrote: post #402

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been asking the same question for years. Greensock is the only thing that feels remotely like the good parts of Flash to me. But it does less, and requires learning some Javascript. https://greensock.com/

Same here, been wanting this for a long time. I even started a project called Hypermedia Canvas, but didn't have the skills or collaborators to get it started. I would be interested to give it another attempt, if I could find someone to help with some parts, like keyframing or tweening. The goal would be to create a fully open source studio to produce rich hypermedia productions using web standard technologies (HTML,…

Also, while Canvas, SVG, etc. imply 2D or 2.5D (excluding the timeline) there are a couple of WebGL projects that could serve as the basis for a Flash/Hypercard-esque web standards studio:

https://github.com/jagenjo/webglstudio.js

https://github.com/tentone/nunuStudio

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

#406

Post by ehsankia » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #197

ehsankia wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Everyone these days has a browser. How is it more difficult to share a web game than sharing a flash game? IF anything, back then you often had to install macromedia and other plugins since they didn't always come by default on every computer.

Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. Sure you can host it on your personal site but who is gonna find it? It has to be on a 3rd party website and that 3rd party website wants some way to monetize it (by showing ads). It's harder to manage many files than one file that a VM can run as is. Also Flash had something like 98-99% installation base during like 2000-2010 so it was very much not a problem. Flash had a much larger…

The reason discovery is down isn't because they're hard to find, it's because there's much more interesting "entertainment" on the web these days, such as Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, and other time sinks. Back in the days, Flash games and geocities were the only forms of entertainment, which is why they were so big. Nowadays, we've got amazing free content and games everywhere, which is why this kind of entertainment isn't as sought after anymore. It's not lack of discovery, it's lack of demand.

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

#407

Post by ehsankia » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #156

ehsankia wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the issue isn't the lack of tools. It's the lack of interest. Making games is easier than ever with Unity, yet people don't spend all day playing random small Unity games. We have limited time, and as the types of entertainment increase, we have less and less to spend on small silly things like Flash games. Back then, a Flash game was the epitome of web entertainment. Now, we have thousands of amazing Youtube…

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

Except no one plays Farmville anymore, and as Candycrush implied, most flash games were replaced by mobile games. My point was that people are finding their entertainment elsewhere (mobile, youtube, reddit), which is the real cause of Flash's demise (and similar content).

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

#408

Post by soup10 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #400

soup10 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to were jobs went on a 1600 word rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5. Afterthought or not, apps quickl…

You accused someone of "trying to rewrite history", when what they said was factually correct. It's also been established that Apple tried to work with Adobe on addressing the issues it saw with Flash but was rebuffed. The issue of Apple forbidding non-native code is one I disagreed with but has many layers and complexities. It's not nearly as simple as your implication that Jobs seemingly woke up one day and decided…

>Why is it on Apple to make honest evaluations of Flash?

It makes a lot of sense if the primary goal is to make good technology and software. Is that seriously so hard to understand?

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

#409

Post by afrodc_ » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

TomGullen wrote: post #9

pippy wrote: post #4

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…

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…

A game development camp I used to teach at here in Austin, Game World's, uses Construct and it is a fantastic tool that's readily accessible, even to children. Once you get them going with game design concepts, they can really knock out a solid game within a week. I think it's a fantastic platform and seems comparable to flash in ease of use.

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

#410

Post by wiseleo » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

anon9001 wrote: post #229

big_chungus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had similar experiences to you and definitely fit into the yak-shaving variety (or at least I did before work destroyed my soul). There's no question to me that early exposure and encouragement makes all the difference in educating kids. I can't understand why we're not engineering experiences in all these different fields for kids to build real stuff that can eventually turn into a trade. If you're a kid, even tod…

There is a way to start children young to become lawyers and doctors. Lawyers need perfect English. Doctors need perfect English and biology.

Our entire school system is wrong. :) I am working on it. We force parents to go to school and that is wrong.

The key to rapid education is teaching the correct subjects. All science is functionally math. Physics is math and chemistry is math. Music is math. All written homework is functionally English. Art is functionally understanding of light and shadows, which is best taught through photography. Photography decouples ability to render (drawing) from ability to compose. Until the child is fluent at algebra and written English, teaching other subjects except for athletics relies on the child's innate talent or, more likely, their parents.