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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

#431

Post by Akinato »

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.

Same here. Neil Cicierega and Weebl's crazy antics are what got me interested in basic programing way back when I was 12-13. From there I started doing more and more complicated things in Actionscript. Sure I didn't learn any theory and produced awful code -- but I got a conceptual idea of programming that has helped me feel comfortable tackling new languages today.

Making a dance video to Monty Python's "Camelot" song is what made me learn about sprite sheets and motion techniques. It encouraged me to start googling different camera angles to figure out how to frame my shots.

That's why I love seeing kids playing with Minecraft, as it contains many of the same elements that I was playing with when I was a kid. Now if we could only get them into Dwarf Fortress, THEN we'd be talking. :) Speaking of which, that steam launch is supposed to be soon.

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

#432

Post by irrational »

Amen to this. At my job we create training content. In the Flash era we had a team of animators that created the greatest content. Our clients in Asia especially loved our content. Then the iPad came out. Overnight all of our clients decided that they were going to use iPads for training (we were training sales associates who previously had to use a manager's computer in a back room, now with iPads they could train on the sales floor). Of course, the iPad doesn't support flash. So we moved from awesome animations to plain text and images web pages with a few short videos for really important content. This is still what we are doing. At this point these is no chance of going back to the time of web animations, and I think it is a real shame. Content now sucks big time.

Why has nobody been able to build a Flash clone to create content for the canvas element? I've looked at Adobe Animate and it is nowhere near being in the same class as Flash.

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

#434

Post by rendall »

It was Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" essay that really turned the tide on Flash. Flash, as a direct threat to the gigantic revenue stream that was the Apple Store, could not be put on the iPhone. I immediately saw that essay for what it was, and didn't pay much attention. Rather than say "Flash threatens Apple's revenue" Jobs' had to employ FUD.

But within a day, Wired magazine published an op-ed masquerading as a factual article, hating on Flash; and never stopped that drumbeat. "Flash. Must. Die." it (literally) wrote.

And then, it was a total pile-on. No "serious programmer" would go anywhere near it, nor admit that there was anything positive about it at all. One could not mention Flash without devs asserting loudly that it was "riddled with security holes" (always "riddled", always "security holes").

I learned some lessons that year, about tech, devs, corporations and people.

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

#435

Post by dkswain »

husamia wrote: post #427
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…

Where are all the creatives flocking to nowdays? HTML5?

Tiled. We’ve built a truly no-code/no-new-design-tool interactive experience builder. Https://Tiled.co

What people don’t often realize with flash was that the output was a file. Tiled is taking a similar approach in that we are “documentizing” interactive experiences. We call the output a microapp (think .swf) and these can be experienced as an embedded experience (both native and browser-based), offline/online, through their app or other platforms.

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

#436

Post by blueboo »

dTal wrote: post #146
blueboo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device... ...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.

Embedded device? It's a handheld unix computer. Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.

And every Arduino-like platform there are dozen Processing, Scratch, myriad drag-and-drop app builders...

Yep, it's never been easier

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

#437

Post by koonsolo »

fastball wrote: post #356
koonsolo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.

Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.

So basically any AAA game has bad performance.

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

#438

Post by srachamim »

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…

I spent 3 nights at Lushoto last week. Nice place!

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

#440

Post by fastball »

koonsolo wrote: post #437
fastball wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.

So basically any AAA game has bad performance.

There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".
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