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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

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Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#91

Post by userbinator »

echelon wrote: post #83
breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard

They did open it up...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications

Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats.

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...

If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, they might have been a required feature.

...but the feature bloat that Adobe created with the platform was part of the problem, introducing not only security issues but inefficiency. SWF started out as a small and efficient vector format, and then accrued far more features than were really necessary for its core purpose.

(HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#92

Post by spullara »

echelon wrote: post #83
breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

Remember that Jobs banned it to kill it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#93

Post by boarnoah »

echelon wrote: post #83
breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

The mid 2000s era was a really magical time for me growing up.

Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites.

Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days.

I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things.

I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#94

Post by jimmaswell »

I'm glad to see a working proof of concept of Flash emulation in the browser. What's sad is Google and Mozilla could have easily implemented such a thing themselves to make a painless transition away from the plugin years ago. Maybe there was some legal issue but I bet they simply found it more convenient to wipe their hands of it.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#95

Post by egypturnash »

acqq wrote: post #70
cogman10 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing that the whole thing lived in ~1.7mb of data. Really crazy how little data went into stuff like that.

The famous original "Napster Bad" (1) from 2000 was around 2 and half minutes long and only 600 KB (!) (specifically: 606,555 bytes -- just checked). http://www.fastswf.com/jDwfXOc And as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) it can be sharper than most of the videos of that that you can find today (or was it fixed? I don't remember -- at least it looked so sharp then!). Anyway, the following video on youtube is…

> as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?)

Yeah, Flash was fundamentally a vector format for much of its life. It started adding bitmaps after a while, I wanna say in the Flash 5 era? It's been a long time and I've deliberately put a lot of my time with Flash in the mental vault, as it was also mostly time working under John K.

Anyway. I spent a lot of time hand-optimizing autotraces of scans of ink drawings, and even more time moving them around in sync to dialogue. Flash was very much about sending compact vector representations over your 28.8kbaud modem connection and moving them around instead of sending anything like what we would call a video stream, until they added the FLV format and YouTube happened.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#96

Post by echelon »

boarnoah wrote: post #93
echelon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

The mid 2000s era was a really magical time for me growing up. Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites. Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced…

I think today's creative youth are on Twitch and TikTok.

I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy.

Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#97

Post by tomc1985 »

spijdar wrote: post #38
superkuh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most file types are not supported in browsers. Only a few are. A "download file" dialog is not a bad experience. Treating .swf like a normal file type would both be easier and better in all ways.

Flash will not be supported in any of the large browsers after December, limiting access to people who go out of their way to use both a fork that preserves NPAPI or whatever Chromium uses and manually install some version of Flash. I'm not aware of any search engines that index arbitrary files that the browser or some ubiquitous media viewer can't open. The most annoying I can think of is the occasional powerpoint f…

There is a binary, Windows-native SWF player that still works 100% perfectly on Win 10. There is also one for OSX but with Apple's hatred for backwards compatibility I have no idea whether it still works or not

It's a shame that Adobe has all but buried it, but it does work.

Honestly its the only good way to view downloaded flash content nowadays, because it preserves all the hyperlinks and other nonlinearity that is lost on conversion to a video file. Strongbad emails, for example, have tons of hidden content activated by clicking hotspots during playback. (You can even hunt for them by hitting Tab)

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#98

Post by quercusa »

k2xl wrote: post #31
catmanjan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - AS2 and the flash movieclip editor had the perfect learning curve for me - I wonder what the current equivalent is, if any

same here. i got into AS2 in highschool and built many flash games. some people still play them and our sad it won't be playable on chrome by end of the year

Is there any hope that Boomshine might work on this and that you'd consider uploading it? Please....

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#99

Post by acqq »

egypturnash wrote: post #95
acqq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous original "Napster Bad" (1) from 2000 was around 2 and half minutes long and only 600 KB (!) (specifically: 606,555 bytes -- just checked). http://www.fastswf.com/jDwfXOc And as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) it can be sharper than most of the videos of that that you can find today (or was it fixed? I don't remember -- at least it looked so sharp then!). Anyway, the following video on youtube is…

> as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) Yeah, Flash was fundamentally a vector format for much of its life. It started adding bitmaps after a while, I wanna say in the Flash 5 era? It's been a long time and I've deliberately put a lot of my time with Flash in the mental vault, as it was also mostly time working under John K. Anyway. I spent a lot of time hand-optimizing autotraces of scans of ink drawings, an…

Thanks. I knew about Flash in general, I just haven't checked yes if the 600 KB swf looked good full screen -- yes it does, with real Flash player. With Ruffle, the lines are thicker.

I still don't know, how are we going to be able to watch the old content with the native Flash player, at least on our desktops? Depending on the new emulations can result in missing or differently presented content (like these thicker lines?).

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