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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

#151

Post by Izkata »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #104
krapp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and in fact the word meme either did not exist or, if it did, it was certainly not in widespread use. The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in 1976. The internet got the term from the book.

Thanks, but as I said, it was not in widespread use in the 90s... at least not in an internet context.

Merriam-Webster has a 1998 [0] reference that sounds close to the modern usage, though I don't know when got popular - at or before 2008 though, based on their next example. I do vaguely remember "viral video" and "image macro" were distinct in the early/mid-00s though, at the time I don't think they were grouped together under "meme".

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meme-word-orig...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#152

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

In a certain sense, I created the very first Flash animation.

I was working at Macromedia and happened to be in the office earlier than usual that morning. Our SVP came to my boss and said basically “We bought Futurewave, we’re announcing it today, and we’re renaming FutureSplash to Shockwave Flash. I need somebody to throw a quick animation together for the press gathering, and none of the creative services people are in the building yet.”

So I downloaded the tool and made this weird little animation with the Shockwave logo falling onto the FutureSplash name and crushing the “utureSp” letters.

After that, we shared a floor with the Flash team. Good people. Jonathan Gay is very smart.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#153

Post by InfiniteRand »

spullara wrote: post #92
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…

Remember that Jobs banned it to kill it. https://www.cnet.com/news/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-from-t...

I remember before this thinking that Flash was a viable way to make cross platform apps that also covered mobile

So at least from my perspective this had a big impact

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#154

Post by echelon »

adrianN wrote: post #150
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable that being a content creator is a viable career for young people as automation and globalization continue to eat jobs. TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.

"Content creators" almost universally only make significant money when the content they create are ads or porn. It's also about as viable a career choice as "becoming a pop star" was a while ago.

I sponsor a couple of folks on Patreon and Github, and none of them create porn.

I think there's a future where long tail art can be funded on an artisanal level by patrons, and the network will connect consumers to artists that satisfy their interests.

Are you interested in an alternate history Oregon Trail where an alien invasion forces westward migration? Or perhaps a time travelling Jacques Cousteau serial where the protagonist searches for love across the ages?

Somebody will make something weird that satisfies your interests and you will pay them directly. And it'll be better than canned Star Wars spam. It'll be real, and the creator will know you by name.

ML and automation will bring down the cost of content creation dramatically and make it look and feel more compelling than the studio stuff we get today.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#155

Post by cghendrix »

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #152

In a certain sense, I created the very first Flash animation. I was working at Macromedia and happened to be in the office earlier than usual that morning. Our SVP came to my boss and said basically “We bought Futurewave, we’re announcing it today, and we’re renaming FutureSplash to Shockwave Flash. I need somebody to throw a quick animation together for the press gathering, and none of the creative services people a…

I love reading stuff like this on HN. Nice!

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#156

Post by zxcmx »

ghaff wrote: post #113
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable that being a content creator is a viable career for young people as automation and globalization continue to eat jobs. TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.

Content creator is a vanishingly small lottery winner occupation now and in the future unless it’s connected to a product in some way.

How much of every corporate job is communicating / consensus vs doing?.

Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.

I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#157

Post by shawnz »

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…

While I agree there is an unfilled need after the end of Flash, is the problem really a matter of technology or is it just that nobody has produced a vector animation editor as easy/accessible as the Flash software was? Clearly all the pieces are in place to do everything Flash can do if you can emulate Flash at full speed entirely in the browser.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#158

Post by wbl »

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…

Canvas should aim to be as close as possible to this. I think with a bit better animation support they would be there, but I really don't know much about the domain.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#159

Post by Marazan »

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 flash player spec was published and the ActionScript3 engine was open source.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#160

Post by Marazan »

Sunspark wrote: post #143
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…

You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3

The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry.

As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%.

All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

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