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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

#221

Post by kmeisthax »

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

Flash grew up in a very weird time where nobody cared about hardware acceleration at all. Go back just a few years and even basic multimedia tasks like playing music or decoding a JPEG require some amount of accelerator support. Go forward a few years and hardware accelerators are suddenly crucial to energy efficiency. Ergo, everything in Flash Player is done in software. Vector rendering & compositing? Software. Video decoding & playback? Software. This wasn't at all exclusive to Flash, of course, but Adobe was uniquely unsuited to realize this problem.

Apple realized very early on that you needed hardware acceleration for common computing tasks in order to have laptops that last more than an hour on a single charge. It took Adobe several years after the launch of the iPhone to actually support some amount of hardware accelerated video decode, and as far as I'm aware vector rendering (the core of the platform) was never meaningfully accelerated. As far as I'm aware, pre-iPhone efforts to get onto phones involved a special cut-down Flash runtime that was perpetually out-of-date and was only really popular on early-2000s Japanese handsets. This wasn't at all built for the "computer in your pocket" that Jobs wanted.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#222

Post by cmrdsprklpny »

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…

Media authoring-wise, the Wick Editor [1] is attempting to fill the gap. It's still pretty young, but looks promising.

[1]: https://www.wickeditor.com

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#223

Post by rchaud »

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…

As someone with a solid HTML/CSS background but weak JS, I gave up on trying to figure out GSAP and other animation frameworks, and just bought Tumult Hype.

It's a GUI-based web animation tool that exports to HTML and MP4, with the ability to write custom JS if you need it. Being able to visually look at timelines and set tweening by dragging a slider is much more my speed, and reminiscent of Flash, which I haven't done anything on in more than 10 years.

Best of all, it's a one-time payment. I considered Adobe Animate, but monthly subscriptions are a total no-no for me.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#224

Post by rchaud »

WJW wrote: post #195
omegote wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the creativity of youngsters doing voice-overs in TikTok to that of early 2000's teenagers creating full-fledged games and entire films with Flash is... I don't know. As you said in your last paragraph, Flash _raised up_ a generation of engineers by _lowering_ the entry barriers to a minimum. TikTok is just a showcase for attw's.

Don't be an old curmudgeon. :) There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well. The most creative TikTok-ers are absolutely innovating storytelling and filmography just as the most creative Flash creators were innovating in their own medium. It's just that when we look back we remember the gems but not the river of crap, but when we look at the present we see t…

> There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well.

Don't 90% of Youtube videos get less than a thousand views [0]? There are millions of videos on TikTok, I'd imagine the algorithm results in the same 80-20 ish sort of balance.

Yes, there were bad Flash projects. But just like everything else, we remember the good ones.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/almost-90-of-all-uploaded-...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#225

Post by rchaud »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #110
echelon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's like saying in 2013 that being a Soundcloud rapper was going to be a viable career choice.

0.1 per cent of those on TikTok, or any other sharecropping platform will be able to extend their online persona into something that makes money.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#226

Post by rchaud »

zxcmx wrote: post #156
ghaff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

'Communicating' and 'performing' are two different skill sets. I believe on TikTok, you are doing the latter.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#227

Post by rchaud »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #185
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…

Yes, there is nothing like the flash IDE available today. I had a manager in the late 2000's who was giddy with the possibilities of HTML5 "It can do everything we do with flash!" Whilst that may be technically true, in practice bloated libraries like D3 are required for even the most basic vector manipulation and coding every tiny detail of an animation feels like groping in the dark when there used to be a source o…

I'm using Tumult Hype, it's SVG animation capabilities are pretty good IMO, and it's all GUI-based.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#228

Post by rchaud »

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

Plenty of Android smartphones ran Flash. I remember browsing the desktop (Flash) version of Youtube on my LG phone in 2009. Flash support continued for at least a few years, but once HTML5 video became common, it dropped off.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#229

Post by spullara »

kmeisthax wrote: post #215
spullara wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.

This is untrue. Apple attempted to ban all third-party development tools, but never actually enforced the rule due to the threat of a lawsuit from the FTC. They dropped the rule about three months after Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash", but the fact that developers still remember the ban is probably a good chunk of why people forgot about the exporter.

That was much later and too late for flash.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/05/ftc_believed_to_b...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#230

Post by HlessClaudesman »

rchaud wrote: post #227
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is nothing like the flash IDE available today. I had a manager in the late 2000's who was giddy with the possibilities of HTML5 "It can do everything we do with flash!" Whilst that may be technically true, in practice bloated libraries like D3 are required for even the most basic vector manipulation and coding every tiny detail of an animation feels like groping in the dark when there used to be a source o…

I'm using Tumult Hype, it's SVG animation capabilities are pretty good IMO, and it's all GUI-based.

OK cool, will give it a shot, thanks for the recommendation!

I tested every application I could find a couple of years ago. Lots of pretty prototyping apps, but generally the end code is somehow garbled or proprietary.

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