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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

#251

Post by ThreeOne »

echelon wrote: post #96
boarnoah wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

here's some nuance: there's plenty of kids showing off programming stuff/tricks/apps on tiktok and plenty of kids getting inspired to try something themselves because of it. It is the very fact that it seems 'doable' and fun/cool that way.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#252

Post by Multicomp »

rchaud wrote: post #241
Snitch-Thursday wrote: post #200

i wish i could buy a perpetual license of Adobe Animate, any version that can take actionscript and such and compile it to an HTML5 video. I don't know if those HTML5 things still count as Rich internet applications (interactive? idk), but there is definitely a void left behind in terms of ease of content creation that lives on the web, at least not without 5 billion npm packages and JS frameworks.

I was looking for the same thing, and definitely did not want to pay monthly. The best alternative I found was Tumult Hype. $50 flat I believe, plus a pro version for another $50 that includes SVG animation tools. It's a GUI based approach to CSS3 and JS animations. Exports to HTML or MP4.

I saw another comment with this and went to buy it. But its macOs only afaict... So close!

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#253

Post by ganstyles »

holler wrote: post #55

Back in the day http://eye4u.com had by far the most amazing flash animations of any site I'd seen. I don't know how they did it but their animations were next level for that time period. Apparently some of them are on youtube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aT4wt0fmGU https://web.archive.org/web/20041126020223/http://eye4u.com/

This is the site that got me into designing flash. I was so entertained and thought every website should have an intro like that. Build one for our website, not anywhere as close to professional, and realized how annoying it was to wait for that animation every time I loaded the site.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#254

Post by dTal »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #206
TremendousJudge wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was the developers who made that call though.

I think it was. Talk about how horrible it is to pile so many abstraction layers together and developers will come out of the woodwork to talk about how much time it saves them. In a lot of cases, developers are rewriting things over and over again in the latest framework-du-jour simply to pad their resumes when they abandon their current employer in two years. Then they turn around and put all the blame on other peo…

To expand on this, developer culture is to view good human factors almost as a badge of shame. If you press the issue with "this is a horrible experience that gets in your way in a thousand tiny and not so tiny ways", the response is almost always "if you can't handle tiny inconvenience #386, you weren't cut out to be a programmer". Witness the sheer scorn heaped on GUIs.

It's a kind of gatekeeping behavior - "I suffered through memorizing a bunch of git commands by rote, and now you have to as well."

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#256

Post by rchaud »

Multicomp wrote: post #252
rchaud wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for the same thing, and definitely did not want to pay monthly. The best alternative I found was Tumult Hype. $50 flat I believe, plus a pro version for another $50 that includes SVG animation tools. It's a GUI based approach to CSS3 and JS animations. Exports to HTML or MP4.

I saw another comment with this and went to buy it. But its macOs only afaict... So close!

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#257

Post by klondike_klive »

I owe my career in animation to Flash - without it the barrier to entry would have been way too steep. I messed around with a super 8 camera in my teens but the expense of developing film and the lack of any mentor or class in animation in the semester I spent at art school meant I never produced anything. Fastforward ten years and I made a radio sketch into an animation called the Pygmy Shrew, attached it to an email as an exe file, and it went crazy. I was suddenly aware of the possibilities of web animation. It led on indirectly to me meeting Roger Moore to record his voice in Monte Carlo, to do an animation of him. Come to think of it, that was the high point of my animation career actually, when it was still a hobby...

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#258

Post by cjsawyer »

echelon wrote: post #96
boarnoah wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was inspired by my uncle’s copy of Flash 5 and his little projects. That eventually prompted my downloading of Game Maker 6 and lead directly to my being a software engineer.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#259

Post by roryokane »

Zelphyr wrote: post #51

I'm glad to see The Internet Archive doing this. There's a flash animation I used to enjoy back around 2000 and I have been looking for it for almost as long. It was basically a showcase animation sequence done by what I think was a Japanese designer. I don't remember the full sequence but it was an anime style animation and at the end was a girl standing on a cliff with her hair blowing in the wind. I'm really hopin…

The animation you’re looking for might already be in BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint (https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/), a Flash preservation project that started in 2018. Here’s their list of preserved Flash animations: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Animation_Master_L....

I’m surprised that so few people in these comments seem aware of Flashpoint, and that the linked article only mentions Flashpoint briefly at the end.

I expect Flashpoint to always have a bigger archive of SWFs than the Internet Archive. This is because the Internet Archive seems to be aiming to only host SWFs that can be compiled for web using Ruffle, while Flashpoint accepts any SWF that can be played by the official Flash Player. Flashpoint can do that because it targets users who are willing to install its archive-browsing software for Windows, which includes a version of Flash Player.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#260

Post by romanoderoma »

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.

Content creation is an elite

Only a few make a living out of it

And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them

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