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HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#271

Post by fendy3002 »

HeckFeck wrote: post #268
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

As an avid Linux user, I can't help but agree with the core of your argument. Open is always better, especially for posterity. But the aspect of Flash that hasn't been fully replicated by HTML5/JS/whatever is the fully integrated workflow. That took away much of the underlying woes with environments and configurations. All you did was install Flash, make your game or animation, and a SWF was produced. This ease of be…

I have zero experience on both. What's stopping someone / org to develop a workflow framework on HTML5 that's working similar with flash?

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#272

Post by linspace »

qalmakka wrote: post #167
selfhoster11 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architectur…

I remember configuring NSPluginWrapper in order to get the 32 bit Flash plugin to work on 64 bit Linux (and FreeBSD). God that was nasty, as soon as YouTube launched the html5 beta I erased Flash player from every device I owned.

NSPluginWrapper... Something has awoken inside me. Distant memories behind a fog. Something evil. This is not good, not good.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#273

Post by roenxi »

danShumway wrote: post #39
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

> Flash was really important for its time

It'll be a shame to see Flash go, it really was quite a technology. Couldn't click a link without some cutesy little flash something-or-other popping up.

My memories may be tainted by time, but I'm hesitant to say that modern web apps have surpassed flash yet. A web browser simply isn't up to the challenge of creating a nice interface for an app and I got the impression Flash's tooling was a long way ahead of the game. But Flash stands as a soon-forgotten internet monument of closed source winning battles and open source winning wars.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#274

Post by sleepy_keita »

danShumway wrote: post #39
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows

This honestly got a laugh out of me.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#275

Post by nop90 »

>You can send a link to your mom and she can just play it w/ no issues

Is this an argument against IE? If so then the pain of installing flash wouldn't be "no issues". If we're assuming mom used chrome here then what's the argument against HTML5? Packaged apps were (discontinued) also more accessible than an SWF file IMO. Rather than explain how to find/run an a file it was just there to click in the browser.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#276

Post by dmitriid »

dimmke wrote: post #132
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…

Try animating anything on the web, and you'll quickly wish Flash wasn't dead.

And then reflect on why there are zero tools for the great collection of technologies collectively called HTML5 that have Flash's timeline tools, independent keyframe animations etc. etc.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#277

Post by protomyth »

udioron wrote: post #246

(From the thread: https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1344530847685369856 ): > 1) Because YOU didn't value something doesn't mean you understand all the ways it was valuable to others > 2) It's possible for technology to regress in big ways even as it moves forward in others, esp. when 1) applies + Google Reader (RIP 2013) + Google Music (RIP 2020)

Like HyperCard, getting rid of flash removed a lot of people's ability to use that creativity to create a program. If I was cynical, I would say it was on purpose to protect 'actual' developer's turf.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#278

Post by omnibrain »

racecar789 wrote: post #119

This doesn't get much attention on HN, but Apache Royale is the legitimate blood-line successor to Flex Framework. Adobe provided the initial resources (developers and hosting) to get the project into a stable state. The project is now managed by Apache. The team solved a couple monumental challenges (converting AS3 to JavaScript, and putting a GUI framework on top of it). https://royale.apache.org/

Havin worked with Flex 10 years ago it is nice seeing it living on. But Flex was not only about the Framework but a huge part of flex was the IDE (Flex Builder/Flash Builder) with visual form editor so you could build your programs Delphi/VB-style. Is there a comparable tool?

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#279

Post by GeneticGenesis »

ksec wrote: post #238
spyder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for videos Flash was the best solution for a long time, almost every video sharing website used Flash video players until HTML5 video got developed.

And apart from Video Codec improvement, many HTML5 video are still not as good as Flash Video Streaming. Mostly an implementation issues and not technical. But no one has the interest of improving it.

This isn't accurate at all. HLML 5 video, MSE etc. have a world of improvements over the mess of FLV / Flash / RTMP streaming.

Can you give some examples of what's wrong with HTML5 video streaming and these implementation issues? There's a huge community of video engineers working to make streaming video better, and we'd love to hear feedback.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#280

Post by dmitriid »

jchw wrote: post #149
tapirl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. The author doesn't argue a tool like Flash should exist. He just states the fact that HTML has still not caught up to fill the blank caused by…

If that’s their argument, it’s missing insight in my opinion. The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting, and in fact it’s full of undesirable problems. If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing. If you even just ignore Flash itself and include Flex, Haxe, and other authoring tools that can deal in flash runtime, it still isn’t that appealing. These arguments get confusing be…

> The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting

It was very interestin. Among the vastly underrated things it had was the insanely fast drawing of vector shapes with insane things like blazingly fast flood fills. It was extremely resilient in the presence of self-intersecting shapes, shapes of almost any complexity, open plygons etc. etc.

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