I don’t think you are saying just because you haven’t experienced something means it can’t be out of the realm of possibility? And for it to be proven someone has to do the work specifically to convince you? Seems kind of evangelical, which is a foreign concept to me. But I’ll try, respectfully. Perhaps you you look/act younger than others. Or maybe others act/look older than you. Or, maybe there’s people who exist w…
It was just a new term to me so I was asking for clarification. You’ve been helpful, thanks.
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…
In terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it. I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.
The older HTML equivalent would be to package it in a *.mhtml where the various parts are mime-encoded, like a multipart email would. It's only been around for decades. Creating it was saving a webpage in IE. Mozilla/Firefox never supported it, though, even though they already had the necessary code for doing email… possibly because they had inherited the Netscape mail codebase which was a bit difficult to reuse.
> 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…
> If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing.
The tooling seems to be what most people miss. That's not trivial. Adobe Animate is supposed to fill that void, but from what I've seen, it's a long way from a drop-in solution.
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?
An open source app called FlashDevelop was fairly hot for a few years after Adobe open sourced the Flex framework. FlashDevelop lacked a visual editor, but it was quite capable. FlashDevelop's last release was in 2018.
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…
As a user, I remember it exactly as the author of this article does. "Standalone player" (let alone on 'linux') is a bit of a strawman. For me it was always as easy as just opening it in my browser and it worked out of the box.
And even if this had problems as you rightly suggest, for its time the alternatives were worse. Comparing via the benefit of hindsight in 2020 isn't really relevant to the point of the article.
This raises an interesting question. Now that we have things like ruffle, could flash content see a resurgence? Or are there no viable tools for flash/ruffle content creation anymore?
YouTube (specifically hobbyist YouTube) replaced Flash. As a nascent carpenter, baker, cosmologist and cycle repair guy I couldn’t be happier with the amount of freely available creative output people are sharing. Videos are this generation’s single-file-upload one-click-share platform. I sure hope — for cultures sake — this generation also has an indie animation scene.
I find video of someone else playing an existing game to be a poor replacement for someone going and making a new game.
Sure. Every hobby I’ve learned in the past few years has been through YouTube.