Kind of late to the party here, but there is a major thing provided by Flash that's missing from today's web: the ability to get artists and hobbyists into creating interactive digital experiences. The current web sucks at that because it doesn't provide a seamless path to upgrade one's artistic talent the way Flash did for people who were already familiar with digital art tools.
Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs. Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But wi…
Worth noting that the SWF format was towards the end of its lifecycle and open standard as well. Fully documented with open source players and tooling available.
Ruffle.rs looks pretty promising for playing flash.
Adobe still has the editor as Adobe Animate - if they made it more widely available, I think there is a big demographic of designers that would like to make a bit of animation or active graphics that is not being served any more.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos. This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images i…
>Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design The places where "animation that works better than text+images" is incredibly small I can read faster than you can animate - speed it up! Or I want to read longer than you an…
There is a whole segment of the web that is now gone, things have become boring and uniform, and while that's fine for all sorts of sites, it's sad that we have just thrown all that out.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#114Kind of late to the party here, but there is a major thing provided by Flash that's missing from today's web: the ability to get artists and hobbyists into creating interactive digital experiences. The current web sucks at that because it doesn't provide a seamless path to upgrade one's artistic talent the way Flash did for people who were already familiar with digital art tools.
Exactly, Flash's editors primary UI was a drawing program with an animation timeline, you can get started without knowing anything more - it was amazingly freeing.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#115A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency. Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet…
Dan Luu has several articles on latency that address these questions:
- https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images is often not as easy as many think, and you need to contend with that before you attempt to implement the design The places where "animation that works better than text+images" is incredibly small I can read faster than you can animate - speed it up! Or I want to read longer than you an…
There is a whole segment of the web that is now gone, things have become boring and uniform, and while that's fine for all sorts of sites, it's sad that we have just thrown all that out.
I wouldn't say it's so much "we have just thrown all that out" as it is "we found out the overwhelming majority of it wasn't wanted or even 'good'"
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#117Adobe Animate seems to pretty much the same with HTML5. You can still script things in ECMAscript like you could with Flash.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird high school/college art nerds today are designing their own VTuber rigs, selling art commissions or making indie games. The biggest reason there isn't a new Homestar Runner or Newgrounds has less to do with technological limitations or complexity and more to do with evolving tastes over time. Also the fact that the new whatever would be either Youtube or Twitter. Or Tiktok. Or something most people here hav…
> more to do with evolving tastes over time. Among the top HN posts of all time is an interactive watch visualization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 This is evidence that people still enjoy interactive experiences, but they are just harder to create.
That's only evidence that interactive experiences can be enjoyed under the right circumstances. In that particular instance, such interactivity is both useful and fresh. But there's no evidence that people want to make more content like that but can't, nor that all such content would be appreciated.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please get a SSD today. You stress me!
Let me stress you more. I use a mid-2010 iMac as a daily driver. It still uses the original spinning disk hardware with more than 77000 Power_On_Hours. SMART says Old_age. I like living dangerously.
What worries me is that you purchased a premium computer from Apple when everyone recommended not to buy it because its obsolete low-end hard drive crippled it.
And you didn’t consider making it a magnitude faster for a fraction of its price.
I’m sure you can find a fridge with better IO performance.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean yes and no. One might make the same claim about an FPU for example. It should be possible for most software to be fast without assuming fast floating point calculations. But if it can reasonably be assumed that the deployment platform does have that capability then does it make sense to focus effort into optimising that. I think there's an argument to be that programs should focus more on when they're reading…
I remember adopting SSDs quite early in their lifetime despite them having controller firmware teething issues at the time. It was hands down the most significant PC upgrade I've made in the last 20 years. That said, Windows used to run acceptably on hard drive. I don't think I could even endure Windows 10 on one now with the amount of background disk hammering it does just staring at an empty desktop.
I maintain that the jump from spinning rust to solid state may well be the biggest single QoL jump we'll see in consumer computing for another couple decades, barring, like, direct neural interface or something wild.