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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#211

Post by Consultant32452 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #207
kome wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.

I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing. But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to…

I miss the days when JQuery was the only JS library a person needed to know to do professional web dev. I stuck with web dev through the peak of Struts, but the constant changing of frameworks with (imo) minimal benefit to user experience pushed me to things besides web dev.

Re: I still use Flash

#213

Post by themagician »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #81
pmarreck wrote: post #39

> Although I developed the game mostly on my Mac, during development Apple invented this thing called “Notarization” where if you run any app on a new version of MacOS, it'll make a network request to Apple to ask if the app's developer pays Apple a yearly fee. If the developer does not pay Apple a yearly fee, MacOS will pop up a dialog strongly implying the app is a virus and refuse to start it. > For this reason, W…

If Proton is accepted as the solution to Linux gaming what is the reason for a developer to build for Linux over Windows? Funnily enough there are parallels with that to why Apple didn’t want Flash on iOS. If you could make it in Flash and ship to both why code an iOS app. Same thing, zero reason to make a native Linux build while that works fine.

Initially, Apple actually looked at an iOS version of Flash. This was around 2009/2010 IIRC. There were special dev iPhones that ran Flash. Adobe didn’t want to optimize it because they thought the iPhone would fail. Apple thought the performance was garbage and the communication mostly ended. I got to play with one for a few days and the performance was terrible. Even simple games lagged and the touch points were a disaster.

Re: I still use Flash

#214

Post by sh4rks »

rogual wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I haven't done a lot of technical postmortem blogpost-style writing so I'd welcome any feedback or tips on how to improve. Is it too long, too short, too technical, not technical enough? Boring? Interesting? Is it enlightening or does it just come off like content marketing? I literally have no idea how good I am at this.

This was a great read. I distinctly remember playing Hapland as a kid. Armour games or Crazymonkeygames, can't remember which one it was. So this was a great nostalgia trip.

Re: I still use Flash

#215

Post by imperfect_blue »

zackmorris wrote: post #172
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #96

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&p…

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

Because for everyone to make what they want to make is, as of current year, a pie in the sky fantasy until scarcity is solved, and perhaps not even then.

There are 8 billion humans, the world doesn't need another hundred thousand programming languages or web frameworks or game development platform or even indie games or fiction or music or film, produced every year when the whim strikes someone's fancy. Even if we could, who can even consume that much content?

Being a cog in a machine at least means you're probably doing something of value to someone instead of writing another book that nobody reads.

As of now we have no better solution to coordination failure except to create the AGI that will save/doom us.

Re: I still use Flash

#216

Post by hoten »

This was a fun read!

rogual: I'm sure you would be able to manage this yourself, but if time is a factor I'd be happy to assist in converting the final result to a WASM build playable in a browser.

Shouldn't be difficult to just plop in SDL (which is trivially portable to WASM) to handle the drawing. Found a basic example here[1] that uses STB + SDL. Should be rather straightforward.

[1] https://github.com/svoisen/wasm-imageviewer/blob/master/rend...

Re: I still use Flash

#217

Post by water-your-self »

leetrout wrote: post #204
zackmorris wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

Can I ask the rough scale of the company you work for?

Re: I still use Flash

#218

Post by TuringTest »

vkazanov wrote: post #176
kitd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.

I remember how the last VisualBasic programmer left the first company I worked for. On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was mandatory for development: version control, code style, code structure. We, young Cpp/Python programmers, despised him. But nothing we had (QT, 2007-2008 web tech, etc) made it possible to spit out a business UI in an hour. To be honest, I still don't see anything co…

> To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable.

I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools.

See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives.

They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor).

[1] https://obsidian.md/canvas

Re: I still use Flash

#219

Post by falcolas »

imperfect_blue wrote: post #215
zackmorris wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

Because for everyone to make what they want to make is, as of current year, a pie in the sky fantasy until scarcity is solved, and perhaps not even then. There are 8 billion humans, the world doesn't need another hundred thousand programming languages or web frameworks or game development platform or even indie games or fiction or music or film, produced every year when the whim strikes someone's fancy. Even if we co…

Personal opinion: I think scarcity is mostly a solved problem, in that most of us are working on projects that only exist to make someone else more money, not to fulfill any actual needs of those 8 billion humans.

There are exceptions of course.

But most of us could stop working tomorrow, and aside from the lack of income, the scarcity of resources available to us would not change.

The real problems that causes hunger/poverty in our world has more to do with logistics and politics, not a deficit of resources.

Re: I still use Flash

#220

Post by dheera »

kitd wrote: post #140
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #96

I remember creating a simple "catch the falling X" game in Flash 20 years ago. It was basic, but had everything you'd expect in a beginner project: points, multiple game states/screens, a victory condition, basic story (which was just a screen at the beginning, like NES). The thing is, I was a literal child and I also had no clue how to code -- I did everything by following tutorials and gluing together code I copy&p…

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.

I feel like Python is starting to get a lot of the same bad rep because non-techies can learn it. It's actually a great language if you want to build stuff really fast. Not everything needs to crunch a billion operations per second and even if you want that, there are several good libraries for that.
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