It reminds me that the show BoJack Horseman was created on Adobe Flash [1]. The creator calls himself an "Old School Flash Hack" in a same vibe like the OP.
Don't know if the latest seasons they still used Flash, maybe yes, because they just exported to video? Migrate to other tool maybe was a pain and/or changed some illustration aesthetics. Not sure if a project like that can migrate properly to Adobe Animate [2], the Flash successor.
I believe that Flash was a tool with a friendly UI/UX for casual animators but also many advanced features for pros, that's why was so popular and loved.
Ah, Flash. Simulating a bouncing ball using keyframe-driven ActionScript that I only sort of understood was my “hello world” moment. Love to see it being used like this. If only I could find those old .fla files…
I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation. Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it? Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, trans…
> Who would grow your food? >> There are exceptions of course. There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc. Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment. Yes,…
You forgot to count plumbers, and everyone in the construction industry.
Also the guy that fills the milk bottles. My brother used to work in a milk bottling plant, but he was not filing the bottles by hand. A machine filled the bottles, someone overlook the machine, my brother was making the chemistry and biological test to ensure the milk was safe to drink. And there was some additional people they call in case the machine gets broken (or to build a new machine.)
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.
It was perfect! Full of low-key wisdom and fun observations. Doesn’t feel like “content marketing” in the slightest.
I wish the Hapland series was coming to Mac, but I respect your decision to snub Apple.
From the article: "GPUs don't really like drawing vector graphics. They like big batches of textured triangles. So, I needed to rasterize these vectors."
The author certainly wasn't the first person to have this problem. What is available for fast display of vector graphics animations with GPU acceleration? Anything better or higher level than just doing huge numbers of calls to OpenGL/Vulcan/Metal/etc.?
I saw the headline and I was ready to talk trash... then I opened the blog post and wow. What an incredible job for a single person. Hats off on the different approaches you took. Excellent work! I loved the post and congrats on launching it on Steam!
Do you feel compelled to participate in that competition? If not, why does it bother you?
Fail to compete and you'll be left behind in terms of compensation, performance review rankings, and career growth, the last of which also limits your future job choices. It also puts you nearer the top of the list for layoffs when corporate finances get tight.
But those things shouldn’t bother you if you aren’t interested in the “more more more” society. It’s easy to get a stable programming job in the US that pays $80k and has very little lay-off risk.
You can’t have it both ways complaining about being left behind in comp while not participating in the grind that allows those comps to go higher.
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.
What I loved about VB was how the basic UI was handled seamlessly and yet you could really dig in on optimizing user flow on top of it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional, and you could spend your time making sure it felt good.
I can still get there with modern tools, but the defaults / conventions in VB are simply superior to anything I’ve worked with since.
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.
Yep. Python has potential to support some environment like Visual Basic. But there is no such project, as far as I know. All GUI frameworks are more complex, and there is no nice drag & drop GUI editor build into an easy Python IDE. At least I don't know it. Maybe if you use PyCharm, select some framework, find the right PyCharm plugins for it, you would have sth similar, but still much more difficult to use, and also there is no prebuilt and ready to be used package for such thing.