IIRC many 2D animators considered the old Adobe Flash Professional to be one of the best 2D animation tools ever made.
It's still around, it's just called Adobe Animate now. Can export to video, to web, etc.
I still use Flash
261–270 of 408 posts
Re: I still use Flash
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash was conceptually fantastic, and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL. Unfortunately we don't have the authoring tool to do so. Flash IDE became Adobe Animate, but it has relatively restricted output and capabilities, compared to Flash before. Unfortunately also Flash was full of bugs, FULL. I mean the player, the IDE, everything. And Macromedia and consequently Adobe were increas…
> today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL. There's one big piece missing: we don't have an animation/gaming interface that's as easy and intuitive as Flash. Flash didn't become ubiquitous because it was powerful, but because it was easy for any 13 year old to pick up and do something nice in a couple of days without reading any documentation or doing any course. Good luck getting anything…
The Flash editor is still around, it's just called Adobe Animate now. It can export to web for you.
Re: I still use Flash
#263Hey 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.
Great article! I also still use Flash by using a custom runtime that interprets the output of the “Export as texture atlas” feature. I was wondering if you had attempted to use this feature in order the rasterize the graphics?
Re: I still use Flash
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the discipline of data-driven business. If 20 people use your app and despise it and are depressed by it, that's better than 19 people using it and loving it. No sentimentality allowed.
How could anyone possibly measure that an app is despised and depresses people (or vice versa)? Usage can't be it, because I use a ton of software that I despise and get depressed by, but only because I get paid to do so, or the app is so niche there isn't a viable replacement.
> How could anyone possibly measure that an app is despised and depresses people (or vice versa)?
You'd have to actually talk to your users. But that requires genuine human investment, so it doesn't scale. It doesn't come in the form of a third-party SaaS with a pretty dashboard, generous free plan, and integration via single tag.
In short: they could measure this, they just don't bother to.
Re: I still use Flash
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed! ;-) However I wonder why the OP didn't try to keep vector graphics and use to SVG for instance? That would allow for infinite scalability. It is mentioned that "GPUs don't like vectors" but if the game doesn't change too often it should not make a lot of difference?
I did consider it. Infinite scalability isn't required during runtime; the scene doesn't ever zoom or scale in the games, because that was always so slow in Flash, so the only real benefits would be 1) supporting higher resolutions and 2) reducing file size. For 1) I decided I'd rather just release an update with larger textures if these ones ever start to look dated. That way I get to keep the runtime code simple. L…
Ah, thanks. That could maybe go into the article as well? Although it's already pretty thorough as it is.
Re: I still use Flash
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed! ;-) However I wonder why the OP didn't try to keep vector graphics and use to SVG for instance? That would allow for infinite scalability. It is mentioned that "GPUs don't like vectors" but if the game doesn't change too often it should not make a lot of difference?
So, I think I need to elaborate on "GPUs don't like vectors". What the OP meant was "GPUs have literally no support for rendering anything other than pixels on triangles and getting them to efficiently draw Bezier curves and fills is an active area of research". You'd need specific hardware support for rasterizing them, and as far as I'm aware no such hardware exists. When Adobe hacked on "HTML5 support" to Animate,…
Thanks for this! Very informative!
Re: I still use Flash
#267> The vintage Flash UI is great. Buttons have edges. Icons look like things. Space is well-used. It's amazing! Using old UIs makes me feel like an archaeologist discovering some sort of forgotten Roman technology. The lost art of UI design. It's neat. This was one my favourites parts in the article. An the real piece of the pie comes right after it: there's a screenshot with like thirty icons and they're different en…
It's like entire industry at one point decide to optimize UIs for the first 30 minutes of usage and not the years of users using apps once they get familiar with them . "oooh let's not put too many buttons to scare users away", "they got 22 inch screens, let's just waste space for no good reason, it looks modern and airy"
UI is now optimized for PowerPoint. The #1 goal of all UI work is so the designer and/or product manager can get an "oh, that looks nice!" showing off screenshots to an interviewer or to someone higher-up who'll help them get a promotion. Trendy (you don't want to look outdated, do you?) and pretty are what matter, not usability.
I seriously think that's what's going on.
Re: I still use Flash
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hunge…
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…
Parent has a point from my experience - most products I worked on never really caught on in terms of being reasonably widely used. I don't think I've ever worked on anything I'd call truly essential.
From what I've seen, most programmers are indeed spending their time building experiments that have the primary goal of making money for the person that pays them - if they create true value that's more of a lucky side effect. And lots of those experiments fail.
Re: I still use Flash
#269Hey 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.
Worth noting that there is a spec for the custom XML file, it's known as FXG. S starts a cubic Bezier curve in absolute coordinates: https://web.archive.org/web/20110611002637/http://opensource...
Re: I still use Flash
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Even if every single position in the US held today were considered essential, there would still be more people in the US who are unemployed than employed.
And every job currently held today is absolutely not essential.