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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#291

Post by bityard »

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.

Just for some perspective, the 40-hour work week is a relatively new invention that only surfaced with the recent rise of the white-collar workforce. In my parents' day, the 40-hour work week was called "bankers hours" and this was used in a highly derogatory "sure must be nice" tone of voice. Many or most of us are probably descended from farmers that worked doing hard physical labor from sun-up to sun-down six days a week at a bare minimum with the rare holiday being reserved for family gatherings and religious observances. No travel at all unless you could hire someone (or left your kids at home) to feed the pigs or whatever while you were gone.

I'll take 40 hours over that kind of life in a hearbeat, thankyouverymuch. Although I am still trying very hard to make it so that I don't have to do even that much for the rest of my life.

In general, I don't disagree that it's sad that we spend such a huge proporation of our precious, finite time on our planet working. Most work without enjoyment because that's how you put food on the table.

On the other hand, the person who cracks this nut will enjoy unprecedented fame and their name in the history books for the rest of human civilization if they figure it out. (And no, it's not going to happen no matter how many 140-char political rants there are on the bird site. Very arguably, those are in fact the opposite of progress no matter which "side" you think you are on.)

Re: I still use Flash

#292

Post by albertzeyer »

jimnotgym wrote: post #290
albertzeyer wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

I have lost count of the number of 'I miss VB6/Flash/Delphi, they were so much more productive' threads on hn! Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?

For Delphi, there is Lazarus, which is absolutely great. However, it's somehow really niche? Maybe because Object Pascal is somewhat outdated now?

Re: I still use Flash

#293

Post by teaearlgraycold »

bityard wrote: post #291
leetrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Just for some perspective, the 40-hour work week is a relatively new invention that only surfaced with the recent rise of the white-collar workforce. In my parents' day, the 40-hour work week was called "bankers hours" and this was used in a highly derogatory "sure must be nice" tone of voice. Many or most of us are probably descended from farmers that worked doing hard physical labor from sun-up to sun-down six days…

And thousands of years ago it would be feasible to live on 30 hours of work a week. I wouldn’t want to give up modernity for that, but it’s not as though tremendous amounts of labor is the original work week.

Re: I still use Flash

#294

Post by yamtaddle »

> GPUs don't really like drawing vector graphics. They like big batches of textured triangles. So, I needed to rasterize these vectors.

I remember in the distant past of like 15 years ago when it was still common wisdom to avoid vector images on web pages, or drawing anything using fancy CSS features, because the resource cost to the client was too high and it'd hurt performance.

I think proliferation of runtime-rendered vector-icons/CSS-drawing/CSS-animation is under-appreciated when it comes to finding things to blame for why the web performs like dogshit, even on super computers. Sure it's probably mostly Javascript's fault, but I think those very likely play a non-negligible role.

Re: I still use Flash

#295

Post by wolverineoflove »

Real talk, I've been shipping an Adobe AIR app (Flash on the desktop) to a major healthcare provider still (just did a build yesterday).

Samsung subsidiary Harmann took over the support contract from Adobe a couple years ago, and I think they have one or two souls running support for the AIR SDK, they're doing... okay.

After years of searching for an Electron alternative (2016-2019) I broke down and wrote an Electron + Vue application. I had really really wanted Wails to work, but it simply has too many sharp corners for an enterprise desktop application that needs to run 24/7.

The corporation customer basically stonewalled and refuses to let the AIR app die. We're pulling up the ladder with the Apple Silicon cutover, and hoping they bleed out on bugs. What a mess.

I'm commenting because I too "still use Flash" in a way. It's a secret shame :X

Re: I still use Flash

#296

Post by ux »

> Blending done in perceptual (sRGB) space

Oh please don't say that. The sRGB transfer function may be somehow roughly correlated with how we perceive lightness, but it's in no way a perceptual space.

Re: I still use Flash

#297

Post by dljsjr »

wolverineoflove wrote: post #295

Real talk, I've been shipping an Adobe AIR app (Flash on the desktop) to a major healthcare provider still (just did a build yesterday). Samsung subsidiary Harmann took over the support contract from Adobe a couple years ago, and I think they have one or two souls running support for the AIR SDK, they're doing... okay. After years of searching for an Electron alternative (2016-2019) I broke down and wrote an Electron…

Would ruffle + WASM + Electron work? https://ruffle.rs

Re: I still use Flash

#298

Post by hgsgm »

ux wrote: post #296

> Blending done in perceptual (sRGB) space Oh please don't say that. The sRGB transfer function may be somehow roughly correlated with how we perceive lightness, but it's in no way a perceptual space.

No post body was provided.

Re: I still use Flash

#299

Post by jimnotgym »

albertzeyer wrote: post #292
jimnotgym wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lost count of the number of 'I miss VB6/Flash/Delphi, they were so much more productive' threads on hn! Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?

For Delphi, there is Lazarus, which is absolutely great. However, it's somehow really niche? Maybe because Object Pascal is somewhat outdated now?

I don't really know Delphi/Lazurus well enough... but I suppose it is similar to the following... for VB there is Winforms and .NET, which as someone above pointed out is 'much more powerful', but somehow not what people want!

Re: I still use Flash

#300

Post by Asooka »

kmeisthax wrote: post #164
bambax wrote: post #59

Earlier 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,…

Have you tried splitting the area covered by each shape into several 8x8 pixel rectangles, then running a compute shader over each one that executes the exact same rasterisation algorithm as Flash did? That's more or less how triangles are rasterised on the GPU anyway.

It's definitely not a simple solution, but might enable you to do runtime rasterisation with a good framerate on the GPU rather than pre-rasterising all the vector art.

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