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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#311

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Try Roblox, I guess.

And to be honest Unity is really easy at the tutorial level. Shipping a real game is the hard part.

Re: I still use Flash

#312

Post by int_19h »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #274
detritus wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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" Well fuck me, I had no idea. I figured that 'simple 2D vectors' would be beyond piss-easy for modern GPUs. I'd never considered that it wasn't the actual math space that was accelerated, rather the fast memory mapping of everything on presu…

Yeah, this is something that many many people assume (vectors are "easy" on GPUs) and then are amazed (like I was!) that they aren't even in the function set. My thought was that if you were "accelerating" desktops you'd really want vectors right? But no.

The interesting thing is that graphics cards in the 90s - which were "desktop accelerators" past the low end - specifically supported accelerated 2D primitives, including Bezier curves for the more powerful ones. It was all gradually dropped as cards focused on 3D games specifically.

Re: I still use Flash

#313

Post by Const-me »

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 awesome.

Also, the idea of using text/assembly as an intermediate format of binary files is pure genius. I will probably use that occasionally for similar use cases.

Re: I still use Flash

#314

Post by zeven7 »

NovaVeles wrote: post #302

I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…

I'm not offering an assessment of the overall sentiment, but it's been a very long time since I've had to think twice about browser interoperability, and it would be an exceedingly rare occurrence for a browser update to cause me any problem.

Re: I still use Flash

#315

Post by int_19h »

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…

.NET with WinForms could do that just fine in that timeframe (and today - it's still supported), and many VB programmers ended up there. Delphi was another popular contender that's still around.

Re: I still use Flash

#316

Post by int_19h »

clarge1120 wrote: post #163
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.

The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.

There was nothing particularly easier about VB6 compared to the later VB.NET. VB (5/6) was, effectively, a scripting language designed around the COM object model. .NET originally started its life as "COM 2.0", with VB support consistently a part of the plan, and gradual feature creep turning it into what it became eventually.

Re: I still use Flash

#317

Post by int_19h »

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?

The problem is that the approach itself is kinda flawed. The moment you have to support high-DPI or translate the app to a different language (with text labels of different size), that whole trick of just WYSIWYG dragging and dropping widgets in a visual designer breaks down.

Re: I still use Flash

#318

Post by [deleted] »

zeven7 wrote: post #314
NovaVeles wrote: post #302

I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…

I'm not offering an assessment of the overall sentiment, but it's been a very long time since I've had to think twice about browser interoperability, and it would be an exceedingly rare occurrence for a browser update to cause me any problem.

[deleted]

Re: I still use Flash

#319

Post by dovin »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #310
NovaVeles wrote: post #302

I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…

Flash really was that easy for so many people. Why isn’t there a true replacement?

I feel like WebAssembly fits that description, in both the good and bad ways.

Re: I still use Flash

#320

Post by mesh »

NovaVeles wrote: post #302

I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare. But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems. That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossi…

> I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare.t

Relative to what though? There was nothing else with its ubiquity, ease of use and deployment, and breadth of functionality.

It pioneered and enabled so many things that we take for granted on the web today.

Personally, as someone who used it extensively, I don't feel it was particularly buggy, especially relative to the alternatives or developing in the browser. It could have performance issues, if developers did bad things or pushed it too hard, but you could say that for just about anything.

As far as security, it was the single most ubiquitous runtime on the web, and thus was a prime target for hackers. Yes, it had security issues (although every web runtime did), but its not like the rest of the web / browsers were particularly secure themselves.

fyi, I worked for Macromedia and work for Adobe now, but these are my personal opinions.

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