We killed a big chunk of the internet when browsers stopped supporting Flash. It's even worse than that, that part of the internet was not built upon instead many things had to be created from scratch without Flash. I'm not saying Flash is good, just pointing out the incredible loss.
I still use Flash
321–330 of 408 posts
Re: I still use Flash
#322> In the end, I settled for a bit of a hack. My exporter reads the ActionScript from each frame and applies a bunch of regexes to attempt to turn it into C++. Haha, I lost it at this part. Brilliant read! How much time did it take you to build the whole thing?
Thank you! Git log tells me I started in November 2019, so 3 years, but the pace of work definitely varied a lot over that time. Sometimes I was putting full days of work into it, sometimes stolen moments here and there between paying work, and some long stretches of just not working on it at all. Maybe I'll do another post with a graph, haha.
Yeah I'd be curious to know the total time spent. :)
In any case, amazing work and write-up!
Re: I still use Flash
#323Hey 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.
Your writing is clear and concise. You don't indulge in run-on sentences, or hyperbole.
It's an impressive piece of writing. You're definitely good at this.
Re: I still use Flash
#324I 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…
About a decade ago I worked with someone who was on the early Flash team.
One of the tradeoffs of the time was that they had to work very hard to both crunch the binary size down for Flash itself, as well as Flash files, because people everywhere were extremely bandwidth-limited - when dialup was the most common method for connecting to the internet and not even 56k was necessarily ubiquitous at that. And of course, compiler technology hadn't come as far as it has nowadays.
The weight of all the decisions that made Flash able to succeed eventually worked against it, but for its time, it was an extremely good implementation that made the web as a whole more interactive.
I'm happy it's been superseded, but I think that it was the right product for its time.
Re: I still use Flash
#325I 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?
Same question. Why you bury -kill- a thing without a true replacement?
Re: I still use Flash
#326Flash and Actionscript were to interactive and animated apps what Python is to generic coding today. It brought together ease of use and powerful functionality, accessible to mere mortals.
Re: I still use Flash
#327Hey 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.
As someone who worked on Macromedia’s and then Adobe’s Flash Player team, I thank you for sharing your experience preserving your Flash content!
Did you investigate Haxe or OpenFL?
Re: I still use Flash
#328Earlier 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.
Yep I was going to say the same thing. I write small internal tools for corporates and my team in 2020 is a fraction of the productivity of my team in the 90s. Lots of tools, the complexity is nuts these days.
Totally agree. And as a result, it has become very hard to find young developers who understand GUI usability and standards.
Re: I still use Flash
#329I like having as much of my code as possible run on my own dev machine, where I can keep an eye on it.
Good principle.
Re: I still use Flash
#330What's the state of the art on converting Flash to HTML5? You'd need an Actionscript to Javascript transpiler, export the assets, and handle tweening / timeline keyframes? And probably handle Flash specific events? I don't recall if Flash has any flash-specific effects you'd need to recreate.