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I still use Flash

foon.uk

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Re: I still use Flash

#351

Post by th0ma5 »

logotype wrote: post #245

Working with Flash was like working with future technologies, back in the day. You could build amazing things with it, things that was not possible using standard browser API’s. In fact, Flash led the way and was the prototype for what browsers can to today. If you cared about what you built, with clever hacks and bitwise performance tricks then the Flash runtime could run your code efficiently. I remember developing…

At the time it was unfortunately both true that Apple needed idle CPUs for battery life and Adobe had no intention or probably no ability either to make that happen with Flash.

Re: I still use Flash

#352

Post by kortilla »

falcolas wrote: post #234
imperfect_blue wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That farmer count is only as small as it is because of the massive society they are built on that allows that to scale. You briefly scratched at with miners, but you forgot all of the machinery and auto manufacturers, the massive energy industry that powers all of it, etc.

> Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous

I think you just don’t understand the purpose of many jobs. If the accountant for the local grocery store didn’t exist, what do you think would happen?

Re: I still use Flash

#353

Post by vkazanov »

int_19h wrote: post #315
vkazanov wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One more thing that changed is a platform situation. Everyone is looking into building crossplatform tools, and MS tools do not really cover this front.

Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable.

So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.

Re: I still use Flash

#354

Post by kortilla »

falcolas wrote: post #270
gus_massa wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t support your point though that we’re anywhere near post scarcity and can support people quitting. Many jobs that were classified as essential during the pandemic are things people don’t have oodles of joy doing (garbage pickup, power plant coal loader, etc).

You can cut out the entire “entertainment” or whatever industry you think isn’t essential, but we still need to convince the people working the essential jobs to do it while everyone else free-rides.

Re: I still use Flash

#355

Post by kortilla »

itsoktocry wrote: post #228
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 it's like we're all waiting around for a billionaire to liberate us Only in Silicon Valley, and that's probably a big part of the problem. In some of the highest paying, most creative occupations on the planet people are drooling at the feet of billionaires to save them while they slave away M-F. Most people throughout history didn't look at the rich with anything but contempt. In Silicon Valley they're held up…

You’re confusing “billionaires” with “a few select billionaires that built disruptive businesses from the ground up”. Nobody in Silicon Valley is “drooling at the feet” of the Walton children.

Re: I still use Flash

#356

Post by dheera »

int_19h wrote: post #317
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?

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.

> translate the app

The way translation is implemented today is horrifying.

Likewise for high-DPI. Why are they still using some linear scaling of icons instead of a super-resolution GAN and some caching?

Why can't an OS translate a single-language app on the fly using state-of-the-art translation neural nets and using visual attention to capture context? It's almost 2023 ffs, and people are still using some gettext nonsense?

Re: I still use Flash

#357

Post by andai »

cpeterso wrote: post #327
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.

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?

Can you comment on why Adobe let Flash die? Did it just become unprofitable compared to their other projects?

Re: I still use Flash

#358

Post by pjmlp »

japhib wrote: post #205
dontwearitout wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was my 2nd programming language (after VB6) back when it was still Macromedia. I had a lot of fun making really crappy minigames and learning the basics of coding. This article brought some good nostalgia and plenty of astonishment at the lengths you went to. Your writing itself is great. A lot of writing linked by HN seems too verbose because people try to sound smart. Yours is succinct while engaging. Right l…

Object-orientation is kind of the old-school way of doing things, these days it's all about ECS - entity component system. This is a more data-oriented approach that has the potential for much higher performance when you have thousands of objects that need updating in your game. It's similar to how OO languages like Java/C# are going out of style and more (nominally, at least) data-oriented languages such as Go or Ru…

Unity isn't going anywhere, and programming to interfaces is just as doable in Java and C#.

Re: I still use Flash

#359

Post by derelicta »

I really miss all my Flash games. Some of em were and have been ported to other plateforms for sure but most are gone. And dont mention all those weird Shockwave emulators; most of em cant run half of the games I used to play.

Re: I still use Flash

#360

Post by citeguised »

derelicta wrote: post #359

I really miss all my Flash games. Some of em were and have been ported to other plateforms for sure but most are gone. And dont mention all those weird Shockwave emulators; most of em cant run half of the games I used to play.

You can drag&drop lots of older (ActionScript 1 & 2) Flash-Binaries into https://ruffle.rs/demo/ Lots of them "just work". Also lots of SWF-Archives on archive.org to download and try.
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