The orisinal games were one of my favorite things on the internet. I'm so happy to see them back.
Internet Archive expands Flash support
91–100 of 231 posts
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#92I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…
Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training - Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia…
> We created all kinds of training content in it
How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0]. https://ruffle.rs/#downloads [0] It was enough for the old exten…
Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#94This is pure nostalgia
Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin.
Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#95I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…
Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…
I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it.
It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#96I hope this means that they will fix the site for the wonderful book _Bembo's Zoo_:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050204004955/http://www.bembos...
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died. I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts…
I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#98Wow, there are a few animutations in their big "unsorted" collection: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted . Rewatching them brings back so many memories from High School.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#99I was just watching a YouTube video about Home Star Runner yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbh9-mNmviE I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it. In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate…
Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…
I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple.
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support
#100This is pure nostalgia
Agreed. We hated Flash back in the day. It was a terrible proprietary format, impossible to search, unstable and prone to crashes. It was even worse than JavaScript today. And it required a plugin. Obviously it did a lot of things right and we miss Flash for it. But it was almost universally despised in the early 2000s.
I was wondering about this because my only memory of it is just how much people hated it. That and security problems.