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Building a new Flash
101–110 of 247 posts
Re: Building a new Flash
#102Heck yeah. I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made. Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedro…
I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.
Re: Building a new Flash
#103I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/ One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even…
I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?
Re: Building a new Flash
#104Heck yeah. I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made. Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedro…
I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.
Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”
So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/
Re: Building a new Flash
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc. No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM. Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any cer…
Nor any semicolons. Also full of nonsense. SWF fundamentally runs action script. The idea that you are going to have a AS3 to C# transpiler and a C# scripting engine AND export SWFs is incongruous. Again, "C# code executed when the playhead enters a keyframe." Now I'd love the oppurinity to learn, but ctrl+f c# here [1] shows 0 results. Though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding the meaning here ( ≖_≖). [1] https://op…
only thing I can imagine is that they are building it with Unity, hence the C#. You can compile other languages to SWF bytecode, that's what Haxe is.
Re: Building a new Flash
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.
The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same. Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone .
There are no colons or semicolons, anyone who really is a stickler for punctuation would not write exclusively with em-dashes.
Re: Building a new Flash
#107I personally believe that Flash has had its day and should die a Hero, rather than be resurrected to become a villain.
For being open-sourced, it was a pretty hot topic, especially at an interesting gathering inside Macromedia in the summer of 2005. Little did we know (or kinda) that it was going to take a different path with Adobe that Christmas.
Honestly, I think, Flash kinda died way before the iPhone was released.
Re: Building a new Flash
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't just some em-dashes, it's 126 of them in a single announcement post.
The number is irrelevant. They are being used as separators on every list item, of course there are many. They could all be hyphens or arrows or colons and it would be exactly the same. Look, I’m not saying this wasn’t written with an LLM. What I’m saying is that you don’t know that judging by the em-dashes alone .
The number is relevant when the comment with the most em-dashes on HN (prior to 2023) had only 31. It's also not the only signal here.
Re: Building a new Flash
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones. Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads o…
I think Apple is more responsible. One of Flash's chief benefits to the customers who paid the big bucks was that it 'just worked' everywhere. Once Apple stopped supporting Flash on the iPhone, that story was a lot less attractive. The bugs were definitely Adobe's fault: as with most tech companies, they were far more interested in expanding the feature set than they were on fixing the bugs and stabilizing the platfo…
This is a myth that needs to die.
The first iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor and could barely run Safari. If you scrolled to fast you would get a checkerbox while Safari was trying to catch up.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1732478
If it couldn’t run Safari with decent performance, how was it going to run Safari + Flash?
In fact when Flash finally did come to Android in 2010, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it barely ran then and killed the battery. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Another anecdote is that the Motorola Xoom was supposed to to be the “iPad killer” because it could show you the “real web” with Flash.
But it came out without Flash because Adobe was late. You couldn’t even see the Xoom home page on the Xoom when it was first introduced because it required Flash.
Re: Building a new Flash
#110Sorry, but can someone explain to me why Flash failed? Was it because Apple killed it, or other reasons? Because not open source? Too heavy? I never really got the story, or only got bits and pieces. I know a lot of people liked Flash.