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HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#201

Post by toper-centage »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #155
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architectur…

I remember fearing for the life of Linux when Adobe Air and Silver light or whatever started appearing. Whole websites started popping up that simply only worked for Windows users. Adobe was totally part of the EEE.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#202

Post by mkl »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #185
kaslai wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

Really? All those kids making those stick figure animations on the early web sites had access to 700$ software? Sounds amazing.

Piracy was easier and rampant back then. Adobe (and Microsoft, etc.) knew that the kids who learned on pirated copies would lead to legit sales later.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#203

Post by wvenable »

ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

> Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is.

Flash run on PC's hundreds of times less powerful than your smartphone is right now. For the original iPhone, sure, but this resource argument is decades out of date now.

In the years after, all we've done is made HTML/JS/SWF as powerful as Flash and even more resource intensive.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#204

Post by artificial »

shams93 wrote: post #102
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

It was always hell to get hired to edit a swf file where the client didn't know you need the original fla to edit the thing the swf was not enough.

This brings back memories of flash decompiling and trying to sift through the output to do the deed.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#205

Post by danShumway »

larsiusprime wrote: post #125
danShumway wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. I think we might be arguing past each other. I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web. When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed: A) that the platform…

Yeah we've arrived at the same page here. I think we actually agree about most everything.

I do agree with everything you're saying about what's been lost, and I feel that loss because I went through that same loss. I'm not commenting from the sidelines, I lost Flash as a development platform too. I think my big frustration is that there's this tone that often comes up underneath threads like this that's, "look what the web took away from us", and I just think that's really harmful and inaccurate.

All of the APIs that are necessary to replicate Flash exist. The only failure of the Open web was assuming that the games industry was going to be competent enough to author new accessible tools. Heck, I was critical of Flash deprecation at the time, but even I thought that Adobe was eventually going to seamlessly export to HTML5. I don't know what to say beyond that. On behalf of HTML5 advocates everywhere, I'm sorry we thought Adobe might be a competently run company.

So I wish more of these kinds of threads were subtweeting people like Tim Sweeney, or Unity devs, or Adobe itself, rather than trying to blame the web for what is arguably one of its biggest success stories: the evolution from being only suitable for toy interactions into a generally accessible application runtime. The web succeeded at that, beyond almost everyone's expectations.

Almost everything that the web can provide to replace Flash it is providing. But web advocates can't build an IDE. Somebody in the games industry has to do that. So maybe those people should be the target of this ire instead of HTML5. I get why people are frustrated, but web advocates can't fix any of this. Somebody who builds game engines needs to fix it, the industry needs to actually make tools.

Like, to be kind of blunt, I wish people would stop criticizing the web for the problems that the games industry created.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#206

Post by artificial »

mkl wrote: post #202
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? All those kids making those stick figure animations on the early web sites had access to 700$ software? Sounds amazing.

Piracy was easier and rampant back then. Adobe (and Microsoft, etc.) knew that the kids who learned on pirated copies would lead to legit sales later.

It was the era of serials and cracks. Astalavista.box.sk. Activators and subscription software came later. Simpler times :)

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#208

Post by chrisco255 »

k_sze wrote: post #198
chrisco255 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ )) Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

And now that's a proprietary authoring tool, again. Back then, one of the arguments against Flash was that it was closed and proprietary, both authoring- and runtime-wise. Browsers nowadays are arguably open-source runtimes, but we still don't have a good open-source authoring tool that replicates the magic of Flash.

The tool may be proprietary, but the output is not. It outputs standard JSON, HTML, SVG, and JS.

I imagine there are some open source authoring tools out there. I doubt they have the polish that Adobe products have. If you find one, or make one, post it here.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#209

Post by watwut »

fny wrote: post #174
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

So Flash and HTML/JS are how I got into programming at the age of 8, and I completely disagree with your comment. All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom: it worked. The portability was amazing. I would just cut a release, put it on floppies, and take them to school. I never had anyone complain once about having an issue. Oh, and no one gave a damn about Linux outside of server admins back…

I miss flash games. The internet is not better without flash, because it lacks those tiny creative games people with little tech knowledge done fast.

That kind of scene is not present now.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#210

Post by chii »

danShumway wrote: post #129
stupidcar wrote: post #120

I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SVG is an inadequate replacement (false). In truth, the fundamental capabilities of the modern web platform matches and typically exceeds anything that was offered by Flash. What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to…

> There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS I commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I would take this a step farther. There is no alternative, free or paid, Open Source or proprietary, targeting any platform (even just iOS or Windows) that is as good as Flash was at rapid prototyping and accessible game creation. To me, the focus on the web is really frustrating. Unity is not as good as Flash was…

the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously).

If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations that can be created in the flash suite and replicated using a html suite cannot satisfy users any more.

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